Hello,
recently I got myself interested in microhistory and read some of the classics (Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Gene a. Brucker...). my background is a bit more artsy and I thought it might be interesting to try and find connections. What I'm curious about is if there is some kind of microhistory of objects. I found an essay by I. Kopytoff which gave me a nice theoretical start about how to think about 'biographies of things', (although it's from `86~), but what really looking for is something a bit more microhistoryish and less anthropological theory. I wonder if there is there something like The Return of Martin Guerre but say, about a 16th/17th c. painting or sculpture, ideally not a famous masterpiece but a more ordinary object.
It might be too specific? in any case I'm very much open to venturing into neighbouring topics (maybe history of books? sacred objects?)
It's my first time here hope I'm doing it right! <3
This may be similar to what you are after, you mentioned Ginzburg, I would suggest his Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca: The Baptism, The Arezzo Cycle, The Flagellation, if you haven't already read it.
Ginzburg takes a few of Piero della Francesca's paintings and brings to life the story behind their symbolism, their patrons, and the man who created them.
It's a great attempt at fusing art history and micro-history. Towards the beginning of the work Ginzburg explains the difficulties inherent in doing this, but ultimately why it has the potential to be profitable if done well.
It's had a fair amount of criticism for relying too much on conjecture... But Ginzburg appreciates this would be the case, and I think he does a good job of signposting his meanderings down the path of speculation.
Perhaps Zara Anishanslin's Portrait of a Woman in Silk is what you are after. Anishanslin takes an otherwise pretty unremarkable c18th American painting as her subject and unravels it.
It's not a typical work of microhistory in the strictest sense — it focuses on a few different individuals and it follows the silk dress at various stages of its development (beginning with a silkworm) — but it does spin a larger narrative about transatlantic networks and c18th material culture from a single work of art.
These are not microhistories, but if Igor Kopytoff's work is of interest, then you might like the essays in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 edited by Paula Findlen. Along the same lines of material culture studies, you might also enjoy Calvin Harris's article, "Four Lives of a Micmac Copper Pot" (1975).
There has been a lot of work done on material objects in the Atlantic World. I'm thinking about the 2015 Art History special issue "Objects in Motion," Daniela Bleichmar's work on collecting cultures in the Spanish Empire and Amy Buono's work on Tupi featherwork.
Timothy Brooks uses Dutch art and Chinese porcelain (among other things) as entry points to talk about early modern globalization in Vermeer's Hat.
There are, of course, the many commodity studies like Mark Kurlansky's Salt and Cod or Ann Goldgar's Tulipmania.