The Economy of Magnificence: Organisation, Excess and Legitimacy

Abstract

The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in the Musee Cluny in Paris are an early example of the use of excess as personal promotion. They were made for Jean Le Viste, a young man on the rise through the fifteenth‐century French court to demonstrate his wealth and taste and thus his fitness to aspire to high position. The paper began as an exercise in thinking about a contemporary high‐flyer might choose to portray on a similar set of art works. This was based on a reading of the Financial Times How to Spend It glossy supplement which acts as a guidebook and style manual for the rich and powerful of the contemporary world. Through this process excess is revealed as legitimating display, acting as a marker of belonging, discernment, connoisseurship and exclusivity, all of which mark the possessor out as a member of an elite. Parallels are drawn with humanist notions of magnificence and magnanimity as markers of fitness to rule, and with How to Spend It as a cultural intermediary. The paper ends by reflecting that while Jean Le Viste found room to include images about transcending wealth and care of the soul, thoughts of putting away material things would disbar the consumers of How to Spend It from the powerful elite to which their material possession give access.

Key words:

• Excess
• Magnificence
• Legitimacy
• Elites

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Fleming, School of Humanities, University of the West of England for his contribution to this paper.

Notes

1. The tapestries were the subject of a recent popular novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, which makes great play of their mysterious nature, see Chevalier (2003). The tapestries themselves can be seen on Chevalier's website (⟨www.tchevalier.com/unicorn/tapestries⟩), or the Museum's own site (⟨www.musee‐moyenage.fr/ang.pages/page_id18368_u1l2.htm⟩).

2. This article also commends Jade Jagger's diamond‐set crown cutlery: ‘It's not so hard to believe Jade Jagger when she whispers, “Jewels—especially diamonds—they're good for the soul”’ (Walton, 2005: 16).

3. As Margolis (2005b: 35) says, ‘I don't quite understand why it's called a “luxury” windscreen scraper because it's not, frankly, the kind of thing you'd feel the need to give up for Lent, but a sound and excellent piece of tat nevertheless’.

4. For those unable to get to New York for their chocolate, Nadelson helpfully gives more easily sourced alternatives: Cadbury's Dairy Fruit and Nut bar and Crunchies. Personally, I would endorse Green and Blacks organic.

5. In the same article, Roland Mouret explains his decision to put ‘tiny white lace ruffles’ on a pair of ‘high black calf‐leather boots’: ‘It was inspired by Viennese waitresses, paper trimmings on antique Easter eggs, Puss‐in‐Boots, Hungarian embroideries and the love‐child of Miss Marple and Zorro—unrelated threads, but if joined in the right way, more interesting than as individual influences. It's a balance between the serious, the human and the humorous, a unity for diverse references’ (Groom, 2004: 38).

6. See, for example, ‘Portrait of a Man with a Quilted Sleeve’, 1510, at the National Gallery, London (⟨www.nationalgallery.org.uk⟩).

7. It is a case in point that between the composition of van der Post's article and the preparation of this manuscript Knomo bags are no longer rare, and thus the fleeting nature of exclusivity is demonstrated.

8. Tapestries, to return to the origins of this paper, were particularly useful for this purpose: ‘Tapestries have not endured as recognized “works of arts” into our own period. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were a particularly ostentatious art‐form, perfectly suited to the requirements of wealthy clients of the time: they combined exquisite design and workmanship with extremely labour‐intensive (and therefore valuable) craft skills; they rendered any room in which they were hung instantaneously sumptuous; they kept large, ill‐insulated rooms warm and draught‐free; they displayed the owner's erudition (if the narrative they depicted was literary), good taste (if they simulated rural scenes of idyllic landscape) or personal prestige (if they represented some scene from his or the family's history)’ (Jardine, 1996: 339).