We have collectively been obliged to consider carefully the different spaces and uses of space within the home, and perhaps we can be guided in this by looking to the examples of the past. From the Renaissance onwards perhaps no other space was more intriguing and complex than that of the household interior in which a wide range of objects served key functions in the fashioning of familial, local and collective identities. We wish to take you on a journey through the domestic spaces of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, retracing the steps of these objects, the families that commissioned them and the villas and palazzos in which they are recorded, and in doing so discover the ways in which art merged with the everyday life of these courtly homes.