Italian Renaissance podcast

In this transcription, Green discusses the concept of identity and self-fashioning in the Renaissance and how it relates to subcultures. They explain that in the 21st century, identity includes various aspects like appearance, behavior, pronouns, and preferences. Technology has made it easier for trends and subcultures to spread globally, allowing individuals to find like-minded people and spaces where they belong. Green introduces the idea of identity as performance, where how one presents themselves influences how others perceive them. They mention Judith Butler's view that performance depends on both self-presentation and how others react to it. Green also discusses the concept of self-fashioning in the Renaissance, where individuals constructed their public identity to move up in society. They emphasize that identity is not rigid but can be changed to suit societal expectations. The transcription mentions the influence of iconography and visual cues in shaping our perceptions of id Hi, my name is Green, and today I'm going to be talking about identity, self-fashioning in the Renaissance, and subculture. A person's identity in the 21st century can consist of a lot of things. How we look, how we act, our pronouns, our likes and dislikes, really anything that we want another person to know about us. And because of technology, we are more interconnected now, more than ever. Trends and subcultures, both visually and ideologically, are able to spread to a broader audience than just being confined to one country. With the rise of technology, identity as a performance is essential to finding like-minded people and finding spaces where you belong. According to Judith Butler in her video, Your Behavior Creates Your Gender, performance is not limited to how you want to be perceived. It also depends on others around you and how they perceive your performance and how they react to it. Iconography is incredibly influential in how we perceive things in our world. My friend identifies really strongly with the goth subculture. They dress in extremely dark clothes and have extremely dark hair that's usually teased up and wear almost white foundation with dark eyeliner and lipstick. I would perceive them, based on this performance, as being goth. And obviously, this performance illustrates their identity as someone within that subculture. Similarly, this vein of thought, identity as performance, was extremely prevalent among early modern individuals. Greenblatt describes this phenomenon as self-fashioning. And he thought of this process as a way to construct one's identity and public self according to status quo to move up and through society. However, to Greenblatt, this identity is also not rigid, but instead malleable, able to be constructed and changed to aid individuals and perform better in society. According to Cox in their book, A Short History of the Italian Renaissance, in Chapter 4, and under the subheading, Identity and Performance, they state that, quote, this notion of identity as flexible, malleable, performative, is one of the most distinctive and intriguing features of Renaissance elite culture. End quote. This performance is seen through Renaissance portraiture, such as Titian's self-portrait, where he portrays himself as a patrician. Titian wasn't a patrician. He is but a painter. But by performing as a patrician, showing himself as a patrician, he shows that this is the identity he wants to be perceived as and what he wants to achieve. Individuals within the early modern period could really only self-fashion through portraiture of themselves and their personal collections of oddities, antiques, such like that. While us in the 21st century have many different ways to self-fashion, some things remain the same throughout the years, however. Props and other visual cues may tell us what is special and unique about the individual at first, but as time goes on, they start to have their own visual rhetoric. Within both the example of Gothic subculture and Titian's self-portrait, both have specific visual rhetoric associated with the identity they are portraying. Gold jewelry for Titian and dark makeup for Goths. However, both of these visual rhetorics give no information about the individualism of the sitter. Instead, it relies on our knowledge of their background and what they are performing to transcribe identity onto them. Identity is tricky. It consists of many different moving parts that can make us unique. But those separate parts are not unique by themselves. Self-fashioning was a way to adhere some of those separate parts onto a more whole identity. And our modern equivalent does the exact same. Just like Titian's self-portrait says, here I am. I am important and powerful. A punk's mohawk or battle jacket says the same thing. And visual identity is the modern equivalent of self-fashioning. And just like with self-fashioning, subcultures only show a small part of a person's whole identity. It does allow us, the viewers, to ascribe certain beliefs and ideas about their whole identity. And it allows the sitter to find their place in society and rise above their station. Whether that be from a lowly artist to a powerful patrician, or from a normie to a cool goth person.