Leah R. Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Art History at The Open University, Milton Keynes. Her research explores the roles that the exchange, collection, and replication of objects played in the creation of social networks in the fifteenth century. She is co-editor (with Nancy Um) of a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History, and her work has appeared in a number of publications including the Journal of the History of Collections. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

'Clark shows that diplomatic, economic and dynastic links between fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance elites were sustained by the circulation of art objects: not just traditional paintings and sculptures, but objects of symbolic and material value as heraldic collars, jewels, furniture, and textiles. In their circulation as gifts between influence-brokers and powerful individuals, these prestige commodities acquire social and cultural biographies and sustain layers of complex interpretation that have a crucial bearing on the selfhood and agency of their owners. Clark's indispensable new study is especially to be welcomed for its attention to the court of Naples, neglected in anglophone scholarship, and here shown to be crucial to the statecraft of Ferrara and Florence.​' Stephen Campbell, The Johns Hopkins University

• 1. Carafa's testa di cavallo: the life of a bronze gifthorse; 2. Practices of exchange: merchant bankers and the circulation of objects; 3. Intertextuality and collection at the court of Ferrara: Roberti's Diptych; 4. The Order of the Ermine: collars, cloaks, and the circulation of the sign.

Leah R. Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Art History at The Open University, Milton Keynes. Her research explores the roles that the exchange, collection, and replication of objects played in the creation of social networks in the fifteenth century. She is co-editor (with Nancy Um) of a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History, and her work has appeared in a number of publications including the Journal of the History of Collections. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

'Clark shows that diplomatic, economic and dynastic links between fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance elites were sustained by the circulation of art objects: not just traditional paintings and sculptures, but objects of symbolic and material value as heraldic collars, jewels, furniture, and textiles. In their circulation as gifts between influence-brokers and powerful individuals, these prestige commodities acquire social and cultural biographies and sustain layers of complex interpretation that have a crucial bearing on the selfhood and agency of their owners. Clark's indispensable new study is especially to be welcomed for its attention to the court of Naples, neglected in anglophone scholarship, and here shown to be crucial to the statecraft of Ferrara and Florence.​' Stephen Campbell, The Johns Hopkins University

• 1. Carafa's testa di cavallo: the life of a bronze gifthorse; 2. Practices of exchange: merchant bankers and the circulation of objects; 3. Intertextuality and collection at the court of Ferrara: Roberti's Diptych; 4. The Order of the Ermine: collars, cloaks, and the circulation of the sign.