Grazia, gift and salt Dining with Francois Ier and Benvenuto Cellini

The aesthetic dimension is crucial in the practices of gift giving in traditional societies as studied by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don (1923-24). Aesthetics is highly relevant because not any object or service is suitable for the socially constitutive (and politically significant) gift, which, above all, is a symbolic act of recognition. Rare and precious objects and services are exchanged at festive occasions. This paper examines the connection between gift and aesthetics in a concrete case of pre-modern Europe: in Benvenuto Cellini's salt cellar for the French King Francois I-er. In Renaissance discourse, the concept of grazia links the work of an individual court artist to courtly behavior, elite self-representation and the celebration of political power. Grazia is actualized in the saliera and the history of its making; in its double sense, as appearance in the artwork and social relationship, it refers to gift giving practices and their symbolic functions, and vice versa. For my article, the material object and the related texts (namely Cellini's autobiography) are equally important.