As Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically dismal life of the man who wrote them.
Traditional fabrics bring unifying stories. The most distinctive Hawaiian material, kapa or barkcloth, was wonderfully versatile, used for skirts, bedsheets and, according to one story, the sky.
Clothing, for Caravaggio, worked in the same way as his chiaroscuro, dramatising disclosure and reticence, attraction and concealment. Caravaggio exploits dress not so much as a language, but as a way of posing the question: what is it we’re most susceptible to?
Intelligence – whether rumour, gossip, hearsay or clandestine leaks – was central to ambassadorial activity.