Could the timing of the Metropolitan Museum's Art and Love in Renaissance Italy have been more serendipitous? The exhibition delved into the esoterica of 500-year-old wedding rites just as the issue of marriage itself surged into the news, with demonstrations and counter-protests all across America. This show lifts the curtain of rhetoric, looking back towards the makings of modern marriage.

What can an assortment of majolica, glassware, paintings and jewellery tell us about today's nuptial politics? Plenty, as it turns out. This romantic yet hard-nosed show offers an illustrated social history through objects: gold, blue and green plates ornamented with allegories of love or portraits of the betrothed; pitchers uniting two families' coats of arms; gold-encrusted caskets and jewels. Wedding gifts did not merely decorate the newlyweds' palazzo or announce their clans' intimidating wealth. The excess had a legal function: to make the fact of marriage irrefutable, to prove that the union they memorialised really had taken place.