Paying Her Respects to His High Mightiness

Florentine painter Tito Conti presents us with an aesthetic comedy. This is ostensibly a historical genre painting, depicting exotic collectables in a wealthy 17th-century interior. On closer inspection, however, Conti is in fact critiquing a very modern phenomenon for his Victorian audience.

The 1870s and 1880s saw the rise of the Aesthetic Movement. Homes were filled with the latest fashions such as Japanese fans, William Morris wallpaper and Chinese blue and white painted porcelains. Aestheticism represented the heights of cultivated taste and fashionable living. Conti depicts a stylish young socialite immersed in luxurious patterns and fabrics, all executed with meticulous detail. Our atte...