Introduction: Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture

'Dirt offends against order.' With this assertion, appearing on the first page of her now-classic study on pollution, the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas announced her conviction that attending to dirt – or, more precisely, the aversion to it – could afford uncommon insight into how societies understood, assembled, and produced order. Published in 1966, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo offered a potent structural analysis of cultural notions of cleanliness. 1 Those empowered to define dirt not only determined social norms, Douglas argued, but they distinguished what (or who) fell within those norms from what did not. To create rules about 'dirt' then – an elastic metaphor, in Douglas's schema, referring to 'all the rejected elements of ordered systems' – was to define order, a categorization dependent, necessarily, on the transgressive status of dirt: deemed restless, volatile, ready to chip away at order's defenses. 2 Like binary stars locked in a gravitational orbit, contamination and purity were, for Douglas, always inseparably dependent.