Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence 9781474249768, 9781474249799, 9781474249782

Table of contents :
Praise For
Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Text
Money and Measurements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1 Fashioning the Medici Court
Chapter 1 The court on show
1.1 Spiders’ webs and legal loopholes
1.2 Seeing and being seen
1.3 Liveries of the court
1.4 The Riccardi host a party
Chapter 2 The rise and fall of the Florentine toga
2.1 The cloak of nobility
2.2 Enforcement strategies
2.3 The lucco’s shortcomings
Part 2 The Courtier as Consumer
Chapter 3 The noble art of shopping
3.1 Supporting local textiles
3.2 Tailors and their apes
Chapter 4 Ruinous appearances
4.1 Honor and family rituals
4.2 Diplomatic codes of honor
Part 3 Modes of Masculinity
Chapter 5 The versatility of black
5.1 Clothing owned and painted
5.2 Representing restraint
5.3 Gendered portrait conventions
5.4 The social values of black
Chapter 6 Youth, fashion, and desire
6.1 The threat of effeminacy
6.2 Distinguishing fashionable from effeminate
Chapter 7 Festive dress
7.1 Dressed to fight
7.2 Masquerade Costumes
Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 5
Chapter 7
Conclusion
Bibliography
Archival documents
Printed texts
Index

Citation preview

PRAISE FOR Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

“ “ “

A brilliant analysis of men and the importance of dress in one of early modern Europe’s fashion capitals. Readers will discover Florentine elite men as avid sartorialists propelled by their enthusiasm for new possibilities of materials and displays as much as by the intricate political and emotional games dress and accessories allowed them to play. Richly researched, this book represents a milestone in our knowledge of how sixteenth-century men conducted their lives through interacting with things. Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Cambridge, UK

This book opens up the wardrobes of elite Florentine families, showing how subtle and sophisticated the choice of dress could be in the sixteenth century. An intelligent, beautifully-illustrated and original study, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how clothing ‘made the man’ during the Renaissance. Highly recommended. Evelyn Welch, Vice-Principal, Arts & Sciences, King’s College London, UK

This insightful contribution turns a discerning and critical eye towards the clothing of sixteenth-century Florentine men. Currie skilfully explores the ways that clothing made the man within this emphatically sartorially-literate society, and shows the rich, fundamental ways that power and identity were invariably ‘negotiated with a material reality’ on elegantly dressed male bodies. Timothy McCall, Associate Professor of Art History, Villanova University, US

“

Elizabeth Currie vividly captures the pleasures and perils of engaging with appearances for Florentine men of the sixteenth century. Recent work on the history of clothing has taught us much about sumptuary laws, courtly etiquette, and cultures of consumption in the period. Currie teaches us more, showing how the politics and materials of dress informed the very experience of men’s lives, from political posturing in the lucco, through the reputational risks attached to balancing magnificence and sobriety, to the playful freedoms sought in eroticised youthful display and dressing for the homosocial pursuits of sport and carnival. Accessible and scholarly, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence is a valuable addition to an expanding literature on sartorial histories. Christopher Breward, Principal, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

Elizabeth Currie

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Elizabeth Currie, 2016 Elizabeth Currie has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4976-8  ePDF: 978-1-4742-4978-2 ePub: 978-1-4742-4977-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Currie, Elizabeth (Fashion designer), author. Title: Fashion and masculinity in Renaissance Florence/Elizabeth Currie. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016003923 | ISBN 9781474249768 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474249782 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Fashion–Italy–Florence–History–16th century. | Men’s clothing–Italy–Florence–History–16th century. | Nobility–Clothing–Italy–Florence–History–16th century. | Masculinity–Social aspects–Italy–Florence–History–16th century. | Florence (Italy)–Court and courtiers–History–16th century. | BISAC: DESIGN/Fashion. | HISTORY/Europe/Western. | HISTORY/Renaissance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE/Gender Studies. | HISTORY/Europe/Italy. Classification: LCC GT972.F55 C87 2016 | DDC 391.00945/511–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016003923 Cover design: Sharon Mah Cover image: Portrait of Stefano della Bella, painting by Carlo Dolci, conserved at the Palatine Gallery in Pitti Palace, Florence. Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Finsiel/Alinari Archives. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

In loving memory of my parents, Pamela and Robert Currie

Contents

List of illustrations  x Acknowledgments  xiv Notes on the text  xvi

Introduction  1

Part One  Fashioning the Medici Court  15 1 The Court on Show  17 2 The Rise and Fall of the Florentine Toga  36

Part Two  The Courtier as Consumer  57 3 The Noble Art of Shopping  59 4 Ruinous Appearances  75

Part Three  Modes of Masculinity  91 5 The Versatility of Black  93 6 Youth, Fashion, and Desire  109 7 Festive Dress  128 Conclusion  146 Notes  149 Bibliography  181 Index  198

List of Illustrations

0.1

Michele Tosini (Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio), Portrait of a Gentleman, 1575, oil on panel, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of Mr. and Mrs Arthur Erlanger, G. 55.10.1.  2

0.2

Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration of the Magi, early 1540s, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery.  9

1.1

Orazio Scarabelli, Naumachia in the Courtyard of Palazzo Pitti, 1589, engraving, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi. (® 1990, Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali ).  24

1.2

Domenico Passignano, Procession of the Body of St. Antoninus, fresco, Convent of San Marco, Florence. (Photo Scala, Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto—Min. dell’Interno).  25

1.3

Giovanni Stradano, Joust Held in the Via Larga, ca. 1556, fresco, Sala Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Getty images).  26

1.4

Sketch for a man’s robe (described as a veste or zimarra) for the Grand ducal livery, 1593, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 143, 418r (with permission from the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali ).  30

1.5

Unknown artist, The Peasant Girls’ Dance, ca.1600, fresco, Palazzo Giuntini, Florence (Photo Scala, Florence).  32

1.6

Nicolas Bollery, Maria de’ Medici accompanied by Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici, ca. 1613–14, oil on canvas, CherbourgOcteville, musée Thomas Henry, 835.74, © D. Sohier.  33

2.1

Domenico di Michelino, Dante Alighieri with the Divine Comedy in his Hand, 1465, fresco, Florence Cathedral (Getty Images).  37

2.2

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Stories of St. Francis of Assisi, 1483–86, fresco, Sassetti Chapel, Church of Santa Trinita, Florence (Dea Picture Library, Getty Images).  38

2.3

Nanni di Banco, St. Philip, ca. 1411–15, Orsanmichele, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  40

2.4

Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Preliminary drawing for a chiaroscuro painting decorating the triumphal arch of the Antellesi corner, representing Cosimo de’ Medici hailed as Duke. Florence, Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi, no. 7731 F (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  41

2.5

Giovanni Stradano, Procession in Piazza Duomo, 1561–62, fresco, Sala di Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Getty Images).  44

2.6

School of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Works of Mercy: Tending the Sick, ca. 1482, fresco, oratory of the Buonomini of San Martino, Florence (Photo Scala, Florence).  48

2.7

Youth’s dark brown leather jerkin, English, ca. 1550–1600. Museum of London 36.237 (Getty Images).  49

2.8

Bernardo Strozzi, A Betrothal, 1620s, oil on paper, 18.5 × 28 cm, WA 1946.338 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.  50

2.9

“Rector, University of Padua,” Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Sessa, 1598), facing page 121. Wellcome Library, London.  51

2.10 An operation on the head from Andrea Cesalpino, De Plantis Libri XVI (Florence: Marescotti, 1583). Wellcome Library, London.  53 2.11 Justus Suttermans, The Senators of Florence Swearing Allegiance to Ferdinando II de’ Medici, 1621, oil on canvas © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.  55 3.1

Florentine School, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1550, oil on panel (Inv. 104). Dea/Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Getty Images).  62

3.2

Cosimo I de’ Medici’s doublet and martingale breeches. Displayed in the Galleria del Costume, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Getty Images).  72

5.1

Agnolo Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and her son, Francesco de’ Medici, ca. 1549, oil on panel. Pisa, Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale.  95

5.2

Attributed to Giovanni Stradano, Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, 1579, Gift of June Pilliod Torrey, class of 1939, 1987.16. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.  96

List of Illustrations

xi

5.3

Anonymous/Giovanni Stradano/Jacopino del Conte, Portrait of Luigi Capponi, ca. 1550, oil on wood panel, Gift of Henry White Cannon Jr., Class of 1910, in memory of his Father, y 1935–59. Princeton University Art Museum (Photo: Scala, Florence).  98

5.4

Agnolo Bronzino, Bartolomeo Panciatichi, ca. 1540–45, oil on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  103

5.5

Agnolo Bronzino, Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1540, oil on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Getty Images).  104

6.1

Tiberio Titi, Portrait of Marcantonio, Orazio, Luigi, and Filippo Magalotti, 1601. Private Collection (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  110

6.2

Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Saint Ives, Protector of Widows and Orphans, 1616, oil on panel, 291 × 215 cm, Palatine Gallery, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  111

6.3

Left predella panel to the altarpiece Christ and the Adulteress attributed to the workshop of Alessandro Allori, 1577. Cini Chapel, Santo Spirito, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).  112

6.4

Italian silk velvet, late sixteenth century, Fletcher Fund, 1946, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 46.156.88. www.metmuseum.org114

6.5

Dress of Young Men of the City of Venice, and Students and throughout all of Italy, Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590). © The British Library Board, 810.i.2, p. 160.  123

6.6

Dress of the Young Men of Venice and of other Places in Italy, Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590). © The British Library Board, 810.i.2, p. 162.  124

6.7

Bernardo Castello, Engraving of Rinaldo and the Mirror Shield, from Torquato Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, unnumbered folios (Genoa: Pavoni, 1617). © The British Library Board, 80.h.8.  126

6.8

Francesco Maffei, Rinaldo and the Mirror Shield, about 1650–55, oil on copper (85.PC.321.1). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.  126

xii

List of Illustrations

7.1

Raffaello Gualterotti, Gioco del Calcio—Piazza Santa Croce, Florence, 1589, oil on canvas. Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University.  132

7.2

Jacques Callot, “Game of Football in Piazza Santa Croce,” from Capricci di varie figure, ca. 1617, Florence, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi. (© 2016. Photo Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali).  135

7.3

Engraving from the dance manual by Fabrizio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1581) Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale (Getty Images).  137

7.4

Francesco Beccaruzzi, A Ballplayer and his Page, ca. 1550, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.  138

7.5

Jacopo Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier, 1529–30, oil on panel transferred to canvas, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (89.PA.49).  138

7.6

Anonymous, Parade Horse, 1619?, pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Delia E. Holden Fund 1963.241. © The Cleveland Museum of Art.  143

List of Illustrations

xiii

Acknowledgments

I

first started thinking about Florentine court dress and gender during my doctoral studies and over the years this project has assumed various guises before arriving at its current form. During this time many people have helped and inspired my research, including everyone connected with The Material Renaissance: Costs and Consumption in Italy, 1400–1650 project sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Getty Grant Program. I would particularly like to thank Evelyn Welch for her continuing support and encouragement. The staff on the Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art History of Design course and successive cohorts of students have helped to shape this book, not least by offering fresh perspectives on many of the topics discussed here. My thanks go also to Jeremy Aynsley and the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, where a fellowship gave me a valuable opportunity to research and further develop my ideas. During trips to Florence, Niccolò Capponi was most generous in providing access to family archival documents. The staff of various archives and libraries have been very helpful, particularly at the Florentine State Archive and the Rare Books room in the British Library. I am grateful to numerous institutions and individuals who have assisted me in tracking down and identifying images. In addition to those listed in specific captions, these include Gloria Fossi, Mina Gregori, Betsy Rosasco, and Grazia Visintainer. The images in the book were made possible by grants from the Pasold Research Fund and from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. Their vital support is greatly appreciated. Two earlier articles introduced some of the themes of this book: “Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550-1620” (Renaissance Studies, vol. 23, Issue 1, February 2009, 33–52) and “Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in Florence” (“Cultures of Clothing in Early Modern Europe” Special Issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 39/Number 3, Fall 2009, 483–509). I was able to discuss this material further in presentations at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Venice, at Royal Holloway, University of London, the Institute of Historical Research, London, and Ertegun House, University of Oxford, and would like to thank all the organizers involved for these opportunities.

Several colleagues and friends very kindly read and commented on draft chapters, including Esther Bannister, Daniel Currie, Maria Hayward, Ann Matchette, Gerry Milligan, and Ulinka Rublack. As well as being a generous reader, Flora Dennis was adept at reigniting enthusiasm at key moments. The reviewers of the initial proposal helped to clarify aspects of the framework, while the reviewer of the final manuscript offered a great many astute and invaluable suggestions. I am very grateful for their recommendations, which I have done my best to incorporate. Needless to say, however, any remaining faults are my own. Many thanks are due to everyone at Bloomsbury who has helped bring this book to completion, especially Hannah Crump who has been a pleasure to work with throughout. Finally, special thanks go to Ferdinando Samaria for stepping into the breach on many occasions, from untangling sixteenth-century Italian texts to twenty-firstcentury technology, and to our children, Arianna and Alessandro, for enlivening the time spent on this study with their inimitable humor and curiosity.

Acknowledgments

xv

Notes on the Text

During this period the Florentine year commenced on March 25. However, in the text that follows dates have been converted into modern usage. Unless stated otherwise, translations from Italian are the author’s own.

Money and Measurements The majority of the prices of goods cited in this book are taken from Florentine archival records, generally household account books, which used a system of money of account based on lire with the following ratios: 1 lire = 20 soldi = 240 denari 1 fiorino = 7 lire 1 scudo d’oro (of the Florentine mint) = 7 lire 12 soldi Measurements for textiles and clothing were given in braccia, which varied in length from city to city. In Florence 1 braccio equalled approximately 58 cm or 2/3 yard.

Abbreviations ASCM Archivio Storico Civico di Milano ASF

Archivio di Stato di Firenze

ASM

Archivio di Stato di Milano

ASV

Archivio di Stato di Venezia

Introduction

Clothing makes a revealing appearance in an account of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici’s final hours. As he prepares to go out on the night of his murder, the doomed Alessandro wavers between choosing his gloves “for fighting” or his perfumed gloves “for making love,” before finally deciding upon the latter.1 The choice conjures up opposing aspects of the duke’s character and underlines the gap between what Alessandro should have been doing (firmly governing his subjects and state during uncertain times) and what he was actually doing (pursuing sexual activities with dubious companions). Although there is apparently no factual basis to this anecdote, it offers a telling insight into the power of male clothing to project different identities. Until relatively recently, male fashion has been relegated to the sidelines of dress history. The clothing of early modern Italian men has been overshadowed by that of their female counterparts, whose wardrobes are often better documented in sources such as trousseaux inventories and correspondence between members of elite female networks. And yet, the concept of “Renaissance man” is so rooted in the historiography of this period that his appearance seems almost familiar to us, epitomized by Baldassare Castiglione’s ideal of the impeccably and gracefully clothed “man in black,” described in the Courtier and depicted in countless portraits [Fig. 0.1].2 Renaissance court dress is also famed for its hierarchical and regulated nature. The strict rules of decorum and etiquette governing social behaviors and interaction were vigorously applied to clothing, while legislation attempted to further codify appearances. However, if we contrast this structured system with the consumption patterns of Florentine courtiers, it is possible to uncover a more dynamic and diverse sartorial culture. Although very few garments survive from this period, individual experiences of dress are relayed by account books that record the accumulation of a wardrobe in all its laborious detail, as well as its maintenance and sometimes dispersal. On their own, lists of clothing in family archives can appear to be little more than an enthralling and sometimes overwhelming array of costly, embellished garments. This book recaptures the meanings of the clothing of

Figure 0.1  Michele Tosini (Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio), Portrait of a Gentleman, 1575, oil on panel, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of Mr. and Mrs Arthur Erlanger, G. 55.10.1.

different individuals, viewing them in the light of contemporary attitudes toward fashion, to show how Florentine men expressed their social, sexual, political, and professional identities through appearances. Members of the Capponi, Magalotti, Riccardi, Botti, and Orsini families, these noblemen were all connected with the Medici and the court in varying degrees. They actively contributed to court ceremonial, held bureaucratic or diplomatic roles in the ducal regime, or belonged to the Medici’s circle of confidants. We see how their wealth and political aspirations, their different ages and familial obligations, all exerted an influence on the types of clothing they wore. The varied forms of dress that coexisted within the upper echelons of society reflected different models of manhood. They also reveal significant scope for individual choice and agency. In Florence, it is possible to trace men changing their clothing for specific purposes, wearing one type of clothing for a portrait and

2

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

another to travel abroad or to take part in sporting activities, alternating between them in the same way that Alessandro de’ Medici purportedly selected his gloves. Viewed in this light, dress illustrates the kind of fluid and sophisticated identityformation discussed in Guido Ruggiero’s analysis of the social context of sexual play in the Italian Renaissance. Ruggiero describes the creation of “ ‘consensus realities’—imagined realities that were built up, reinforced (or disciplined), and shared by the various social groups with which an individual interacted.”3 Different sartorial rules governed the social scenarios that courtiers operated in, and when used successfully, dress could assert gender and power, unite families, and forge reputations. Clothing was minutely scrutinized by all the players in this form of strategic game, often ostentatiously praised for its quality, value, or ingenuity, and it was crucial to convince one’s peers in order to pass muster. These distinct modes of dress represented an advanced means of communication, only fully understood when embedded in its original political, cultural, and social framework. Many of the political and economic developments that took place in the first century of ducal rule in Florence had a direct impact on masculine roles and ideals.4 After the brief reign of Alessandro de’ Medici (1530–37), Cosimo I de’ Medici is credited with bringing stability to Florence, although at some cost, notably in his merciless suppression of opponents and the increasingly undemocratic processes of his government. Contemporary chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci described how individuals singled out by the Grand Dukes could rise upward, a view supported by the growing number of nonelected government offices.5 The Grand Dukes could pluck an individual out of obscurity or ruin the career of a once powerful man, increasing the need to ingratiate oneself through actions, manners, or the correct form of dress. Cosimo established hereditary rule, handing power over to his son Francesco in 1564, and secured the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. Although a time of comparative peace, Florence’s international relations, particularly with Spain and France, required constant vigilance and diplomacy. Political developments strongly influenced attitudes toward fashion, prompting antipathy to foreign dress and warnings about the dangers of excessively haughty and pompous Spanish fashions, or short, tight French styles. Cosimo’s court was still in its infancy, and foreign visitors noted its relative informality, lack of ceremony, and small size compared with its European counterparts. The Venetian ambassador wrote that the duke did not “live like a true prince with those great refinements enjoyed by other princes or dukes, instead he lives like a very great head of a family.”6 Cosimo worked hard to increase the grandeur of the court and to strengthen his authority within the city and abroad, brokering propitious marriage alliances as well as putting on eye-catching public spectacles. Highly skilled propagandists, the Medici exploited the power of visual imagery through forms such as family portraits and their personal devices. Clothing featured prominently within the range of cultural expressions that defined the new court and the changing nature of the Florentine nobility.

Introduction

3

Florence had long been a major center for the production of wool and silk textiles.7 The Medici sought to protect and boost the textile sector, promoting sericulture, for example, to increase local supplies of raw silk. During the second half of the sixteenth century, textile manufacture shifted to consist primarily of medium- to high-quality wools and cheap or medium-priced mixed silks, created to meet the growing demand for fashion over durability and to compete in a rapidly developing international market. Guild and court records reveal the difficulties involved in creating and selling these innovative kinds of textiles, flagging up concerns about product contamination with substandard dye stuffs or the controversial practice of watering silks to make them heavier. With such expertise in trade and manufacturing,  Florence was well placed to be a leader of fashion, but various barriers prevented its wealthy citizens from wholeheartedly embracing ostentatious dress, not least the usual moral reservations regarding luxury, which was widely held to pose a threat to the social order, the body politic, and the economy.8 Additionally, Florentines were proud of their city’s sartorial tradition of modesty and sobriety, which sometimes made them appear “austere and melancholic,” as characterized by Niccolò Martelli, consul of the Florentine Academy, in 1545.9 Keen to foster a sense of Florentine patriotism, based on the city’s historic achievements, Cosimo and his sons did not wish to entirely abandon these earlier sartorial codes. The Medici stoked residual memories of republican dress, while simultaneously tolerating and judiciously promoting more ostentatious clothing. These contrasts are set out in Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo, written between 1550 and 1555, significantly well into Cosimo’s reign. For Della Casa, Florentines were easily distinguishable from their courtly compatriots in Naples, part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire. Neapolitans are described as ostentatious, decked out in feathers, pomp, and embroideries, elements that regularly featured in critiques of male dress, and which Della Casa considered inappropriate for serious men and citizens. He explained that each city had its own customs and ways of dressing: Perhaps what is customary for Neapolitans, whose city is rich in men of great lineage and barons of great prestige, would not do, for example, for the people of Lucca or Florentines who are for the most part merchants and simple gentlemen and have among them neither princes, nor counts, nor barons. Therefore, the stately and pompous manners of Naples transferred to Florence, like the clothes of a big man put on a little one, would be baggy and superfluous; to the nobility of Neapolitans and perhaps to their nature, neither more nor less than the manners of the Florentines would appear meagre and skimpy.10 From a less politicized standpoint, Cesare Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi et moderni also located Naples at the top of the hierarchy of flamboyant clothing, describing how Neapolitan “men of rank dress very sumptuously” and “the gentlewomen of Naples are notably refined and luxurious in their dress because they value

4

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

adornments that they can wear on their backs more than any furnishings for their house.”11 Throughout the sixteenth century at least, Florentine noblemen exhibited caution with regard to sartorial extremes. Florentine versus Neapolitan or Spanish, conservative versus fashionable, republican versus courtly: these contrasting modes of dress and the values they embodied continued to be debated without being entirely reconciled or definitively adopted. Dress staked out differences between men and women, at a time when boundaries between the sexes were thought to be porous and amorphous, influenced by humoral theories and ideas about anatomy and physiognomy inherited from the Hippocratic corpus.12 Human bodies could be fallible and deceptive, and although this was particularly true of women, it also applied to men.13 Unsurprisingly, there are many examples of what has been termed “gender slippages,” when these ideals crumbled away.14 Too much of the wrong kind of contact with female bodies could corrupt male ones. According to Giacomo Lanteri’s Della Economica (1560), unmarried Venetian women were compelled by law to wear veils to protect men from their lasciviousness so men “would not become effeminate and soft, but would be virile and robust with their souls and bodies.”15 Count Lodovico of Canossa in the Courtier warns of certain men who “were not, by nature, made women, as they clearly wish to appear,” who “not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows [but are also] in their every act . . . so tender and languid that their limbs seem to be on the verge of falling apart.”16 This image of disintegration hints at one of the key functions of male clothing, namely its potential to act as an armor to encase and define the male body, emphasizing virility. The military-inspired codpiece is an obvious example of this kind of male attire: it showed and symbolically protected the integral, erect, male form. In her book on armor and masculinity in the Renaissance, Carolyn Springer sums up the stark dualism between the sexes: “To be open, permeable, and accessible is the nature of femininity; virility instead is closed, secure and (literally) impregnable.”17 Metaphors for making and showing manhood or, conversely, undoing, dissecting or invading it, often revolved around clothing. The quip attributed to Cosimo the Elder by Niccolò Machiavelli in his Istorie (1526) that “two yards of pink cloth can make a gentleman” is one such example.18 In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass remind us that early modern fashion was not simply a “dazzling play of surfaces.” Without a clear “antithesis between clothes as the surface/outside and the person as the inside/depth,” clothing had a fundamental, structural role to play.19 Nevertheless, the relationship between these depths and surfaces was neither static nor easily fathomable. Writing on female cross-dressing in Renaissance Italy, Frederika H. Jacobs has questioned whether “clothes were used merely as a disguise or functioned as constitutive signs in the sense of the aphorism ‘clothes make the man’ (or woman).”20 She holds back from any overall conclusion, arguing each case should be assessed individually. Similarly, this book does not offer any hard and fast rules, and proposes that the coupling

Introduction

5

of mind and clothing occurred in numerous, very distinct ways. It is evident that dress could be used to amplify existing qualities, as hinted at in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso when Jocondo decides to buy new clothes to wear to meet Astolfo in Rome. Jocondo is described ordering “new clothing, to make his appearance suitably dressed—for beauty is increased by a beautiful cloak.”21 In order to draw out their natural valor, men might change their clothing, or their hairstyles. This appears to have been a widespread phenomenon during the Florentine siege, as diarist Agostino Lapini writes that men: stopped wearing hoods (cappucci), which beforehand almost everyone used to wear, and started wearing hats and berets. They began to cut (mozzare) their hair, whereas before everyone wore (zazzere) down to their shoulders, and grow beards, while before they were always clean shaven.22 Clothing could also be used to guide behavior, especially in the case of social groups thought to be particularly at risk. Young men were often targeted: seen to hang in the balance between women and adult men, not yet tied down by family or professional duties, more susceptible to deviation from approved sexual practices, their dress received special attention.23 Over the last few decades, important research has transformed our understanding of masculine identities in the early modern period. The notion that “masculinity is multiform, rather than unitary and monolithic,” as proposed by Frank Mort for the late twentieth century, is applicable to the early modern period.24 Historians have also underlined the complexity of gender identities that transcend “the binary opposition of men and women,” one motive for exploring the similarities and contrasts between male and female clothing in this book.25 The original emphasis on manhood in early modern England, in studies by Elizabeth Foyster, Tim Hitchcock, and Michèle Cohen, has become more European.26 However, even recently Caroline P. Murphy has pointed out that for the Italian Renaissance, aside from work on male homosocial identity, “there is a distinct absence of published research dedicated to masculinity, especially when compared to the proliferation of work on women.”27 Given this comparative lack, it has been useful to make connections with work on masculinity and consumption in later periods. The chapters that follow consider masculinity as a process, not dissimilar to Tim Edwards’ analysis of men “learning to become men” in the twentieth century when “masculinity is perceived to be increasingly predicated on matters of how men look rather than what men do.”28 There is a growing amount of research in the field of literary studies focusing on manhood and specifically the male body in the Renaissance, analyzing questions of normativity, performativity, and sexuality, all key to what Tim Edwards terms the “third wave of studies of masculinity.”29 Placing clothing that was actually worn, not simply conjured up as a symbol, at the heart of these debates, this study offers a fresh perspective within an already fertile field.

6

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

During the period addressed by this book, from the reign of Cosimo I (1537–74) through to Cosimo II (1609–21), some long-established notions of masculinity came under pressure. Scholars have argued that noblemen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced a kind of “crisis of masculinity,” as a consequence of weakening domestic economies, military defeats, and wider European decline.30 Courts are thought to have played a key role in undermining masculinity by turning courtiers into “dependents,” an argument first proposed by Joan Kelly as part of her thesis that the Italian courts were environments that fostered “feminized behaviour.”31 One of the premises for this was that male courtiers competed against one another in order to win favor with their monarch, who was sometimes female.32 The emasculation of the courtier is a theme that continues to preoccupy current scholarship.33 Elizabeth Lehfeldt’s study of the crisis of the Spanish aristocracy in the seventeenth century shows that dress was frequently referred to as evidence of an underlying malaise, and that excessive grooming, soft hair, and the adoption of ever-larger ruffs received particular criticism.34 The new kinds of social activities required of the courtier, traditionally “female” skills, such as dancing for example, are also considered to have jeopardized manhood. For Castiglione, however, the courtier had to be adept at a combination of stereotypically male and female gendered pursuits, evidenced by his advice to the nobleman to “lead his prince by the austere path of virtue,” by “adorning it with shady fronds and strewing it with pretty flowers,” “now with music, now with arms and horses, now with verses, now with the discourse of love.”35 The tale of a courtier who refuses to dance with a lady because he is above such “silly trifles” suggests that these might not be easily reconciled. She wittily replies that because he is not at war he should keep himself well-oiled and store himself away with his other weaponry until he is needed, lest he get any rustier than he already is.36 Failures to embody the full range of male virtues were held to account across Europe. In France, ballet master François de Lauze reported an incident where Henri IV rebuked a courtier for not having learned to dance. The courtier defended himself by saying he had served the king well on the battlefield, only to receive the reply: “Then I counsel you to arm yourself with a cassock in peacetime” because “a Knight could occupy himself with no more noble exercise than one that so advances the understanding of his Court and his world.”37 Against this backdrop of uncertainty, the display of manly virtues became increasingly significant. In 1576, the Florentine patrician Lorenzo Giacomini lent his voice to the growing debate on the true nature of nobility by presenting his treatise Della Nobiltà delle lettere e delle armi to the Florentine Academy. It included the principle, taken from Aristotle’s Nicomean Ethics, that “virtues are habits of the soul” (le virtù sono abiti dell’anima).38 John Florio’s Italian-English Dictionary of 1611 translates the word abito as “a habit, a fashion, a forme, a custome, a qualitie, a disposition of mind or bodie. Also an attire or sute of apparell.” The meaning of habit as both custom and costume implies that clothing could make intangible

Introduction

7

virtues visible. In Renaissance thought, virtues were first and foremost symbols of virility, suggested by the etymological link between the word virtue and vir, Latin for man. Virtue covered a whole range of “male” attributes, including action, efficacy, personal strength, and order, a strong contrast with “female” virtues, such as modesty and chastity. The notion of virtue had absorbed different resonances from classical writings, medieval chivalric codes and Christian values, so that by the sixteenth century, well-read Italian men would have been aware of various sets of exemplars on which to model their behavior.39 Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen have pointed out the conflicting nature of codes dictated by Christian values and the honor ethic, concluding that Renaissance Romans “sometimes picked their principles to fit their needs.”40 Even though concepts of male virtue were various and evolving, their differences were often primarily a question of degree and interpretation.41 Under the Medici, the meanings of virtue were far from rigid. Due to its pivotal role in Machiavelli’s writings, virtue had accrued strong political and military values, yet new definitions of nobility also emphasized the importance of “civil virtue” in Florence. For the sixteenth century, Henk Th. van Veen characterizes the latter as the expression of the “love of one’s city,” of being “devoted to the honour and interests of the various communities to which one belongs” rather than being “self-seeking.”42 Virtue was also shaped by the growing emphasis on civility and refinement typical of decorum at court. The struggle between the attributes of continence and excess is particularly relevant to our discussion of clothing. Physical strength and valor remained dominant cultural ideals and the period covered by this book was framed by warfare, involving the Medici’s political allies if not always waged on Italian soil. Memories of the ten-month siege of Florence from 1529–30, when tens of thousands died from hunger, disease, and fighting, were still vivid.43 Cosimo and Francesco’s Habsburg ties spurred on their willingness to intervene in the crusades against the Ottoman Turks and several galleys set sail from Tuscany to fight in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.44 Courtiers’ active participation in warfare was very minimal but men could demonstrate their virility by mastering the art of fencing and more violent duels were sometimes fought to settle matters of honor, although it seems few actually took place in Florence.45 And yet it was imperative that physical strength was kept in check, for if it descended into brute force, or tyranny in the case of a monarch, it was associated with some of the worst male vices: luxury, effeminacy, and excess.46 The increasingly prevalent image of debauched mercenaries, displacing the fifteenth-century ideal of the manly warrior in body armor described by Timothy McCall, embodied some of these concerns.47 Just as opportunities to demonstrate strength diminished in urban and courtly contexts, the value of the virtues of measure, continence, and civility became more apparent. The views of classical thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, that individual control would result in collective control, that desire was insatiable, and that, in the words

8

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

of Seneca, “he is most powerful who has power over himself,” had been elaborated by fifteenth-century Florentine humanists like Leon Battista Alberti.48 With increasing emphasis on codes of etiquette and polite behavior, self-possession was even more prized in the sixteenth century.49 A painting by Jacopo Bassano illustrates these contrasting models of manhood through clothing and body shape [Fig. 0.2]. The leaning servant in the foreground represents brute strength but, crucially, elements of his dress were key components of court fashions that aspired to this muscular ideal, particularly the ripped leather jerkin and thigh-revealing breeches. Meanwhile, the appearance of the central king, wearing a striped upper-garment called a saio, and his retinue offers an elite configuration of valor, alluded to by their jutting elbows, swords, and plumed berets, recalling the headwear of Swiss mercenaries.50 By analyzing a variety of scenarios, spaces, and audiences for dress at the Florentine court, we can see how these different prototypes were referenced at specific moments in typologies of dress. To borrow a phrase from the Cohens’ discussion of honor codes, they were “blended in inventive ways.”51 Such alertness to context implies many Florentine courtiers knew, figuratively speaking, when to fight and when to dance. We see wealthy Florentines exercising restraint in their taste for modest woolens, or in portraiture, where power is

Figure 0.2  Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration of the Magi, early 1540s, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery.

Introduction

9

internalized through the almost universal adoption of plain, black clothing by male subjects. This form of continence suggests the influence of Castiglione’s notion of sprezzatura (“the art of concealing art”), as much about an attitude as any specific type of clothing, for example how far a courtier should allow his cloak to slip down his back when dancing.52 Although court dress is associated with conspicuous consumption, most of the courtiers discussed in this book were not preening peacocks nor could they be considered models of austerity; instead they navigated carefully between extremes. The more combative male was also cited in portraiture, for example with the glimpse of a sword hilt. This, too, was usually kept in check as displays of body armor are rare. Military overtones were made explicit in more dynamic situations, such as in everyday dress when Florentines wore accessories connected with the chivalric Order of Saint Stephen and sporting competition was the most acceptable arena where war was referenced through clothing. Honor, the public face of virtue, has often been associated with material possessions, particularly grand architectural projects, such as palace building in the fifteenth century. It was also emphatically linked with physical appearances, measured and acted out on a daily basis in easily discernable ways through clothing. The very process of assembling a wardrobe was an activity that consolidated social networks and strengthened men’s reputations as members and representatives of the Florentine court, as fathers and husbands, as merchants and honorable figures of the different communities that they operated in. It was a sign of honor to dress according to one’s social station, to celebrate family events in an appropriate manner and distribute gifts of clothing to relevant guests and relatives. Such practices had to be publicly acknowledged with the correct level of display and it is possible that male dress tended to receive less attention in Italian sumptuary legislation than female dress because it was self-monitored more effectively through codes of honor. The ways honor and manhood intersected in Italian court society reflect Judith Butler’s view of gender as “the appearance of substance . . . a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment [in which] the mundane social audience [participates and hence] comes to believe.”53 The importance of “seeing and being seen” can be traced back much further than the period we are dealing with, indeed it has existed as long as codes of honor have governed human behavior. Susan Crane, for example, has highlighted similar concerns in fourteenth- to fifteenth-century England and France: “Living in the externally oriented honor ethic, secular elites understand themselves to be constantly on display, subject to the judgment of others, and continually reinvented in performance.”54 Nevertheless, the need to display honor, and be honored in turn, became more pressing in Florence not least because of the prevalence of court celebrations that centered on sartorial display. The increasingly popular genre of prescriptive writings on behavior, clothing, and etiquette, described by Stephen Greenblatt as “manuals for actors,” also linked honor with external appearances, overturning the notion that ancestry and noble blood were the

10

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

sole prerequisites.55 It is generally thought to be easier to manifest honor when social structures are static and well-defined. Certainly, the developments affecting Florentine noblemen, such as changes in their access to power or the promotion of new families, offered more opportunities to contest honor and consequently increased the need to define and demonstrate it more clearly. There has been substantial scholarly focus on the “topsy-turvy,” transformative potential of dress in the early modern world: from young boys dressing up as women on the Elizabethan stage, to courtesans at the vanguard of fashion in Renaissance Venice. However, dissimulation and dissent are not the main clothing stories that emerge from this book. The popular Florentine pastimes of Carnival and football are prime examples of the way early modern societies allowed men far more leeway than women to participate in potentially disruptive activities, often tolerated as “sport” when youths were involved.56 Under the Medici, these festive events became very prominent. However, noblemen usually devised and financed liveries intended to strengthen, not undermine, the authority of the court. Equally, the evidence of the Florentine noblemen discussed here contrasts with contemporary fears that individuals were no longer knowable through clothing and that the growth of urban centers presented men with opportunities to dissemble their real identities through dress.57 Overall, the sartorial strategies used at the Florentine court exemplify individuals carving out their position within the structure and hierarchy of the court rather than turning their backs on it. This can be compared with Ruth Mazo Karras’ study of fifteenth-century youth in England and France. Across the various different models of masculinity she observes: young men were training for a share in power, a place in the hierarchy from which they could master other men. In all cases they were learning ways in which they could be unlike women. In all cases they were competing against each other and their elders.58 Through the prism of clothing, we see Florentines participating in similar forms of negotiation as those described by Herbert Sussman for the early Victorian period. Sussman argues: the problem of power and patriarchy calls for a double awareness, a sensitivity both to the ways in which these social formations of the masculine created conflict, anxiety, tension in men, while acknowledging that, in spite of the stress, men accepted these formations as a form of self-policing crucial to patriarchal domination.59 The desire to perpetuate the elite and remain within it while staking out one’s own authority, is inherent in the way that Florentine noblemen adapted the clothing assigned to them for court events, in order to achieve the desired amount of

Introduction

11

personal visibility within a larger group display. The sense of anxiety described by Sussman often features in histories of masculinity and is an emotion that runs through some of the sources discussed in this volume. Clothing could be the source of profound troubles, as we can see from the heartfelt complaints about shouldering the financial burden of dress written by noblemen on the verge of bankruptcy. However, these are balanced by examples of others congratulating themselves on their successful and ingenious liveries, underlining how clothing could further personal interests. Despite significant cultural constraints, a sophisticated and diverse system of clothing thrived in Florence, allowing men to mark out pivotal moments in their lives and the extent of their engagement with the political regime, as well as their moral fiber and virility. Fashion at this time has been linked with the loss of manhood. However, by focusing on the clothing men bought and wore, we can see how they actively used dress to convey ideals they valued, showing how exemplary models were “always being negotiated with a material reality.”60 One defining feature of this reality is the specificity of place, and by analyzing the links between clothing and masculinity, we are reminded of the role played by geography in the construction of gender. Although some of the ways in which dress was utilized by Florentine men can be applied to courtly societies across Europe, it is evident that others were unique to the city and its political and cultural identities. This study is divided into three sections and the changing culture of clothing presided over by the Medici is analyzed in Part I, “Fashioning the Medici Court.” Chapter 1, “The Court on Show,” traces the growing links between power, authority, and external appearances. The Medici used new sumptuary laws to consolidate support for their regime, privileging a distinct group of wealthy Florentines, a contrast with earlier, more democratic laws. Histories of sumptuary legislation highlight their inefficacy but evidence of the reactions to the Florentine laws provides new insights into their reception. The subtle relationship of mutual dependency between monarch and courtier is traced through the use of court liveries, specifically at celebrations for Maria de’ Medici’s marriage to Henri IV of France in 1600. Chapter 2, “The Rise and Fall of the Florentine Toga,” examines how a single garment shaped male identity under the new political regime. The lucco, a full-length cloak, was central to sixteenth-century discussions on the nature of nobility and the compatibility of civic, mercantile, and courtly roles. It was thought to confer dignity upon men who were concerned about their backgrounds in trade, emphasizing the value of their civic engagement. Much was made of the garment’s resemblance to the classical toga, adding weight to the belief that Florence was the rightful heir to Imperial Rome, but the Medici’s interventions to increase the cloak’s popularity met with some resistance. Part 2, “The Courtier as Consumer,” builds on recent scholarship demonstrating that transactions in the Renaissance market place were rarely purely financial and that consumption practices greatly contributed to the construction of gender

12

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

identities in the early modern period. Chapter 3, “The Noble Art of Shopping,” considers how commissioning clothing was a source of cultural prestige, while requiring a fine balance between fashion, financial interests, and family ties. The chapter investigates personal interactions between courtiers and their tailors as well as wider networks between patrons, artisans and retailers. It provides a counterpoint to contemporary anxieties that Italians were betraying local fashions and sheds light on the ways that fabrics contributed to the identity of noblemen, the fame of the city and its economic stability. Chapter 4, “Ruinous Appearances” focuses on the pressures experienced by noblemen to maintain their honor. Despite criticisms of profligate courtiers, it was vital to be seen to live in a manner befitting one’s social station. The difficulty lay in calculating the appropriate levels of display and failure to do so meant risking reputations, as illustrated by the examples of the two noblemen discussed in this chapter. The concluding section, “Modes of Masculinity,” investigates three contrasting, and seemingly contradictory, modes of male dress, driven by specific social and cultural contexts. It shows courtiers using clothing to skillfully negotiate the demands of peer interactions and competition. Chapter 5, “The Versatility of Black” offers new insights into the popularity of the color black, by analyzing its prevalence in Florentine portraiture. It contrasts the portrait of a soberly clad nobleman with the many kinds of clothing he actually wore, much of it of a more flamboyant nature, unpicking the specific meanings of black in this image to show how the color reflected masculine virtues. Chapter 6, “Youth, Fashion, and Desire,” focuses on one of the most frequent criticisms leveled at male dress, namely its effeminate nature. It juxtaposes evidence of what young Florentine noblemen wore with contemporary debates about the effeminate male in medical treatises, etiquette manuals, and literature. The final chapter, “Festive Dress,” shows how vivid colors and elaborate embellishments were enthusiastically embraced by Florentine noblemen for football matches and Carnival entertainments. It is argued that the clothing worn at these events projected the virtues of the ideal courtier, while also offering significant freedoms from the customary codes of etiquette at court.

Introduction

13

14

Part oNE

Fashioning the Medici Court

16

1 The court on show

For everyday occasions, Cosimo I’s clothing conveyed modesty and accessibility. This has been described as a calculated strategy, whereby Cosimo dressed “sumptuously and splendidly” in order to demonstrate the power and solidity of his state to popes, ambassadors, and other Italian princes, but employed moderation when dealing with his citizens.1 In Florence, Cosimo presented himself as a downto-earth, practical man of action and his habit of riding through the city among his people, dressed in a simple cloak, was praised by various commentators.2 His wife, Eleonora di Toledo, was also keenly aware that ostentatious dress in Florence in certain contexts was risky, not least because her subjects were wary of her close connections with the “haughty” Imperial Spanish court.3 Not surprisingly, therefore, Cosimo emphasized worries about the rising costs of expensive clothing in his sumptuary laws, a form of legislation implemented in some Italy cities as early as the thirteenth century.4 Although a few laws covered the correct etiquette for banquets and funerals, their primary focus was clothing and, more precisely, exactly who was allowed to wear what and when. Cosimo introduced three very detailed sumptuary laws over the course of his reign. His sons passed further laws: Francesco’s law of 1568 mainly reiterated earlier decrees, while Ferdinando’s two laws were unusual in their very narrow focus. The first, discussed in Chapter 2, dealt with civic robes, while the second, of 1593, regulated the use of pearls and other kinds of embellishments made with metal threads, such as canutiglio (purl, a trimming made of twisted metal threads). Catherine Kovesi’s survey of three centuries of sumptuary legislation in Italy suggests that there was no overall correlation between particular forms of government, including courts and republics, and the frequency or severity of legislation.5 Despite clothing’s obvious potential to aggravate already entrenched social divisions, some sixteenth-century writers espoused the notion that sumptuary laws could be democratic in spirit, minimizing rather than exacerbating outward differences. The republican

sympathizer Giovanni Della Casa was one of these, painting a utopian picture in his Galateo: Remember that in many of the best cities it is forbidden by law that a wealthy man parade about attired much more gorgeously than a poor man, for it would seem that the poor are wronged when others, even in matters of appearance, show themselves to be superior to them.6 This view was mirrored in the opening statement of Cosimo’s 1562 sumptuary law, which linked excessive clothing expenditure with a variety of social ills. Sumptuous dress was seen as “incompatible with dignity and modesty,” and amongst all the things relating to civil life and the good government of any prince or republic, modesty is most necessary and decorous, as it restrains human actions, and orders and moderates both the universal and public, as well as the domestic and private.7 This correlation between clothing and moral restraint was a particularly salient one for a ruler who wished to distance himself from accusations of tyranny. The law therefore presented an opportunity for Cosimo to forge a link between republican and princely regimes. Certainly, the law’s prologue had clear, egalitarian aspirations. In reality, however, Cosimo merely paid lip service to these prevailing views on the divisive nature of dress, as Medicean sumptuary policies followed a new direction that made a clear break with the past. Their laws embodied two main strategies, both of an elitist nature. The first was a desire not to alienate wealthier subjects who possessed, or might wish to possess, expensive clothing and jewelry. Secondly, and more radically, Cosimo and his sons used clothing regulations as a means of visibly marking out powerful, pro-Medicean groups. We are lucky to have evidence of the decision-making process behind the 1562 law, recorded in a letter from Cosimo to his secretary, Francesco Vinta, which reveals the duke’s lenient attitude toward the wearing of ostentatious, expensive clothing in public, for men and women. The duke stated that he wished to ease the financial burden of clothing on his wealthy subjects by allowing them to continue to wear banned garments if they predated the new law.8 He permitted the use of plain gold and silver jewelry, as long as it was not enameled. As enameling increased the fashionable or aesthetic qualities of jewelry rather than its intrinsic or resale value, this was presumably intended to preserve family patrimonies. Overall, Cosimo’s attitude was markedly relaxed: In the first instance, we do not wish to prohibit pearls, a single string worth not more than 500 scudi that is. We do this because all gentlewomen have them. We do not wish to deprive them of a perfumed pair of gloves worth up to 10 scudi, because that is how much they cost and everyone owns them.9

18

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

Pearls and gloves were the kinds of accessories usually included in wedding trousseaux, a matter that particularly concerned male relatives, as discussed in Chapter 3. These expensive items contributed to worries that the rising costs of dowries and trousseaux were delaying marriages and preventing some women from marrying at all, consigning them to lives in convents.10 Yet this does not seem to have been at the forefront of Cosimo’s considerations at this point. In fact, the laws chart a marked shift toward more luxurious sartorial display and were apparently calculated to encourage rather than curtail investments in articles of female jewelry and clothing. The 1546 law permitted expenditure of a total of 260 scudi on women’s jewelry, including paternoster beads usually worn as a loose belt, a “garland” to be worn in the hair, and two rings.11 This rose to 459 scudi on jewelry in 1562, increasing again in 1568 to 639 scudi, very significant sums of money, given that 2000 scudi was a sizable marriage dowry for a Florentine gentlewoman in the 1560s.12 To contextualize it further, the successful court sculptor Giambologna earned 300 scudi a year in the 1580s, while an unskilled construction worker might earn 33 scudi.13 Similar shifts occurred in the amounts of fabric allowed to make specific garments. In 1562, a man’s short cloak could be decorated with three braccia (1.74 meters) of fabric. In 1568 this increased to four braccia (2.3 meters). In 1562, 25 braccia (14.5 meters) were permitted for a woman’s overgown. In 1568 this rose to 27 braccia (15.7 meters). These changes were linked to new fashions, including the use of bands, or guards of fabric in contrasting colors, appliquéd onto garments such as cloaks, and added to the rising costs of clothing. Cosimo’s proposals to Francesco Vinta were actually more tolerant than the finalized legislation and the laws show that some of his suggested changes were modified or abandoned entirely. His plan for the use of preexisting clothing was not applied until 1568. The 10 scudi gloves were reduced to 4 scudi for women and 3 scudi for men. The 500  scudi pearl necklace never materialized: in its place in 1568 women were allowed one string of pearls of a value “befitting to their status.”14 Overall, the details of the reforms concur with Marcello Fantoni’s view that Medicean sumptuary laws were “on luxury and not against it.”15 Cosimo’s dress laws were also distinctive for the number of dispensations they included. Although exemptions had been introduced in a few Italian laws from the thirteenth century onward, in Italy they were less common than in various other European countries, where they were already widespread by the fifteenth century. In fact, according to Catherine Kovesi, few Italian cities used sumptuary legislation to formulate a “detailed class structure that in any way resembled the laws of Spain, France and England.”16 Venetian laws did not contain special exemptions, for example, possibly because the patrician group was so closed it was felt there was less need to regulate social mobility in this way.17 In fourteenthand fifteenth-century Italian sumptuary laws, exemptions were mainly granted to judges, doctors of law and medicine, and chivalric knights, so three out of the four

The court on show

19

groups involved were professionals.18 By contrast, Cosimo shunned these more meritocratic exemptions and restricted privileges to individuals who possessed noble titles, or enjoyed some form of close connection to the Medici court. In 1546 a contemporary chronicler spotted a similar bias toward the more fortunate in new sumptuary regulations for street prostitutes. These women were forbidden to wear silk and forced to wear a yellow badge, a counterproductive measure according to the anonymous chronicler because it would enable them to “be recognized and followed by scoundrels.”19 The writer criticized Cosimo for focusing on street prostitutes and not courtesans, or puttane grandi, who worked from home and were more prosperous. In his view Cosimo’s sumptuary laws failed to target large prey. Instead they were punitive toward his weaker subjects and in this respect they were made “as the philosopher said, just like spiders’ webs.” Sumptuary laws are often considered to be the consequence of social upheaval, arising from “circumstances in which a hieratic social order has come under internal pressure.”20 The fledgling Medici court is a prime example of this. Cosimo’s precarious position at the start of his reign, opposed by some powerful figures within the Florentine patriarchy, necessitated extreme caution about whom he could trust. He worked hard to surround himself with faithful supporters, sometimes drawn from other parts of Tuscany and beyond. A study of the process of “nobilization” in Florence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has shown that a heterogeneous range of social groups held power in the city, including old patrician families, mainly of mercantile origins, the papal and imperial nobility as well as a few, relatively new families who gained power by serving the Medici. Most of these were functionaries or came from the provinces.21 Dress was one of a variety of tools used by the Medici to bind together what Claudio Donati has described as “an amalgamated élite,” formed by these disparate groups, to some extent distinct from those Florentine families who had become great under the republic.22 Donati has pointed out a focus on “delineating social groups” embedded in Medici sumptuary legislation, which highlighted the correlation between clothing, rank, public service, and aristocracy during the second half of the sixteenth century. Marcello Fantoni has gone further to argue that the dress laws were a force for change, part of the conversion process from mercantile to aristocratic.23 Rewarding trusted individuals with the right to dress as they pleased, while at the same time increasing their public visibility within Florence, was a politically bold move.

1.1  Spiders’ webs and legal loopholes The 1546 law had a typical beginning, emphasizing the need to distinguish between the clothing of Florentine gentlewomen, country women (contadine),

20

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

and prostitutes, well established categories in Italian sumptuary legislation, which often paid particular attention to female dress.24 However, the following section introduced a distinction between the clothing of Florentine citizens, in other words men who were eligible for public office and their families, and noncitizens. Women who did not have citizenship were allowed to wear paternoster belts worth up to two scudi, rather than four scudi, and their gowns could contain up to three braccia of bands of appliquéd textile, rather than four.25 In 1562, daughters or wives of Florentine citizens were allowed to wear a gold garland and belt, while others were only allowed silver. Not dramatic differences, they would nevertheless have been easily identifiable to onlookers. More radically, the law included a list of people entirely freed from clothing regulations. These included chivalric knights, and a long list of other official appointees, such as ambassadors and commissioners, who enjoyed personal dispensation that did not necessarily always extend to their female relatives.26 At the top of the court hierarchy, marquises, counts, lords, their wives and sons, as well as non-Florentines (forestieri) were also exempt. There is evidence that this unprecedented step had an impact on wealthy Florentines’ perceptions of the significance of personal adornment. Rather than lessening the social pressures that encouraged sartorial competition, it seems the laws heightened anxieties surrounding the connection between status and clothing. Within Cosimo’s government itself, there were fears that such a complicated system of exemptions would create difficulties. In a letter dated November 1568, Antonio Maria Petrucci, secretary of the Sienese Balia, argued that Sienese sumptuary laws should be applied universally to all subjects, with no exceptions. Following a line of reasoning similar to that outlined by Giovanni Della Casa, Petrucci urged that the legislation should not give preferential treatment to “men of letters, arms or any other prerogative . . . for the common good, because otherwise these particular considerations would cause confusion and damage.”27 The most polemical feature of the exemptions was the extent to which they included female relatives. The strength of Cosimo’s relationships with his first wife and daughters has frequently been remarked upon and so it is perhaps hardly surprising that he was interested in this area of domestic life.28 He seems to be drawing on his personal experience in the section of his letter to Francesco Vinta proposing that all wives should be treated the same as their husbands because: if God makes husband and wife as one, we do not know why the law should separate them. And in order to remove troubles and annoyances, of which there are enough already, without this, in a marriage.29 Despite Cosimo’s feelings on the matter, women whose husbands were exempt were not in fact allowed to dress as they pleased until 1568 and it took even longer to instate this policy in other parts of Tuscany.30 In 1582 in Arezzo, the Knights of Saint Stephen successfully petitioned the Pratica Segreta, or Privy Council, a few

The court on show

21

days after the introduction of a new sumptuary law, regarding precisely this issue. They requested Grand Duke Francesco I to remember: Our honour, interest and social position, desiring that our consorts be freed from this law, so that the distinction of individuals will be recognised and we will avoid further expenses; just as our Lord the Most Serene Grand Master included our consorts in the privileges of the Religion [of the Order of St Stephen], considering husband and wife as one and the same person.31 It was considered unacceptable for wives to be forced to wear humbler clothing than their husbands. Although fashion was often held to be a female concern, it was one that husbands benefited from vicariously, illustrated by the tendency for women to be the focal point of sartorial display in double portraits while their men folk receded modestly into the background, as discussed in Chapter 5. This petition was not unique and similar reactions were presumably expected, as the laws stated that the Medici dukes could personally intervene to decide who to include or exclude. If courtiers were dissatisfied with their sartorial privileges, this was the accepted route to try to bend the strictures. One such example is that of Giovanvittorio Soderini and his wife Maria de’ Nerli, who spotted the potential for flexibility in the laws and wrote to Cosimo just after the introduction of the 1562 law. Soderini presented his case as follows: Finding ourselves, my consort and I, with a notable quantity of clothing and jewellery prohibited by the law published by your Immense Excellency, in order to avoid superfluous expense and as the above mentioned items are new and fresh and of very honest value . . . we most humbly beg and with all affection . . . that with his particular grace and favour he would deign to allow that we, together with our family of servants, are counted among those excluded and exempt from the above reform.32 Although the response to this letter is unknown, its existence is evidence that Cosimo was not regarded as the rigid enforcer of a culture of restraint. By encouraging specific groups of Florentine nobles to dress in a lavish manner, the Medici were clearly intent on shaping, rather than stamping out, the courtly lifestyle noted and, often criticized, in sixteenth-century descriptions of Florence.

1.2  Seeing and being seen Bestowing sartorial privileges was a gift that brought the Medici ample returns. Cosimo’s own moderate example suggests he did not advocate the indiscriminate use of valuable clothing and jewelry or ostentation for the sake of it. However, his

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legislation certainly did allow the most influential members of the court to dress up as much as they wished for specific events, to enhance the prestige of the duchy. A similar result was achieved in Venice, but by different means, as the restrictive sumptuary laws that targeted the wealthy were waived for specific occasions when it was crucial for important citizens to appear dressed in fine clothing.33 The Medici pursued a policy of utilizing ever-more impressive court festivities as forms of propaganda for their regime, increasing the number of suitable occasions where courtiers were expected to wear the finery to which they were now entitled. The participation of courtiers in their most splendid clothing was such an essential component in this projection of power and prosperity that their attendance became compulsory.34 In itself this was not a new departure: in the late fifteenth century, Lorenzo de’ Medici had orchestrated public spectacles in similar ways to strengthen the family’s authority. However, the Medici dukes exercised their statecraft on a much grander and awe-inspiring scale, exceeding native Florentine traditions to compete with the pomp of other, larger, and more established European courts.35 A new festive calendar was introduced under the ducal regime, combining Florentine public celebrations that had long flourished during the republican period, such as the Festa degli Omaggi, with imported ones, including papal jubilees, the elections of emperors, or the visits of foreign dignitaries, calculated to emphasize Florence’s position on a more international stage.36 The Medici put their mark on the city’s architecture, the backdrop that ennobled festive ephemera, with an ongoing program to open up and rationalize areas of the urban fabric, creating broad, central axes, ideal for state processions and other types of civic celebrations. Columns commemorating the triumphs of the ducal regime were placed at either end of via Maggio in the Oltr’arno area, marking out the street that became one of the main festive routes and most fashionable residential areas in sixteenth-century Florence. In addition to public spaces, the Medici used their own properties and those of influential courtiers, to stage increasingly lavish displays and amusements, drawing on their substantial personal financial resources, swelled by the Grand ducal coffers. Technological advances enabled elaborate theatrical and operatic performances, involving breathtaking “special effects,” such as the sea battle (naumachia) performed at the Pitti Palace as the finale to the celebrations for the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine in 1589 [Fig. 1.1].37 Such festivities were usually held over several days, weeks, or even months, combining different events, including processions, football matches, dancing, and banquets. Written sources reserved a special place for descriptions of dress on festive occasions, particularly in accounts by foreign travelers who considered it a measure of a city’s prosperity. On Michel de Montaigne’s first visit to Florence in 1580 he was underwhelmed by what he saw. However, returning to the city for the feast of St. John the Baptist he was impressed by processions in the streets, chariot and horse racing, and displays of textiles in the shops, as well as the finely dressed

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Figure 1.1 Orazio Scarabelli, Naumachia in the Courtyard of Palazzo Pitti, 1589, engraving, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi. (® 1990, Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali ).

Florentine gentlewomen at balconies. He enthusiastically recorded: “After all, I cannot deny that Florence is called ‘beautiful’ for a reason.”38 Dress was also given prominence in so-called festival books and Florence was one of the main printing centers of this kind of souvenir guide that became so popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.39 Books often listed the noblemen who helped to finance the proceedings by name, as well as those who participated in masques, jousts, and triumphal entries. Often rather sterile narratives, with little interest in conveying the range of sensory qualities, the sounds and smells, of these jostling, vibrant events, they instead provide a visual schema of the participants, recording combinations of textiles, colors, and embellishments in great detail. Although the descriptions of dress are perhaps not always faithful—indeed, reading across different sources, it is possible to find multiple variations of the same outfit—they provide a compelling insight into the function of clothing.40 In a crowd, dress offered a key to decipher political and social hierarchies and by extension the structure of the court as a whole. It was vital in rendering a large group spectacle instantly legible, introducing order into a potentially chaotic scene.41 We can see this clearly in Domenico Passignano’s fresco depicting the Procession of the Body of St. Antoninus [Fig. 1.2].42 Members of the Medici family helped to carry the baldaquin, including Ferdinando and Don Pietro, who stand out in white and gold liveries. The figure behind them in black with a white ruff is thought to be Francesco di Jacopo

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Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence

Figure 1.2  Domenico Passignano, Procession of the Body of St. Antoninus, fresco, Convent of San Marco, Florence. (Photo Scala, Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto—Min. dell’Interno).

Salviati, his outward gaze and clothing linking him to his relatives, Averardo and Antonio Salviati, depicted in the middle foreground, patrons of the St. Antoninus chapel in the church of San Marco. Additionally, the ecclesiastical figures and the spectators are also differentiated through dress. Sources suggest that many courtiers relished being on display in this way. A description of Cosimo II’s wedding to Maria Maddalena of Austria (Giunti, 1608) relays a strong sense of the performative nature of dress: Because whoever had come to these festivities wanted to take part in this chivalric entertainment, enjoying being seen as much as seeing. Given that as they moved up and down the same street many times, the first group of people compared themselves with the next and, exchanging greetings, each one came to know everyone else and just as they were displaying their own fine clothes they also discovered everyone else’s.43 The participants’ heightened visibility and the overtones of voyeurism inherent in this scene are hard to reconcile with many other accounts of courtly

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Figure 1.3  Giovanni Stradano, Joust Held in the Via Larga, ca. 1556, fresco, Sala Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Getty images).

sartorial display, in which the individual is subsumed in the crowd. If we consider the subtle differences between male and female dress codes at such events it is evident that complicated power negotiations were involved. As might be expected, the participation of most women was very circumscribed: noblewomen, ladies-in-waiting, and other female guests were often unnamed, and had passive rather than active roles, or were confined to particular spaces. At festive events, women tended to occupy outlying positions, where they could nevertheless observe and be observed, promoting the virtue and nobility of the female population, and by extension the court as a whole. This is clearly conveyed by Stradano’s fresco of a Saracen joust, where the women are pictured at balconies draped with textiles, separate from the male onlookers on the ground [Fig. 1.3]. Orazio Scarabelli’s engraving of the sea battle at the Pitti suggest the audience was almost exclusively male, apart from a small cluster of women at the top right [FIG. 1.1]. Bruna Niccoli has characterized the function of women on such occasions as “spectators, but also a kind of chorus to the scene.”44 The concept of groups of high-ranking women as a chorus is apt, given that the sacrifice of individual status was necessary to achieve a more powerful expression of group unity. This was true even at events where women dominated, such as the celebrations for the baptism of Francesco I’s heir, Filippo, in 1577, described in a book printed

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to commemorate the occasion, dedicated to court secretary Giovanni Vincenzo Modesti: Arriving two by two, approximately 230 married women and gentlewomen, including the Grand Duchess’s ladies-in-waiting, were all dressed identically in gold silk dresses (teletta), and some other Ladies and several more Florentine gentlewomen were dressed similarly. Others were dressed in different colours, but all of them so richly, in brocades and cloths of silver and gold, and other very beautiful silks, and with so many gold embroideries and pearls and so richly and charmingly, that the skill and cost involved in their creation were both so great that it was impossible to tell which was superior: not to mention the gold and jewels they wore, which were so numerous and of such high quality, that it was breathtaking to behold.45 These types of dress and textiles were prohibited to lesser-ranking women and the reference to art reminds us that we are not only admiring the grace and beauty of the gentlewomen themselves but, importantly, our attention is also drawn to the craftsmanship of Florentine silk weavers and clothes makers. Indeed, in such descriptions the clothes themselves become protagonists, independently from the bodies they adorn. This degree of impersonal detachment echoes the praise lavished on shop displays of local textile wares, for example, on the feast day of St. John the Baptist. The conflation between finely dressed women and shop wares recurs in Cesare Vecellio’s description of Venetian brides at Ascension time: The brides set about inventing and adorning themselves in the greatest luxury and elegance they can, because they will be seen not only by their fellow citizens but also by the many foreigners of all ages and sexes who come not only from nearby towns but also from distant ones to see that splendid display of merchandise.46 The fact that female clothing served a purpose extending beyond personal glorification was expressed in many different rhetorical forms. Raffaello Gualterotti’s description of the entourage of Genoese women greeting Christine of Lorraine on her way to Florence in 1589 underlines the power of the collective, stating that the clothing of this group of women was so similar that “everything seemed made by the same hand and by the same will.”47 The capacity of their clothing to visually enhance the planned entertainments is highlighted in a letter from Christine of Lorraine to Ferdinando, describing the Ceremony of the Golden Rose during Lent in 1593: As well as the Princesses, I had invited thirty-five gentlewomen and ladies from the household, who came so elegantly dressed that the spectacle did great honour to the festivities.48

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1.3 Liveries of the court Although the appearance of male courtiers en masse also projected the solidity and unity of the court, it was defined by a greater range of clearly perceptible sartorial distinctions. Important Medici supporters were not mere onlookers and fulfilled a variety of key roles, perhaps leading a convoy to meet a visiting dignitary or future Grand Duchess, or financing and organizing aspects of the festivities themselves. In many scenarios, dark colors were the norm in male court dress but for festive occasions brighter colors were required, like the liveries worn by the Medici for the St. Antoninus translation procession [FIG. 1.2]. This sharp contrast is described by Federico Fregoso in the Courtier: Hence, I think that black is more pleasing in clothing than any other color; and if not black, then at least some color on the dark side. I mean this of ordinary attire, for there is no doubt that bright and gay colors are more becoming on armor, and it is also more appropriate for gala dress to be trimmed, showy, and dashing; so too on public occasions, such as festivals, games, masquerades, and the like. As for the rest, I would have our Courtier’s dress show that sobriety which the Spanish nations so much observe, since external things often bear witness to inner things.49 While women’s festive dress tended to be a more elaborate and expensive version of their usual attire, the colorful outfits worn by men involved a dramatic alteration of their customary appearance, and it was presumably tempting to use such distinctive clothes to stand out from their peers. Souvenir books described these garments in detail, translating the ephemeral into the permanent, their spectacular nature functioning as an indicator of the event’s success. After Matteo Botti attended the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine in 1589 in livery, he purchased a book about the event that included a “description of the liveries and other pomp.”50 Similarly, Riccardo Riccardi features in a “list of the liveries that were seen during these festivities” in a souvenir book for the 1608 wedding of Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena of Austria.51 In the context of the court of Henry VIII, Maria Hayward defines a livery as “clothing of a specific style, colour and cloth, given by one individual to another,” with various different forms, including corporate, household (both royal and noble), and soldiers’ liveries.52 Originating from the French livrée, meaning dispensed or handed over, a livery was usually a gift or part payment, primarily in the form of clothing. As Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass have pointed out, liveries created a reciprocal relationship between the parties involved: “Livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation.”53 Stallybrass contrasts household liveries, denoting

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servitude, with guild liveries, indicating seniority and freedom. Nevertheless, he argues that both forms resulted in “the marking of a body so as to associate it with a particular institution.”54 The use of livery (la livrea) at the Medici court also entailed certain forms of dependency, yet the term was applied more broadly. The kind of liveries seen at court events were essentially matching outfits with a particular color scheme worn by several individuals. The Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (the first Italian dictionary, published in 1612) underlines this wider meaning, describing being liveried as “wearing clothing of the same style, and uniform.” Sometimes family or heraldic colors were used or striking color contrasts were selected. As we can see from Sicillo Araldo’s Trattato dei colori nelle arme, nelle livree e nelle divise (1565), these combinations could be chosen simply for their aesthetic merits. The treatise offers numerous different options, including orange with white or pink, adding that it was easier to put two colors together as three required greater consideration regarding their symbolism.55 Personal preferences dominated when choosing liveries for Maria de’ Medici’s wedding in France to Henri IV: Christine of Lorraine wrote to Ferdinando that Maria had chosen a color “she had always loved” for the king himself, while the pages and other members of the royal household were to wear blue, sky blue, orange, and white.56 Although the Medici provided liveries for members of the Grand ducal household at great expense, courtiers often paid for ceremonial liveries out of their own pockets, significantly affecting our understanding of their ramifications.57 In such instances, a livery did not solely reflect the stamp of authority. Certainly, courtiers still demonstrated their allegiance to the Medici by playing a part within an orchestrated group display but by financing their own clothing they enjoyed greater autonomy, making these events a perfect platform to fuel sartorial competition. The scope for personal aggrandizement is treated satirically in a popular verse by the Bolognese Giulio Cesare Croce about the 1608 Medici wedding. In this exposition of vanity, titled Croce’s Most Noble Livery for the Wedding of the Grand Prince of Tuscany, in which he spends and squanders so much money that nothing remains to clothe himself to attend the splendid festivities, Croce parodies the fashion for commissioning vastly expensive liveries, using unusual fabrics and gems imported from faraway lands. He maintains that the Florentines’ hearts will be “pricked with the bitter wound of envy” when they see his own, richly decorated livery, however due to his lack of funds the clothes never materialize. His pages are given names such as “Breathless,” “Dry,” “Thin,” “Whipped,” and “Derelict,” starkly contrasting with the aura of privilege associated with the court.58 Despite the competing interests of the various parties involved, it was customary in contemporary accounts to admire courtiers’ liveries as a form of tribute to the grandeur of the monarch.59 Continuing with the analogy of festive clothing as performance, courtiers’ liveries can be seen as a prologue to the main act. Liveries were composed of a series of carefully chosen signs, so that a  more  expensive

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silk, a wider ribbon, or a decorated lining helped to pinpoint the exact rank of the wearer. This obviously required an audience sufficiently aware of the value of dress to be able to distinguish between these sometimes very small gradations. Such opportunities for distinction are evident in a sketch for a robe for the Grand ducal livery, annotated with a series of embellishments, such as braids and buttons, which could easily be altered to denote different ranks [Fig. 1.4]. That the Grand Dukes constituted the pinnacle of this display is made clear in Vittorio Baldini’s account of the 1589 wedding, possibly the version purchased by Matteo Botti. In the midst of a lengthy description of the different liveries worn by Florentine courtiers and visiting nobility, the author breaks off to apologize: duty and decorum oblige him

Figure 1.4 Sketch for a man’s robe (described as a veste or zimarra) for the Grand ducal livery, 1593, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 143, 418r (with permission from the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali).

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to commence with an account of the clothing of the Grand Duke himself.60 But before he does this he seizes the opportunity to run through the appearance of the fifty liveried servants accompanying Ferdinando before culminating—at long last—with the most splendid outfit of all. However, the reader’s expectations are ultimately frustrated as the Grand Duke’s clothing is apparently adorned with most superb and sumptuous embroideries and decorated in such “incredible and infinite” ways that the author is at a loss for words. This rhetorical flourish evidently constitutes the only effective form of deference to the Grand Duke, to truly set him apart from the courtiers whose dress had been minutely scrutinized before him, including valuations of individual garments and embellishments. While Ferdinando’s clothing was symbolically indescribable, the clothing of his courtiers was closely prescribed by their status, festive role, and position in relation to their ruler.

1.4 The Riccardi host a party A range of sources allows us to explore the significance of liveries at a single event held to honor one of the key achievements of Ferdinando’s reign. As the Grand ducal regime entered a new century, Ferdinando secured a great diplomatic coup in the form of Maria de’ Medici’s marriage to Henri IV of France. It represented a further step in consolidating the international stature of the Medici, something that Ferdinando lost no opportunity in alluding to at the proxy wedding ceremony in Florence in October 1600, celebrated in the cathedral. This was followed by a banquet in the Salone del Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio, hung with two vast canvases by Jacopo Chimenti depicting the two Medici alliances with the French monarchy.61 After days of celebrations, Florentine courtier Riccardo Riccardi hosted what he described as a “little party” in the extensive gardens of his villa in via Valfonda, on the outskirts of the city near the Fortezza del Basso.62 The palace courtyard was draped with green cloths and around the inner loggia Riccardo positioned busts, statues, and portraits, probably including the one he had acquired of the bride herself a few months earlier.63 There were further Medici tributes in the gardens, with a marble statue of Aesculapius, the god of medicine and healing used in the Medici’s own gardens as another of the family’s symbols, placed at the end of an avenue of laurels.64 The striking surroundings of the gardens and the variety of the festivities, including dances, jousts, hunting, music, and a procession of carriages, laden with silver baskets containing gifts of fruit for the bride, appear to have met the necessary high standard. Ferdinando was impressed, reportedly taking Riccardo to one side afterward to praise him, saying that in comparison “the rest of us wretches are not capable of giving parties.”65 Described in an account by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, the occasion was also commemorated in

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Figure 1.5 Unknown artist, The Peasant Girls’ Dance, ca.1600, fresco, Palazzo Giuntini, Florence (Photo Scala, Florence).

a series of frescoes on the ceilings of the hunting lodge, now Palazzo Giuntini [Fig. 1.5]. Roy Strong saw the event as the prototype for more grandiose displays held in the Pitti gardens during the reigns of subsequent Grand Dukes, noting the unique nature of the frescoes as “no other source gives us such a powerful and accurate impression of the use and importance of the garden as a setting for the fêtes de cour in the late sixteenth century.”66 The Jacopo Chimenti canvas shows Ferdinando, standing in for Henri IV, placing a ring on his niece’s outstretched hand. Both figures are depicted in festive white and gold clothing, a combination reprised in a slightly later painting by Nicolas Bollery, with Ferdinando at the port of Leghorn accompanying Maria as she leaves for France [Fig. 1.6].67 The clothing in these two images differs in many other ways but the colors white and gold are recurrent features also worn by other protagonists at the wedding, including Medici relatives. One account records Antonio, Maria’s half-brother, and don Giovanni de’ Medici, in superbissime liveries embroidered with gold.68 A planning committee for the event assigned specific duties to individual courtiers and recommended appropriate forms of clothing. Forty young noblemen appointed to carry the Grand ducal baldaquin were instructed to wear white outfits set off with black cloaks and berets,

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Figure 1.6  Nicolas Bollery, Maria de’ Medici accompanied by Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici, ca. 1613–14, oil on canvas, Cherbourg-Octeville, musée Thomas Henry, 835.74, © D. Sohier.

obviously intended to echo Ferdinando’s own appearance. The men were to be clothed: all equally, and in the same manner throughout, and it pleases us that the outfit should be white . . . a matching white satin doublet and breeches, decorated with gold lace, white silk stockings, white leather shoes, gilt swords and dagger, with a sheath and white belt, black slashed velvet beret with a white feather, and decorated with a sufficient quantity of braid, a black sarcenet cloak with figured velvet, with a purple lining or facing as long as the end result is that there is no distinction between one or the other and they all appear to be of the same quality.69

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Riccardo and Francesco’s account books reveal they also adopted the combination of white and gold, following a similar dress code to that established by the committee. However, they invested in far more valuable liveries than those worn by the forty baldaquin bearers. Their outfits consisted of matching short cloaks, doublets or cassocks, and breeches made of striped gold and white tabby silk.70 Even though it was purchased from one of their own silk companies the fabric still cost a substantial 10 ½ lire per braccio. From their account books it is possible to link approximately 171 scudi with these two outfits, already more than half the average annual clothing budget for the entire family. Yet this was but a fraction of the total cost, as it is only possible to identify the main fabric and tailoring expenses in the account book. The finished garments were probably embellished with gold lace, on which the Riccardi spent large sums during this period, and completed with silk stockings, hats, and shoes purchased for the event. To contextualize this, two years earlier Riccardo had spent 18, 500 scudi on the Valfonda palace and gardens, a 32-acre estate and “the largest privately-owned property within the walls of Florence.”71 The frescoes around the ceiling of the hunting lodge show various stages of  the entertainments, including the Peasant Girls’ Dance [FIG. 1.5], each one repeating the same arrangement of spectators with the villa in the background. As the frescoes were designed to be legible from a distance, it is not surprising that the brightly dressed female spectators stand out. Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger praised their appearance: Very many seated gentlewomen leant forwards, ornamenting that very dignified place in a lofty and noble manner; making such a gracious spectacle that, combined with the numerous people to be seen all around, in the absence of any other festivities, very great pleasure would have been had.72 In contrast, the male participants are on the whole less eye-catching: in keeping with the outdoor setting they are shown with their dark cloaks over their white doublets and hose. It is probable that the Riccardi are included among the group of figures under the central canopy. This event and the clothing for it are a reminder that power derived not only from courtiers’ physical proximity to the Grand Duke, but also how closely their clothing approximated his. The Riccardi’s accounts indicate their readiness to invest substantially in what was essentially an ensemble event aggrandizing the Medici. The elaborate expressions of respect, deference, and magnanimity embodied in Riccardo and Ferdinando’s behavior also extended to the clothing of the participants. The dress expected of courtiers attending Medici festivities required a large financial outlay, often paid for out of their own pockets, and due to their distinctive colors, there were few opportunities to wear these outfits again. On the one hand, by donning colors prescribed by the Medici, the Riccardi brothers renounced a degree of

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independence. The authority to suppress the individual identity of his subjects, by removing their freedom to choose their own clothing, clearly underlined the power of the monarch. Yet the Riccardi also reaped benefits from taking up their place in this tightly controlled performance. It was a privilege to wear colors ordained by the monarch and they were able to turn this sartorial hierarchy, with its many subtle nuances, to their own advantage, clearly affirming their superior status in comparison with those around them. The different degrees of personal choice and financial input involved reflect the very porous boundaries between the sartorial identities, and honor, of private individuals and court as a whole.

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2T  he rise and fall of the Florentine toga

The persistence of the republican ideal and its influence on Florentine politics and culture long after its actual demise has fascinated historians from the sixteenth century onward.1 Mainly in the wake of the conquest of Siena in 1555, when the political situation in Florence became more stable, Cosimo I drew on its symbolism to consolidate his authority and dynastic ambitions, instigating a series of artistic projects intended to portray the new government as a natural successor to the Medici oligarchy of the fifteenth century.2 This focus on the identity of the court and its representations was aimed to strengthen the position of Medici courtiers within Florence and in relation to other European courtly elites. Henk Th. van Veen argues that Cosimo’s approach “consciously instilled a systematic and narrow kind of Florentine self-consciousness among the urban upper echelons.”3 The founding of various academies intended to commemorate the city’s past and future cultural achievements, such as the Accademia Fiorentina (1541) and the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (1563), marked another strand of this strategy. Such initiatives reflect the Medici’s belief that they would accrue glory by harking back to the city’s magnificent past, as well as a desire to emphasize continuity rather than disjuncture. From this perspective, Robert J. Crum has described the redecoration of the Palazzo Vecchio under Cosimo I as combining a “retrospective, double-duty iconography—at once princely and Florentine.”4 Cosimo was not the first Medici to fully appreciate what has been described as “republicanism as a system of representation.”5 Cosimo the Elder utilized similar methods to manipulate public opinion to his advantage and it has been argued, for example, that his patronage of humanist historian Leonardo Bruni was partly motivated by the hope that such an alliance would help placate opposition toward the Medici oligarchy. According to James Hankins, this was one of several examples of “the disguises of power employed by the Medici regime—their attempt to conceal the

true locus of power by exercising their rule under the cloak of republican forms.”6 For Cosimo I, this was a rather precarious balancing act. As John Najemy puts it: Cosimo regarded the republican past ambivalently: on the one hand, he needed it to bolster his legitimacy weakened not only by his state’s violent origins but also by his status as a creature, indeed a vassal, of the emperor; on the other, he was wary of it because he feared its resurrection.7 Given such preoccupations, it is hardly surprising that Cosimo I, and Ferdinando after him, took a close personal interest in the literal cloak of republicanism, seeking to reconfigure it in a new guise fit for court.8 For centuries, Florentine

Figure 2.1  Domenico di Michelino, Dante Alighieri with the Divine Comedy in his Hand, 1465, fresco, Florence Cathedral (Getty Images).

The rise and fall of the Florentine toga

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Figure 2.2  Domenico Ghirlandaio, Stories of St. Francis of Assisi, 1483–86, fresco, Sassetti Chapel, Church of Santa Trinita, Florence (Dea Picture Library, Getty Images).

citizens had been associated with this form of cloak, known as the lucco, typically worn by professional figures, including lawyers, doctors, and government office holders. It had long been employed in literary and visual representations of eminent Florentines. In Dante’s Inferno, written in exile between 1304 and 1321, the poet is recognized as a Florentine as he journeys through the seventh circle of hell because of his clothing, just as elsewhere in the poem his speech reveals his identity.9 This, the sole reference throughout the Inferno to Dante’s dress, suggests he was wearing the type of loose, flowing, full-length, sleeveless red cloak depicted in Domenico di Michelino’s portrait of the poet dating from 1465 [Fig. 2.1]. The cloak became a key component of Florentine male identity and was represented on the backs of some of the most powerful figures in fifteenth-century Florentine society.10 In Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule in the Sassetti Chapel at the church of Santa Trinità, the cloak is worn by Lorenzo de’ Medici and members of Francesco Sassetti’s family [Fig. 2.2]. The life-size, wax ex-voto figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici given to the church of the Santissima Annunziata was also dressed in a lucco, supposedly the clothing he wore when he appeared in public at the window of the family palazzo in via Larga, having survived the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478.11 Depicting Lorenzo as a Florentine citizen was intended to absolve him from accusations of tyranny, while the garment also acted as a metaphor for the triumph of good government over a nefarious plot. In his description of the ex-voto, Giorgio Vasari described the lucco as “the civil

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clothing worn by citizens.”12 Similar perceptions of the Venetian toga reinforce a sense of the significance of such garments. Many contemporary observers, including Marino Sanudo and Francesco Sansovino, praised what was considered to be its egalitarian nature.13 Vecellio attributes the toga with great powers: “The dress ordinarily worn by the Venetian nobility is the ancient Roman toga, and its uniformity is perhaps no small reason for the harmony and concord with which this immense Republic has always been governed.”14 In reality, the lucco was one of several forms of cloak or mantle worn by professional adult men or government officeholders. Carole Collier Frick has shown that among the various styles available, one of the most expensive and prestigious was the cioppa, a full-length gown with sleeves, sometimes lined with fur.15 In her study of Florentine civic robes in the fifteenth century, Jane Bridgeman concludes that there is little evidence to substantiate the statement made by the sixteenth-century humanist historian and poet Benedetto Varchi that the lucco and cappuccio were compulsory wear for adult male citizens during the republic. Indeed, she points out that the lucco does not feature in the list of prices issued by the Florentine tailors’ guild in 1415, while other types of overgarment, such as the cioppa and mantello, were included. To counter claims regarding its long history of use, Bridgeman argues that visual representations of the lucco only became really widespread in the 1470s.16 If, therefore, the lucco was not the only choice of Florentine robe, why were the Medici so keen to promote it?

2.1 The cloak of nobility The style of the lucco differed from several other forms of male gowns in a small, but significant detail, namely that it was sleeveless. This aspect is highlighted in the most detailed description we have of the garment, the aforementioned account by Benedetto Varchi in his Storia Fiorentina. Varchi, a staunch republican, was recalled from exile by Cosimo and commissioned to write an account of Florence’s recent history. Varchi gave the impression that the “noble” cloak was ubiquitous among adult men of standing: In the city, during the summer the clothing of Florentine men over eighteen is a gown of fine wool or black serge, reaching almost down to their ankles, longer for doctors and other more sober people, lined with taffeta and sometimes with tabby or sarcenet, almost always black, open at the front and sides, where the arms appear, and pleated at the top, where it is closed at the neck with one or two hooks on the inside, and sometimes ribbons or braid on the outside. This cloak is called a lucco and is very comfortable and graceful to wear. Nobler and richer people wear it in the winter too, either lined with fur or velvet or sometimes damask.17

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The lack of sleeves linked the cloak in Florentine imagination with another noble garment, the Roman toga. This sartorial connection underscored the Roman origins of Florence, as well as the popular notion that city’s republican tradition made it the true heir to republican Rome. When the banker, diplomat and chronicler Giovanni Villani recorded the arrival of the Duke of Athens in Florence in 1342, he proudly described the appearance of the Florentine men as nobler, more handsome, and dignified than those of any other nation, and their clothing directly descended from the Roman toga.18 The loose hanging folds of the lucco and its lack of tailoring coincided with Florentine notions of antique dress, reinforced in turn by the many sculptures and paintings showing classically inspired garments that Florentines encountered as they went about their daily lives. These depicted an array of Roman styles, more or less freely interpreted, including tunics, loose and belted, or full-length overgarments with or without sleeves.

Figure 2.3  Nanni di Banco, St. Philip, ca. 1411–15, Orsanmichele, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

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They all shared some salient features, tending to accentuate the volume of the fabric and the way it was draped around the body. The simple cloak on Nanni di Banco’s sculpture of St. Philip for the shoemakers’ guild at Orsanmichele, for example, is not dissimilar to the sixteenth-century toga [Fig. 2.3]. Depictions of the lucco often embody a classical solemnity, as in a sketch by Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli which emphasizes the garment’s lack of sleeves and the gathered cloth along the shoulders [Fig. 2.4]. The central figure, bent on one knee to kiss Duke Cosimo’s hand, holds up his long cloak around his body in a gesture reminiscent of the sculptural typology of the Roman orator with swathes of fabric draped over one arm. Dress historian Stella Mary Newton proposed that Giovanni Villani’s reference to the Roman toga reflected something bordering on “a tribal memory.”19 Indeed,

Figure 2.4  Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Preliminary drawing for a chiaroscuro painting decorating the triumphal arch of the Antellesi corner, representing Cosimo de’ Medici hailed as Duke. Florence, Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi, no. 7731 F (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

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although Florentines felt the connection with the Roman toga keenly, this did not necessitate a close understanding of its many forms. Not surprisingly, the toga underwent various changes over the course of the Roman Republic. Its length and volume decreased or increased and its draperies were arranged in different styles. A useful reminder that Roman dress was far from static, and that changes in fashion were greeted with anxiety long before the sixteenth century, can be found in Appian’s complaint in 120BC: For now the Roman people are much mixed with foreigners, there is equal citizenship for freedmen, and slaves dress like their masters. With the exception of the senators, free citizens and slaves wear the same costume.20 What really mattered was not so much the detail of the garments, but rather their shared symbolic valence, as both represented active citizenship and consequently a form of nobility. Caroline Vout has stressed that wearing the toga meant “participating fully in the political life of Rome.” Indeed, its use was restricted to citizens, and it came to be thought of as a form of national dress.21 Similarly, only men who were Florentine citizens, in other words tax payers and longstanding residents, were eligible to wear the lucco.22 Over time, the toga increasingly became a ceremonial costume rather than a practical garment, a fate not dissimilar to the one that befell the lucco.23 The lucco was so emblematic because participation in civic life had long been a badge of honor for members of the Florentine patriarchy. Debates about the true nature of nobility were being held across the Italian peninsula but there was a particularly pressing need to tackle this issue in Florence. Over the last few decades, various studies have revealed the process of “aristocratization” under the Medici.24 One of the unusual features of the new regime was its lack of an established and cohesive aristocracy, distinguishing it from other Italian courts such as Milan or Ferrara, or even Republican Venice. Many sixteenth-century authors addressed the problem of the Florentine urban aristocracy, which could not boast of a “nobility of the sword” or an uninterrupted feudal ancestry. Furthermore, the strong mercantile tradition of many members of the Florentine patriarchy was considered to be incompatible with aristocratic models, both in other parts of Italy and abroad. In 1527, Venetian ambassador Mario Foscari described seeing the men in charge of the Florentine government, together with their sons, in their shops actively involved in manual labors linked to the wool and silk trade. He concluded that “as all Florentines are employed in these base occupations, they cannot but be craven and base themselves.”25 Writing just three years before the establishment of the court, Foscari’s comments are hardly convincing, given that the role of Florentine patricians within the textile sector was primarily entrepreneurial, financial, and administrative. However, similar views continued to persist under the ducal regime. Mary Stuart reportedly chose to denigrate her mother-in-law, Catherine de’

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Medici, by referring to her as “la marchande florentine.”26 Florentine authors, such as Paolo Mini, in his Difesa della città di Firenze, et de’ fiorentini contro le calunnie et maldicentie de’ maligni (first published in Lyon in 1577 and then in Florence in 1593), attempted to rebut such criticisms. Mini chose to emphasize the ways in which Florence’s republican past contributed to the city’s continuing greatness, including these mercantile links. In a passage that directly echoes the language of detractors, Mini noted that members of other Italian courts were disdainful of the fact that Florentines lived by “vile gain, all day long with a spindle, winding on the warp or at a trellis combing and selecting wool.” However, he proceeded to extol the virtues of a strong mercantile mind-set and their wider application, stating that “Florentines are therefore good for more than just negotiating with tailors, and grocers, and with silk merchants about silk, and disputing with weavers about velvets and sarcenets.”27 Alongside such justifications of commercial occupations, historians and other commentators argued that nobility could be proved in a variety of tangible or demonstrable ways, through a range of noble actions, of a military, cultural, or civic nature. The centuries-long involvement of many families in government office was presented as an alternative to signeurial nobility.28 A vital point was being made here, namely that noble blood was not a necessity and that it was possible to “become” noble. Vincenzo Borghini’s Nobiltà delle Famiglie Fiorentine (probably written in the early 1560s but not published until 1584–85), stressed the value of civic deeds and the potential for merchants to be ennobled through public service.29 Borghini, a scholar and prior, also argued that a man could become noble through “his things” (le cose sue), including his house, his name, title, and his clothing.30 But, as in all such questions of social capital, it was necessary to achieve the right balance. In Borghini’s opinion the pursuit of nobility was occasionally taken to ridiculous extremes and he caricatured the fashion for recording, and often inventing, family trees and coatsof-arms as proof of aristocracy.31 Borghini was not the only author to consider the potential of dress to convey nobility. For Paolo Mini, the lucco continued to embody the dignity and honor of the Florentines in the sixteenth century: Who dresses more soberly and with more simplicity and honesty than the Florentines? And their head wear, called cappucci, their virile togas, called mantelli, and their cloaks, called lucchi, testify to this.32 Views like these helped to confirm the link between the republican mantle, the official garb of the public servant, and the Florentine aristocracy. The emphasis on tradition and service to the city glossed over the fact that Cosimo and his successors embarked upon a process of overhauling the structure of Florentine government. Robert Burr Litchfield has shown that most office holders under the ducal regime were still picked from same pool of patricians as they had been during the republic and the qualifying requirements remained very similar.

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Increasingly, however, posts were filled in accordance with the personal wishes of the Grand Dukes rather than through a more democratic process. Furthermore, the powers of office holders were slowly eroded. Although the overall number of positions increased between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, the amount of rotating, short-term posts, supposedly of a more egalitarian nature, diminished, replaced by permanent offices whose incumbents were chosen by the Grand Dukes.33 The decision to retain the same uniform for government members was a shrewd strategy, helping to disguise the fact that the underlying system itself was being radically changed.

2.2  Enforcement strategies The Medici used various tactics to increase the cloak’s prominence. Images of the gown were incorporated in the frescoes in the newly redecorated Palazzo Vecchio, a building that represented the intersection between the two regimes. Flemish artist Giovanni Stradano immortalized Florentine bureaucrats in their black garb in the Sala di Gualdrada, which was completed in 1562, the year of Cosimo’s second clothing reform.34 The frescoes illustrate traditional Florentine public events and festivities, such as jousts and football matches. Figures wearing

Figure 2.5  Giovanni Stradano, Procession in Piazza Duomo, 1561–62, fresco, Sala di Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Getty Images).

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lucchi appear in several of them, sometimes as the main focus of the composition, as in a scene showing a procession of government members in the city center [Fig. 2.5]. Framed by three Florentine landmarks, the duomo, campanile and the baptistery, the view is dominated by the cloaked men, their grandeur and dignity admired by clusters of bystanders. The lucco also appears at several opportune moments in a biography of Cosimo. After the Grand Duke’s death, Christine of Lorraine commissioned Domenico Mellini, the official chronicler of many Medici events and festivities, to write an account of her father-in-law’s life. As the work was not published until 1820, it had little impact on contemporary attitudes, but the aura Mellini creates around the cloak is striking. He recollects that Cosimo preferred to wear clothing “in the Florentine style” in somber tones of black and gray, although it was sometimes “richly decorated with gold.” In this respect, Mellini was keen to characterize Cosimo as, at heart, a republican. He underlined this by describing Cosimo as an admirer of the “grave and dignified” traditional Florentine civic dress. Furthermore, and here his argument becomes pure propaganda, he praised Cosimo for introducing sumptuary legislation in order to counteract the new courtly ways that were corrupting more conservative sartorial practices.35 This picture of sobriety concludes with an anecdote about Cosimo’s appearance at a party hosted by Isabella de’ Medici at the Palazzo Medici with three other masked companions, all wearing lucchi. Putting on the gown in an ante-camera, Cosimo is reported to have said “I would pay a great deal to be able to go about Florence wearing this gown; it is beautiful and at the same time noble and grand!”36 The choice of the lucco to wear at a masque, as a form of disguise, might not seem coincidental to a reader critical of the ducal regime. The Medici turned to sumptuary legislation to enforce use of the garment and to enhance its prestige. Cosimo’s laws included various details on the correct use of the gown and Ferdinando took the unusual step of passing a detailed law devoted solely to the subject of civic clothing at the start of his reign in October 1588. Cosimo’s 1546 law ordered that men aged eighteen years and over were to wear the lucco, or similar garment, described as a “long civilian cloak.” Infringements of the laws usually resulted in a fine but in this instance it was decreed that the culprit would lose their office, a far more punitive measure.37 It also reinforced the notion that without the cloak noblemen were unworthy of their offices. The 1562 law reiterated that Florentine citizens were to wear a toga of any type of material, color or lining, as long as no metal threads were used.38 It is likely that Ferdinando’s lively interest in robes of office stemmed partly from his personal experience as a cardinal in Rome. At the time his law was being drafted, he had not yet been seen in Florence divested of his ecclesiastical robes. When his first public appearance in civilian dress occurred on November 30, 1588, it seems that the transition was not entirely successful as one Florentine noblewoman candidly described him as looking like “a barrel of anchovies.”39

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The Florentine diarist, Giuliano de’ Ricci, characterized the 1588 law as evidence of Ferdinando’s “continual quest to safeguard the honour, reputation and needs of his subjects.”40 Before plunging into the minutiae of buttons, linings, and metal threads, sumptuary laws usually included a preamble outlining a series of laudable aims. In this case the law stated a desire to return to the glories of Florence’s past. Ferdinando apparently aspired to: reform and re-order the civilian clothing of his most beloved city of Florence, which (owing to the nature of recent times, known for their licentiousness both in public and private) has declined through much neglect and to restore it, as it deserves, to its ancient splendour and dignity.41 An important new step was to raise the age of those eligible to wear the lucco from eighteen to twenty-nine. This heightened the sense of privilege associated with the cloak: it was now a garment that had, in a sense, to be earned, through age and experience. Under the age of thirty, Florentine men were often excluded from public office, so this increased the association of the cloak with active citizenship. The law ordered that a lucco, or similar form of long gown, made of different types of black wool, had to be worn throughout the day until midnight. It applied to a group of several hundred people: the members of the main government bodies, including the Councils of Two Hundred and Forty-Eight, or Senate, as well as the knights of Saint Stephen who were eligible for these offices. The law specified different types of fabric, colors and forms of decoration for the cloaks of different office holders, thereby establishing new visual hierarchies even within the elite togati. The lord lieutenant and other counselors, who held the most eminent positions, now had to wear cloaks of crimson red cloth, with matching stockings and black velvet shoes, while in the winter they were allowed to wear a lined cloak of fine serge or other type of wool in the same colors. Additionally, the lord lieutenant was to wear a purple silk hood (cappuccio) over his left shoulder. The forty-eight senators were assigned slightly less costly black cloth or serge lucchi, lined with red or purple silk. The 1588 law contained a range of provisions taking into account the reality of daily life in Florence, a city based on commerce, populated by merchants who needed to go about their business unhindered. In order to allow greater freedom of movement, merchants were permitted to wear a shorter length cloak, called a ferraiolo, until midday. However, in the afternoon up until the Ave Maria bell in the evening, they were required to put on the correct form of civilian cloak. On holidays when church bells did not ring, they were to be responsible for changing their overgarment at the correct time. In the summer months, the lucco was to be worn only after eleven o’clock in the evening because of the heat. During bad weather, office holders could wear a more practical, short cloak outdoors on the condition they were accompanied by a servant carrying a lucco, so that it could be put on again indoors.42

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2.3 The lucco’s shortcomings This emphasis on the physical experience of wearing the cloak is unusual in legislation, providing an interesting perspective on the motivations of Ferdinando and his advisors, who were sympathetic to the fact that a cloak usually made of about 5 meters of wool, even a fine one, could be hot at times or weighty and uncomfortable when wet. Despite Ferdinando’s efforts to encourage use of the cloak, it was not an unmitigated success. Straight after the law was passed on November 1, 1588, chronicler Giuseppe Settimanni described the “citizens of Florence” processing through the streets of the city in their different colored lucchi, as ordered by the Grand Duke. He was particularly impressed by the new style of hood assigned to lieutenants.43 He was one of several diarists to record ceremonies at which the cloak was worn in the late sixteenth century, but ultimately it was not embraced on the scale that the Medici had hoped.44 During the previous century, various male outer garments and tunics were made from substantial quantities of fabric falling from the shoulders in pleats or large folds, but these full-length gowns must have felt increasingly heavy and cumbersome to those accustomed to the more fitted clothing and thigh-length cloaks fashionable in the sixteenth century. Opposition to Ferdinando’s law led one powerful group in Florence to petition for special exemption: the Buonomini di San Martino. This was a male lay congregation, mainly made up of members of the Florentine patriarchy. Founded in 1442, it was involved in charitable activities and attached to the influential St. Mark’s monastery, which had strong connections with the Medici family. The lucco was a defining feature of the group’s iconography, appearing prominently in their oratory frescoes, begun by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his workshop in 1478. One of the scenes shows three Buonomini giving provisions to a needy woman and her newborn child [Fig. 2.6]. One figure, wearing a cappuccio, provides the woman with swaddling bands and blankets. Another, seated on a stool, is enveloped by his cloak, gathered around him so that its red lining is just visible. In the foreground, the third figure offers a female servant a capon and flask of wine. In another scene, two Buonomini provide money for lodgings for two pilgrims. The younger of the two wears a tunic but the older man’s lucco is a truly monumental garment, pushed up in great folds over his shoulder so he can retrieve his purse to pay the hostel owner. Its sculptural qualities convey the sheer weight of the fabric. Despite the fact that the identity of the congregation was so closely bound up with the lucco, the Buonomini wrote to the Grand Duke in March 1589 to obtain partial exemption from the new law. The signatories of the petition included members of the Strozzi, Gondi, and Carnesecchi families. These noblemen explained that to carry out their charitable works they usually had to “travel about a great deal and at all times of day all over Florence, going into small and badly arranged

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Figure 2.6  School of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Works of Mercy: Tending the Sick, ca. 1482, fresco, oratory of the Buonomini of San Martino, Florence (Photo Scala, Florence).

houses.”45 In these conditions, they argued, the lucco was not a suitable garment. Consequently, they requested that all Buonomini of a lower rank than the Senate of Forty-Eight should be allowed to wear a slighter longer version of the ferraiolo, the fashionable Spanish-style short cloak, instead. The petition concludes with a note from Ferdinando I’s secretary, Piero Usimbardi, that the Grand Duke was disposed to grant their request. Beyond such practical issues, opposition to the cloak marked another episode in the ideological and aesthetic battle between the short and tight versus the long and loose in male clothing, which can be traced back to the fourteenth century.46 The Grand Dukes’ personal tastes reflected this conflict. Cosimo’s clothing preferences as a young man show clearly how extremely unpopular these robes could be. Despite Mellini’s assertions that Cosimo admired the lucco, there is little evidence that this was actually the case. A comprehensive analysis of the Grand Duke’s wardrobe records that he did not possess a single lucco.47 While his cousin Alessandro was duke, the youthful Cosimo reportedly wore clothing inspired by military apparel. Although no details are provided, it is likely to have included upper garments made of leather, similar to this leather jerkin [Fig. 2.7] or the slashed jerkin, in spirit at least, seen from the back in Bassano’s Adoration of the Magi [Fig. 0.2]. Historians have interpreted this as a conscious decision to emulate and recall his father, the renowned condottiere, Giovanni delle Bande

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Figure 2.7  Youth’s dark brown leather jerkin, English, ca. 1550–1600. Museum of London 36.237 (Getty Images).

Nere.48 According to contemporary historian Scipione Ammirato, Cosimo’s warlike appearance provoked the displeasure of Pope Clement VII, Giulio de’ Medici, who presumably feared it presented a threat to Cosimo’s cousin, Duke Alessandro. Clement VII ordered Cosimo to wear the Florentine lucco in line with the city’s customs, but he was seemingly so averse to the suggestion that he avoided public appearances until Duke Alessandro relented and decided to “remove that nuisance from him.”49 Cosimo’s sons later demonstrated a similar taste for shorter, practical, fitted garments. In several portraits Ferdinando is depicted in the same short breeches and exaggeratedly muscular legs associated with his father. The combination of bulbous trunk hose and exposed bulky thighs was a strong, if relatively short-lived, statement of manhood, almost as overt as a codpiece, both definitively superseded by the baggier, longer breeches worn in the seventeenth century [Fig. 2.8]. Vecellio associates this fashion with the clothing of French noblemen, perhaps another reason it appealed to the Francophile Ferdinando. Vecellio’s rather visceral description suggests the extreme nature of this fashion: “They wear short breeches, very tight on the thigh, which practically reveal the veins of their flesh.”50 In a more dignified version, again from Vecellio, the show of a well-defined leg encased in short patterned breeches worn by the rector of Padua University creates an aura of assertive strength that cannot be dampened even by a full-length gown [Fig. 2.9].

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Figure 2.8  Bernardo Strozzi, A Betrothal, 1620s, oil on paper, 18.5 × 28 cm, WA 1946.338 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Ferdinando met with opposition when he tried to enforce the use of academic gowns, outside the lecture halls as well, at the University of Pisa.51 Galileo Galilei was one of the academics fined for not wearing a gown in 1590, inspiring him to compose a 300-line poem titled Contro il portar la toga (Against the Wearing of the Gown).52 Galileo followed the model of burlesque Florentine poets who expounded their views in poetry on a surprising range of topics, from salads to syphilis, sometimes in the demanding form of terza rima. Rather than being evidence of Galileo’s nonconformist nature, the poem reflected a widely held aversion to the toga. Listing the gown’s many shortcomings, the author complained: What do we believe it matters Having a toga of black velvet And someone who carries your cloak in your wake ... Because the toga won’t let you walk, It gets in your way, impedes you and ties you in knots So that it’s a trial to attempt to walk. And yet it doesn’t seem to be unsuitable For those who go about their business slowly53 Galileo lambasts the sense of pomp and ceremony embodied by the garment, including the fact that a servant was required to carry it when it was not being

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Figure 2.9 “Rector, University of Padua,” Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Sessa, 1598), facing page 121. Wellcome Library, London.

worn, and pokes fun at wearers who become tangled up in and slowed down by its folds. While some of his gripes, including the fact that it was not easy to visit a brothel wearing a toga, were humorous, his suggestion that the toga wearer was hampered and ineffectual was particularly damning, suggesting a passive rather than active male, thereby calling into question the wearer’s sexual potency. It is significant that Galileo wrote the poem in his twenties, as the toga was not perceived to be a garment for the young and active, a point reinforced by the new age restrictions for the lucco. As the poem underlines, limb-constricting garments that forced the wearer to walk in a particular way were hardly thought to be virile. Indeed, Vecellio praises the clothes of “young men of the city of Venice and of students” because they are “handsome and elegant, and [they] allow the wearer

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to move easily and quickly.”54 Eugenia Paulicelli also notes the toga’s associations with old age, quoting from a 1581 description of Doge Sebastiano Venier putting on armor, “abandoning the toga and with it his old age, he is dressed with new and strong limbs.”55 Like the young Florentines discarding their civic hoods during the siege, removing the toga is seen to give him a new agility and lease of life. The toga began to be widely perceived as the binary opposite of the kind of fashionable dress associated with soldiers, the epitome of male strength and action. Indeed, Aldo Manuzio’s biography of Cosimo de’ Medici praised the lucco, “that grave and most dignified garment, which brought the City honour and grandeur” by directly contrasting it with new male fashions in Florence, the “light, base, and soldierly clothes worn by the citizenship.”56 Luca Valoriani’s poem, In Praise of Breeches, also suggests that men were seduced by fashionable dress because they were attracted to the striking attire of the off-duty soldier. Valoriani describes berets, slashed doublets and breeches as the clothing of soldiers and “civette.”57 Tellingly, the latter constituted another disreputable social group: “Wanton or effeminate lads, nightsneakers” according to John Florio’s World of Words. Soldiers were increasingly viewed as fashionable, sexualized figures, feared for their corrupting influence upon the male populace at large.58 In the decades following the siege of Florence, German troops continued to have a visible presence in the city. Cosimo paid thousands of mercenaries to fight for him in the Battle of Marciano against the Sienese and his German Guard (Guardia de’ Lanzi) often features in depictions of important court events, for example, at the investiture of the Order of Saint Stephen.59 Some key elements of military dress can be seen in an image of an unfortunate soldier undergoing a head operation, from Andrea Cesalpino’s De Plantis (1583) dedicated to Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici [Fig. 2.10]. An obtrusive codpiece and low-necked shirt, of the kind that had long been replaced by high collars or ruffs, compound his rather degenerate look. The large, open slashes on his doublet sleeves and breeches clearly offer complete freedom of movement. His clothing recalls that of Landsknechts depicted in engravings by German artists including Sebald Beham and Daniel Hopfer in the first half of the sixteenth century, a sartorial type that dominated until the seventeenth century when the increasing professionalization of military forces led to greater conformity and the provision of uniforms and equipment.60 However, official opposition to militaresque clothing perhaps enhanced its appeal. When the fiery Benvenuto Cellini recalls being stopped by the Otto di Guardia for wearing a short cloak (cappa) instead of a civil cloak and hood, like many other aspects of his autobiography it amounts to a boast.61 Given the emasculating connotations of full-length cloaks, it is not surprising to discover that the lucco has a patchy presence in the wardrobes of the courtiers investigated here.62 The records of Giovanbattista Capponi do not list any payments for a lucco, although he is represented in one in the only portrait that survives of him.63 The Riccardi brothers were more enthusiastic in its uptake.

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Figure 2.10  An operation on the head from Andrea Cesalpino, De Plantis Libri XVI (Florence: Marescotti, 1583). Wellcome Library, London.

Francesco acquired one of the full-length gowns even before he held a position that necessitated its use. His accounts record three lucchi, one for summer of silk twill lined with taffeta and the other two made of rash, a fine serge.64 His younger brother, Riccardo, purchased five different lucchi.65 Perhaps these purchases can be understood in light of the Riccardi’s social standing. Although the brothers possessed an extremely large fortune, the family was a relatively new presence among the Florentine elite. Francesco was made a senator in 1596, but he was the first member of the family to receive a political honor. These factors could well have increased the brothers’ willingness to be seen in public in such a cumbersome status symbol.66 The extensive wardrobe of the diplomat Marquis Matteo Botti, inventoried after his death in 1621, contained seventeen long gowns, although only two of these are described as lucchi, compared with fortyfour ferraioli and numerous other short cloaks called cappe.67 The wardrobes of

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all these individuals reflect the unassailable demand for shorter, lighter garments, including the Spanish ferraiolo, a growing shift in fashion that was to influence the textile industry, boosting the production of a range of cheaper, lightweight silks and mixed cloths during the mid-sixteenth century.68 Indeed, the lucco was the antithesis of contemporary court fashions and it appears that Florentines were turning to other forms of clothing to affirm their status. The garments and accessories that formed part of the chivalric robes of the military Order of Saint Stephen seem to have been adopted with greater enthusiasm. The foundation of the Order in 1562 was a coup for Cosimo, an honor previously confined to emperors and popes. Aspiring knights of Saint Stephen, who were mainly Florentine but hailed from all over Italy and abroad, had to prove the pedigree of their ancestry by demonstrating the nobility of their parents and grandparents on both sides.69 In March 1590, shortly after his lucco law, Ferdinando reformed the constitution of the Order, including a series of provisions on its robes, which were based closely on other existing military orders, particularly the Knights of Malta. The main component of the robes was a mid-length white wool cloak with a crimson cross. The 1590 reform emphasized the religious meaning of the cloak. White so that onlookers would gaze upon purity, the color also signified the candid nature of the members’ souls. The red cross was placed on the left so that members would “love and adore it with all their heart.”70 The full regalia was restricted to important ceremonies, when the knights processed through the streets of Florence in order of seniority. However, the new law required members to always wear a cloak with a cross appliquéd in fabric on it and a chain around their neck with another, small gold cross, edged in vermilion.71 Ferdinando exploited yet another opportunity to mark social difference through clothing by ordering the top ranking knights, including Priors and members of the Balia, to wear crosses surrounded with gold fringes. The injunction was followed by Giovanbattista Capponi, whose accounts contain frequent purchases of crimson and white silk as well as what seem to be ready-made crosses supplied by mercers in order to sew onto cloaks.72 The manifest advantage of the chivalric dress code was that it was possible to demonstrate membership while still wearing fashionable clothing. These cloaks and chains became so popular that a law was passed in Milan in 1584 to prevent nonmembers from wearing them in public.73 An individual named Scipione Aurelio, working across the region of Lombardy, was accused of selling various goods including “clothing and red crosses in form and material very similar to the cross and militia of Saint Stephen, of which the Grand Duke of Tuscany is Grand Master, without given proof of nobility or legitimate authority.” All involved in the fraud were charged to appear before magistrates and it was ruled that in future artisans and merchants had to apply for special permission to sell such products.

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The 1588 sumptuary law exemplified the first Medici Grand Dukes’ propensity to use their subjects’ clothing to affirm their own stature. By conferring greater importance on the lucco and carefully formulating the way it was to be worn, Ferdinando acknowledged and legitimized the significance of public service for Medici courtiers. But whereas once the gown had encapsulated strong political values and plucky republicanism, now it was worn by men who had placed themselves directly in the service of the Grand ducal regime, a steadily growing proportion of the Florentine nobility. While its reincarnation was gradual enough to not entirely alienate Florentine subjects, by the late sixteenth century the lucco perhaps resembled an extension of the Medici household livery, compounded by the fact that individuals risked losing their positions if they did not wear the gown correctly, which was also true for Grand ducal liveries.74 The Medici’s focus on the cloak was a rare instance of “positive” sumptuary legislation, in that it promoted, rather than prohibited, a specific type of clothing. Nevertheless, from the responses to the legislation and the evidence of Florentine families’ clothing accounts, it is clear that sumptuary privileges were most welcome when they accorded with the prevailing aesthetic, an indication of the increasing force of fashion over the course of the sixteenth century and possibly also of Florentine willingness to adapt to court life. Despite the Medici’s varied strategies to emphasize the prestige of

Figure 2.11 Justus Suttermans, The Senators of Florence Swearing Allegiance to Ferdinando II de’ Medici, 1621, oil on canvas © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

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the gown, it could not shake off its archaic, emasculating image. A painting by Justus Suttermans seems emblematic of the garment’s fall from grace [Fig. 2.11]. It represents a group of senators, rather disheveled men past the prime of youth, shrouded in their civic robes, swearing their allegiance to the newly crowned eleven-year-old Grand Duke Ferdinando II, the scene dominated by the more imposing figures of his mother, Maria Maddalena of Austria, and his grandmother, Christine of Lorraine.

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Part two

The Courtier as Consumer

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3T  he noble art of shopping

Account books reveal that Florentine courtiers often had weekly contact with clothing artisans and merchants, evidence that they invested substantial amounts of time and effort, as well as money, in maintaining and replenishing their wardrobes. Rather than being a frivolous pastime, procuring clothing was viewed as a serious activity, one that was demanding and potentially risky, requiring expertise and good judgment. In recent years, studies on domestic consumption patterns in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have explored the extent to which clothes buying was a female activity, both in real terms and in contemporary perception.1 As retailing developed, clothes shops were frequently represented as locations for amorous trysts, where a woman might be enticed by her suitor as much as by a pair of gloves, a scenario conjured up in Abraham Bosse’s famous engraving of the Galerie du Palais in Paris (c. 1638).2 We can trace the beginnings of this kind of “spectacle of consumption” in the sixteenth century with the growing prominence of mercers’ shops, some of which specialized in the sale of trimmings such as ribbons, braids, and laces, and provided a range of services including bespoke and ready-made fashionable accessories often intended for female use. The connection between these shops, with their striking array of merchandize, and female consumers is suggested in Pietro Belmonte’s derogatory remarks on female followers of fashion, “adorned in such way that I cannot tell if I am gazing at the Rialto and the Mercery of Venice or just a simple, silly little woman.”3 Our knowledge of the extent to which clothes buying was divided along gender lines in this period is limited by the surviving sources. Although family account books tend to record the recipients of clothing purchases, they rarely name the individuals who ordered the work, collected the finished goods, or had direct contact with shopkeepers. More ephemeral sources, on the other hand, such as loose receipts, regularly mention the participation of married women, highlighting their role in specific aspects of clothes buying. For example, Florentine receipts

suggest that it was customary for women to buy directly from velettai, or veil makers, who specialized in making and selling goods for female dress, sometimes encompassing a wide range of accessories and textiles, made from linens and other light fabrics. As these items also tended to be made in a domestic context, Florentine noblewomen were well equipped to judge the quality of goods for sale.4 However, within the well-run home, purchasing goods was traditionally considered to be an area of male competency while the female head of a household was responsible for the care and management of these possessions.5 Being able to buy good quality products at the right price was an important aspect of the patriarchal ideal of the “effective administrator.”6 As Torquato Tasso wrote in 1580: “The office of acquiring should be attributed to the man and that of preserving to the woman.”7 This compartmentalization reflected concerns that women might fritter away family wealth, instead of preserving it to pass on to future generations. There were also practical reasons for such a division of labor, given that patrician men could go into shops and move around the city streets with greater freedom than their female counterparts. This was particularly true in Italy, where scholars have shown there was more control over women’s movements in public places than, for example, in England or the Netherlands.8 In 1549, a Welsh visitor to Florence, William Thomas, was struck by the sheltered nature of members of the female population: “Florentines . . . love a modesty in their women’s apparel and . . . they keep their maidens in so strait a manner that no stranger may see them.”9 In contrast, mercers, among the most important purveyors of goods for clothing, offered a cosmopolitan experience that was presumably considered more appropriate to the male shopper. In his encyclopedia of arts and science, the Bolognese physician Leonardo Fioravanti praised: “the skill and foresight of the mercer, in knowing so many new fashions of things.”10 Filippo del Vivo has suggested that the shops of successful mercers were utilized to disseminate political information in Venice, acting as meeting points to exchange news garnered by merchants who traveled across Europe, and to the East and West Indies.11 Similar curiosities were perhaps satisfied in the central shopping areas in Florence, such as the via de’ Servi, where there were about thirty shops, belonging to mercers, veil makers, shoemakers, and perfume sellers.12 Buyers usually supplied artisans with nearly all the materials required to make up their clothing and consequently took a very active role at different stages of the production process, in terms of choosing, overseeing, and sometimes coordinating aspects of the work. By necessity, therefore, many individuals, sometimes including extended family relatives and servants, could be called upon to play a part. Although a group concern, acquiring clothing was divided up in ways that can be clearly related to gender roles and family hierarchies. Men’s desire to control the appearance of their family members is evident from the way they took responsibility for the acquisition of clothing at significant life events, such as weddings. Even though women generally bore the brunt of moralists’ tirades on

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the evils of fashionable dress, the very items singled out for blame were usually condoned and often commissioned by male relatives. Very expensive outer garments were purchased by male members of the family, drawing on the support of a larger network of friends and relatives for advice and sometimes also for financial assistance. This was a centuries-old tradition. As Carole Collier Frick has shown, in 1381 no fewer than eight relatives were involved in selecting and buying the wedding dress of the Florentine Caterina del Bene.13 In fifteenth-century Florence, men were heavily involved in the acquisition of items for marriage trousseaux and counter-trousseaux. The counter-trousseau consisted of clothing purchased by the groom, often including the wedding dress itself, and was highly significant not least because it was a means of acknowledging and symbolically balancing the substantial financial benefits the bride brought to the marriage in the form of her dowry.14 The male members of the family who had negotiated the marriage were therefore keen to seize the opportunity to visually and publicly underline the union between the two families involved. Samuel Cohn has pointed out that such gift exchanges did not in fact favor the bride, describing them as “a man’s game,” as they involved male relatives, promoted the interests of the groom’s family, and were often financed ultimately by the bride’s dowry.15 In the late sixteenth century, the purchasing and giving of wedding finery, trousseau garments, and linens was still a collective male enterprise. In Bologna, for example, male members of the Gozzadini family took the initiative in commissioning clothing items for the trousseaux of their sisters, daughters, and future wives.16 Florentine Cosimo di Donato Tornabuoni typically provided his wife’s wedding outfit, described in his account book in 1578 as a white grosgrain undergown, gown, and doublet “for the morning that she went out.”17 A contemporary view that this was a far from disinterested gift can be found in the Spanish tale The Miser Chastised by Donna Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, published in a collection of novellas in 1637, in which a miserly man is unusually generous in one particular aspect of the wedding preparations. Zayas explains that Don Marcos, on this occasion so far overcame his parsimony, as to present his wife with a rich wedding dress of great cost and fashion; calculating very wisely that the expense was but trifling in comparison with what he had to receive.18 This was just one occasion when men were able to utilize the clothing of their female relatives to their own advantage. Some made testamentary provisions to ensure that this control was maintained after their death. In 1581 the Milanese Giovanni Pietro Visconti left instructions that his wife Livia Tollentina should remake some of her gowns into ecclesiastical hangings.19 Similarly, Renata Ago has noted the tendency of men to dispose of their wives’ clothing in seventeenth Rome, with the example of Giacomo Anguillara who bequeathed his wife’s purple brocade and lace gown to one of his heirs.20

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3.1  Supporting local textiles Two specific aspects of clothes buying are examined in this chapter, namely the acquisition of textiles and tailored clothing, to show how adept many Florentine noblemen were at negotiating and navigating the world of merchants, retailers, and artisans, and how these quotidian activities can reveal key aspects of male status and identity. Despite changes in fashion from the early sixteenth century onward, which placed increasing emphasis on the cut of clothing and added embellishments including haberdashery, the fabric a garment was made from was still the most expensive component of dress. When large-scale designs were involved, like the black damask in this portrait of an unknown man, the pattern was not always matched up in order to conserve as much fabric as possible [Fig. 3.1]. The saying “measure twice cut once” was particularly pertinent as expensive textiles placed burdens upon both clothes buyers and artisans. A tailor had to be absolutely sure of his calculations before taking his shears to a fabric that he often would have been unable to afford himself.

Figure 3.1 Florentine School, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1550, oil on panel (Inv. 104). Dea/Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Getty Images).

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As well as the issue of cost, the origins of the fabrics you wore had strong political and social implications. A recurrent criticism of male fashions at this time focused on their provenance. Across Europe men were increasingly chastised for wearing foreign-style clothing. Giuliano il Magnifico in the Courtier lamented, for example, that “some dress after the French style, others like the Spaniards, and others again like the Germans, and there are also those who dress in the manner of the Turks.”21 This problem was often framed in highly dramatic terms. Encased in the clothing of different nations, the male body was symbolically hung, drawn, and quartered.22 In other versions, the divided body was fought over by competing armies, and the wearer was seen to be subjugated to a more powerful enemy reflecting, as Gerry Milligan points out, unease about Spanish and French domination of Italy.23 In her work on the architectural body in fifteenth-century Florence, Liane Lefaivre argues that in many cultures “the body serves to project an image of the unified organic whole or congruity on the world.”24 In contrast with this ideal, across sixteenthcentury Europe the clothed body reflected irreparable divisions, although there were many authors, including the English William Harrison, who chose to put a more humorous spin on this trope: Such is our mutability that today there is none to the Spanish guise, tomorrow the French toys are most fine and delectable, ere long no such apparel as that which is after the High Almain [German] fashion, by and by the Turkish manner is generally best liked of, otherwise the Morisco gowns, the Barbarian sleeves, the mandilion worn to Collyweston-ward, and the short French breeches make such a comely vesture that, except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England.25 Such criticisms referred mainly to styles of clothing but the fabrics they were made from were also implicated. The brightly colored or patterned silks worn by wealthy English citizens in the sixteenth century were nearly always foreign products, imported from Italy, Spain, and France, and were therefore construed as treacherous in many literary forms of the time.26 Despite this, Henry VIII purchased many foreign goods, including silks from Italy, linens from the Low Countries, and furs from merchants trading in the Steelyard.27 Fabrics woven on the continent were not just available in London. It was possible, for example, to buy textiles imported from Milan, Genoa, and Ulm from a mercer in Ripon, Yorkshire, in the late sixteenth century.28 As Fynes Moryson remarked in his Itinerary of 1617: “If I should begin to set downe the variety of fashions and forraign stuffes brought into England in these times, I might seeme to number the stares of Heaven and sands of the sea.”29 In contrast, English wool was represented as a useful, sober, and manly textile, a symbol of the nation’s backbone and moral fiber. Promoting local goods therefore became an act of statecraft. Ronald Berger points out that the “most expensive English goods

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could have almost nationwide market areas,” just as luxury imported fabrics circulated across the country. The domestic textile market in Italy differed markedly, as the existence of several flourishing, often quite closely located, production centers ensured strong regional variety and competition.30 Silk weaving was first established in Sicily and a few northern Italian centers in the eleventh century and by the Renaissance period production thrived across numerous cities, including Venice, Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Lucca, Naples, and Milan.31 Different centers specialized in particular types of wool and silk fabrics, leather and linen goods, accessories and haberdashery. If they wished, wealthy Florentines could buy and wear these items with relative ease. Tracing the provenance of the textiles they purchased we can gain a sense of the strength of their allegiance to local goods and consider whether their choices were influenced by negative attitudes toward foreign products or by other factors. Correspondence relating to clothing purchases provides substantial evidence that the desire to fit in was a key consideration, which encompassed the kind of textiles worn. Adherence to local customs was often a priority, even if that meant altering one’s dress when traveling abroad. When the postmaster general of Bologna requested his annual gratuity from the Medici court in 1543, Cosimo I’s Major-domo Pier Francesco Riccio conferred with other members of the ducal household on what should be sent, suggesting “a lot of damask or jujube-coloured satin to make a dress for his daughter-in-law.” Cosimo himself was drawn in to the debate, saying that satin would be best because “women in Bologna rarely wear damask,” unlike the Florentines.32 In 1575, when the daughter of the scholar and dramatist, Sperone Speroni, moved from Padua to Rome, he suggested she change her clothing because the Romans, unlike the Paduans, were not in the habit of wearing silk, “except for sarcenet in the summer.”33 Clothing helped to integrate or camouflage the wearer, as Federigo Gonzaga made clear in a letter written from France to his mother Isabella d’Este in 1516 asking her to have new shirts made up in the local style and sent out to him so that he could dress like everyone else.34 In diplomatic circles, dressing in order to blend in with new surroundings was an important element of etiquette and deference, illustrated by the experiences of Matteo Botti, discussed in Chapter 4. On a diplomatic assignment to Paris in 1610, Botti explained in a letter to the Medici that “when one has to commission a livery, caparisons, or wedding garments with a lot of gold, it is necessary to plan well in advance and it is not a good idea to stray from the customs of the country you are in, or at least as little as possible. Even the Spanish ambassador does this.”35 Here Botti’s view differs from that of Gaspare Bragaccia, author of L’Ambasciatore (Padua, 1626), who suggests Spanish and French diplomats were so powerful they were absolved from this gesture.36 Florentine textiles did not just provide noblemen with a sense of belonging; they could also further their financial interests and duties of patronage. Over the period from 1550 to 1620, Florence’s prosperity derived from three main commercial

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activities: the wool and silk industries, and banking.37 Most of the largest textile companies continued to be run, or at least largely funded, by members of the Florentine nobility. Florentines were naturally keen to invest in their own products and their account books demonstrate their fidelity to local ventures during this period. According to Jordan Goodman, well into the seventeenth century Florentines preferred to “place their funds in silk and banking in Florence, rather than abroad.”38 The Grand Dukes also publicly promoted local textile production at opportune moments. When Christine of Lorraine reached the bustling port of Genoa, before her marriage to Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1589, it was noted that she went shopping for silks on the via dei Toscani, a street named after the silk merchants originating from Florence and Lucca.39 During the wedding preparations, the Medici ensured that their influential subjects benefited from their patronage. James Saslow points out that the names of many of the most prominent members of the Florentine nobility feature in the list of companies supplying large quantities of textiles used for the celebrations.40 As a consequence, Medici wardrobe records constitute a veritable “who’s who of patrician families.”41 Most of the textiles purchased for the theatrical costumes and clothing for the Grand ducal family and its retinue, a vast total of 7134 meters, were made in Florence.42 Florentine household accounts reflect a variety of considerations when it came to textile buying, combining the purely financial with the personal. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Riccardi had invested about 30,000 scudi in silk and wool businesses.43 They bought many clothing fabrics from a silk company based in Pisa trading under their name, and from other companies in which they had invested substantial sums of money, allowing them to obtain textiles at reduced prices. One of Francesco Riccardi’s account books records him buying silk fabric “at a discount of my choice.”44 Not surprisingly, this was standard practice: Niccolò di Luigi Capponi and Giovanbattista Capponi both purchased from Capponi silk merchants. Overall, however the Riccardi purchased dress silks from a total of twenty-five different merchants, including companies owned by the Medici, Strozzi, Panciatichi, Salviati, Bonsi, da Filicaia, Rinuccini, and Corsini. Similar patterns emerge from Medici wardrobe accounts. During Eleonora di Toledo’s lifetime, the family used more than forty silk merchants.45 This strategy meant noblemen relied on the services of a number of favored, long-term suppliers but continued to shop around for unusual or hard-to-find items. In the late seventeenth century, the Gondi family’s accounts show a similar pattern, although with rather smaller numbers of suppliers. This could be seen as a reflection of the very extensive range of textiles goods available in Florence and the fact that many merchants specialized in specific types of silk or wool. Furthermore, it was a shrewd strategy to distribute patronage widely, in the hope of future reciprocation.46 As well as buying from local merchants, the Riccardi also purchased local goods for which Florence was renowned, especially rash and silk sarcenet. Portraits showing subjects in their finest clothes can give a false sense of the predominance

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of silk in male wardrobes. In contrast, the Riccardi family’s account books show the textiles purchased most frequently for their own clothing were in fact two types of wool: perpignan and rash. These alone accounted for approximately 20 percent of their total expenditure on textiles and haberdashery for clothing purposes, over the period 1575–1600.47 Although both were in origin foreign fabrics—rash had come from Raskia in Serbia and perpignan wool from the French town of the same name—by the fifteenth century they were produced in Florence.48 Rash suited the growing demand for lighter fabrics, and it cost the Riccardi on average 10 lire per braccio, more than they paid for some silks, including damask, satin, and taffeta. Silks purchased by the Riccardi for their clothing also reflected changes in local production, which had shifted focus from high-end polychrome brocaded velvets and damasks to lighter fabrics such as taffeta and tabby silks. These were now considered acceptable wear for even the grandest occasions, such as the Medici wedding festivities described in Chapter 1. Even plain velvets rarely featured in the brothers’ accounts: out of the almost three hundred lengths of fabric purchased by the family during the last decade of the sixteenth century, only six were velvets.49 Like many wealthy Florentines, they preferred light, plain silks, or ones with smaller motifs, which could be embellished with slashing or embroidery. However, local goods did not satisfy all the needs of Florentine courtiers, who also sought out specialized items, unusual types of haberdashery or fabric that were not produced in the city, often drawing on their network of friends and relatives to do so. Clare Walsh has described these kinds of transactions as “proxy buying,” in her study of shopping in early modern England, which underlines their social significance.50 They show men looking for the same characteristics as they might when purchasing silverware or furniture, such as quality and durability, and suggest they had a good knowledge of what the market had to offer. For example, when Cosimo Tornabuoni commissioned a particularly fine dress for his wife, decorated by the sought-after court embroiderer Antonio di Ubertino Verdi, brother of the artist known as Il Bachiacca, he chose a green tabby silk from Venice, purchased on his behalf by a Florentine nobleman, Marquis Orazio del Monte, who was visiting the city.51 Letters written between the Florentine nobleman Filippo Magalotti and the Genoese Stefano Spinola demonstrate a shared desire to obtain the best products available. In 1595 Magalotti sent Spinola a straw hat, a typically Florentine product, which turned out to be too tight and had to be returned to the maker to be widened. Spinola wanted some Florentine rash, but was dissatisfied with the first piece sent by Magalotti. He wrote: That sample of rash that your Lord had sent to me, although it is good and beautiful it is not much like the one I want. And so I am including a sample so that you can show it and see if you can get some more made and if so order up to 50 braccia, as in addition to my gown I would like a dress for my wife, who is expecting.52

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Spinola was confident that Magalotti could find a weaver to copy the sample exactly and have it sent to Genoa in time for it to be usefully made into a garment for his pregnant wife. His letter reveals the planning involved in clothes buying and the extent that men assumed their high expectations could be met by local artisans. In return, Spinola assisted his friend by ordering a quantity of purl made by Genoese nuns, replicating a sample sent by Magalotti. Not only did noblemen go to great lengths in order to hunt down the best velvets or particular types of haberdashery, their correspondence hints that this could be a source of enjoyment. Alongside other social pursuits, such as fencing and dancing, the cultivated courtier or gentleman also had to be familiar with the language of clothing, and possess a degree of connoisseurship when it came to the finer points of dress. This is reflected in the tone of a letter from written by the knight Orazio Urbano from Venice in 1572 to the Grand Duchess Joanna of Austria: The diligence used in dyeing and in all other aspects is very great and the silk itself is beautiful and of an excellent color. However, all those who know about this art agree that Venetian silks are not of the same finesse and perfection as the Neapolitan ones.53 Urbano’s description conveys the esteem and cultural capital associated with textiles. Diligence, beauty, art, finesse, perfection were certainly all qualities worth pursuing despite the practical obstacles. Imported goods were also available to purchase directly from shops in Florence, bypassing the possible complications of proxy buying. Nevertheless, household account books from the second half of the sixteenth century very rarely refer to textiles that were actually produced abroad. Of these, cheap mixed wool and silk draperies from Flanders were the most common (such as burattino, saietta, and ferrandina, which generally cost about 2 or 3 lire per braccio). Goods from other parts of Italy, such as Naples, Venice, Milan, and occasionally Bologna, were more prevalent. Given that the provenance of a textile was not always known or recorded, it is impossible to calculate what proportion of any individual’s wardrobe these “foreign” goods represented, but it is clear they were not common. We can trace small quantities of medium-cost silks, such as taffeta, from Venice and from Naples various types of silk passementerie and what is generically described in accounts as seta and setino, the latter referring to either a lower-quality pure silk or a mixed-fiber silk, and very occasionally linen from Pozzuoli. Milanese goods were more varied, including the accessories the city was famous for, such as hats and belts, but also types of haberdashery, including embroidered guards, and several kinds of mixed-fiber silks, called burattino, saietta, and ferrandina. Even for contemporary consumers and retailers, it was not always obvious where a fabric came from, what it was made of, or even what it should be called. Mixed-fiber silks evolved rapidly enough for their old names to be left lagging

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behind. Ferrandina, for example, originally a fabric woven entirely of low-quality silk, tended to be a combination of a silk warp and a wool or cotton weft by the second half of the sixteenth century. A 1589 petition from two veil makers based in Florence, seeking permission to weave narrow-width, striped cloths from a mix of silk, flax, and metal threads to be used to make doublets, focused partly on the “identity” of the textile.54 Part of the request hinged upon whether the proposed fabric would be classified as a silk or not and what the implications of this would be. Luca Molà’s study of the silk industry in Venice has shown that weavers often disregarded regulations concerning the markings of cloths and therefore it was not always possible to identify different types of fabrics accurately.55 Equally, when accused of trading in contraband fabrics Venetian tailors and merchants sometimes used the defence that they did not, themselves, know where goods had been made.56 With the increasing range of mixed cloths, ambiguities abounded, presumably also shielding the wearers of foreign fabrics from possible criticism. The kinds of imported fabrics bought by Florentine noblemen tended to be plain, lightweight and, relatively speaking, cheap, characteristics that hint at an increasing desire for fashionability, a key factor that tested local loyalties and prompted consumers to look for goods further afield. The prominence of Florentine products in courtiers’ wardrobes therefore depended heavily on the ability of the city’s textile manufacture to stay abreast of fashionable tastes. Certainly, natural inclinations to buy local were put to the test when Florentine wool production began to flounder. In 1570 the Wool Guild noted that the industry was performing poorly and that “woollen cloths were no longer made of the same quality and quantity as they used to be.”57 Various measures were taken to protect locally made fabrics, including a ban on the importation of quality woolens, such as rashes and perpignans, into Florence from other parts of the Grand Duchy.58 These initiatives were ultimately unsuccessful and Richard Goldthwaite has outlined the effective collapse of the Florentine cloth industry in the early seventeenth century, partly due to the “new draperies” from Holland and England “flooding all the Mediterranean markets.”59 The increasingly competitive international textile trade stimulated demand for fashionable goods, no longer satisfied by local production. Indeed, consumer attitudes toward textiles were undergoing a sea change that had repercussions for many years to come. This shift was noted by textile merchants and agents in Italy and abroad. In the 1540s, for example, an Antwerp-based firm selling says in Italy reported that “it is the colours that sell the says, not their quality.”60 In 1723 the Venetian Board of Trade submitted a report that contrasted the new consumer attitudes with those of the sixteenth century, when the only consideration was how cloth would wear: a suit was purchased for the whole life time of a man, more or less, therefore people thought in terms of perfection and not at all about cost. [Now] Everyone buys a new suit of clothes twice a year and so they look for bizarre and lively colours and for novelty: they

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no longer think about the strength of the material, since this does not matter, and they all go for outward appearances and attractive prices.61 Although the report focused on middling-status consumers, it echoes the quest for perfection revealed in sixteenth-century letters and has wider relevance in highlighting classic tensions between intrinsic value and fashion value, frequently identified in histories of consumption and consumer goods. From the early seventeenth century onward we see increasing acquisitions of textiles from abroad at the most elite levels of Florentine society. Roberta Orsi Landini has shown that fabrics for Cosimo I’s wardrobe were rarely made outside Florence but that the situation was radically different when it came to Cosimo II’s reign from 1609 to 1621.62 Various pairs of his breeches, for example, were made from silks from Naples, England, Piacenza, Milan, and wool from Flanders and Milan.63 Orsi Landini and Stefania Ricci note that provenance begins to be recorded regularly in the Medici Wardrobe at this time, including fine woolens from Spain, England, Flanders, and Milan.64 The example of the Salviati family, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, also shows an increase in imported goods, totaling about thirty to thirty-five percent of the textiles they purchased, while the rest were Florentine. In addition the Salviati bought foreign accessories, mainly made in France, such as wigs, fans, fur muffs, and crests.65 Boutier paints a similar picture of the textile consumption of the Gondi family, during the same time period. Niccolò Gondi combined local goods with imported textiles, while the proportion of northern European textiles among his purchases increased, including cloth from Bavaria and Brittany and serge from Scotland. Although it is possible that some of the goods listed were actually Florentine-made copies, such patterns are certainly in line with what we would expect from broader market changes. The increasing circulation of these foreign products was more damaging in economic terms than the much-condemned Spanish cloaks and French breeches in the previous century.

3.2 Tailors and their apes In the same way that noblemen purchased textiles from many different sources, they also depended on the services of a sizable group of artisans. The records of Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, dating from 1569 to 1579, show transactions with around seventy-five different artisans and merchants.66 Some of these only appear once or twice in his accounts, while others, such as his preferred shoemakers, worked regularly for him for years. The different craftspeople named in Niccolò’s accounts include tailors, hose makers, beret makers, knitters, veil makers, and perfumers. Typically, his mother also carried out sewing work for him, as the production of linen underwear was a task often entrusted to female relatives or nuns from the

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city’s convents. Over the decade covered by his account books, Niccolò used five different tailors, another standard practice. Rather than exclusively patronizing one tailor, the noblemen discussed here generally ordered clothing from several different ones, over long periods of time. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the more specialized occupations of breeches makers and doublet makers had been swallowed up by the tailoring profession. This form of streamlining in the clothing trade meant that tailors were able to offer the whole range of garments, thus playing a major role in shaping men’s appearances. Fueled partly by anxiety about the amount of power they wielded, cultural stereotypes of tailors were often negative. Across Europe, the image of the affluent man as a monkey or puppet controlled by his tailor became increasingly diffused in the sixteenth century. Ulinka Rublack cites a pamphlet written by German theologian Johann Eberlin von Günzburg in 1520 entitled I Wonder why there is no Money in the Land, which states that “clothing artisans make people into monkeys.”67 The idea that you were created, literally fashioned, by your tailor can be found in Ben Jonson’s On English Monsieur, in which the Monsieur “must prove/The new tailor’s motion, monthly made.”68 Later in the seventeenth century, Randall Holmes commented “for indeed we are all his [the tailor’s] Apes” in his A Storehouse of Armoury and Blazon (1688).69 The Bolognese Leonardo Fioravanti’s discussion of the profession in his Dello Specchio di Scienza Universale (1572) appears to be a deliberate riposte to claims that the tailor emasculated his clients and seeks to rebalance their relationship, putting the customer firmly in control: “The person who is ordering the clothes, he tells the tailor what style they are to be in, in other words if they are to be long, short, wide or tight, plain or embellished.”70 In reality, it was a more subtle relationship involving a degree of mutual dependency and courtiers had to be able to trust the men who made their clothing, both in terms of their skills and discretion. Once the expensive fabrics purchased by customers were handed over to the tailor, waste or damage became a major concern. Regulations introduced by the different cloth guilds tackle the issue of “disappearing” or wasted textiles. Although often intended primarily to safeguard the interests of their members, the impact for consumers is evident. To reduce such incidents, the silk guild stipulated that tailors had to pay for any goods they damaged.71 The trial of a Milanese tailor, Gian Giacomo Prata, reveals the lengths artisans might go to in order to conceal an error from a wealthy client. Having mistakenly cut through an extra layer of fabric, Prata attempted to buy an identical piece of Venetian tabby silk to replace it. Unsuccessful in this, he then pieced together the remaining fabric as best he could but the customer still noticed the sleeves of the finished garment were too small.72 In 1578, the Florentine guild of linen drapers dealt with incidents of this nature, stating that if a tailor was found guilty of such an offense he was to repair the damage done to the relevant party and pay a fine of up to 50 lire.73 The guild also sought to maintain a distinction between the work of tailors and the business of buying and selling fabrics and

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haberdashery. It claimed that tailors did not always use the full amount of textile to make up a garment so that they could sell on the remnants afterward. To prevent this practice, tailors were forbidden to sell goods without specific permission from the guild.74 Sometimes tailors came to work at a family’s home, requiring a further level of trust. An account book kept by Bartolommeo Botti and Caterina de’ Medici records that in 1589 their tailor Giovanbattista di Bastiano Pivelli was paid for “work done in the house, ordered by Signore Matteo.”75 In 1603, one of the Magalotti’s tailors, Domenico Fontani, was paid for “various expenses and making clothing in Florence and at the villa,” about 14  km outside Florence at Pieve di Santa Maria all’Antella.76 While we might assume that in such cases courtiers would require their tailors to be reliable, sometimes the tailor was in fact the one at risk: a memoir of Florentine life by the tailor Bastiano Arditi reports that a tailor was the victim of theft while working for the Guicciardini in their palazzo in 1574.77 Not all tailors had access to their customers’ homes but most had an intimate knowledge of their bodies and important life changes. The idea that a tailor had to know his clients even better than they knew themselves is hinted at in Le Tailleur Sincère (Paris, 1671). Tailor Le Sieur Boullay recommended, it is very necessary to observe a man well before measuring him, so as to note his ordinary posture, and that without warning him, for he may stoop naturally or hold himself erect, or else lean on the one side or the other; if he expects that you are going to take his measure, he will think he is doing right to hold himself more erect than usual and you will fail with your measure.78 Clothing artisans would have been privy to their customers’ physical weaknesses, as evidenced by Cosimo I’s struggles with his digestion and circulation. Roberta Orsi Landini notes Cosimo’s need for special clothing for his ailments, such as stockings for his gout as well as several martingale breeches worn during bouts of diarrhea. The Medici Wardrobe sent instructions to “quickly, quickly” have some breeches of scarlet cloth “with a martingale” made up so that Cosimo could take advantage of their “comfort.”79 Martingale breeches were a new and apparently popular invention and Cosimo’s burial outfit provides an example of them, seen here displayed at the Palazzo Pitti [Fig. 3.2]. The silk breeches have disintegrated badly, including the padded front of the codpiece. Nevertheless, it is still possible to make out the integral flap at the top, which laced to the front of the breeches, and the hanging strip of fabric that would have fastened behind.80 This innovation made it possible to undo and take down the codpiece without entirely removing the breeches. Before hooks and eyes replaced eyelets, points, and laces in around 1620–30, undoing breeches was a laborious affair.81 The shortcomings of breeches are outlined in a poem “Against Breeches” (Contro alle calze) by Messer Bino, written in a rather earthier vein than Galileo’s “Against the Wearing of the Toga.” The author calls breeches “dishonest and not fit

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Figure 3.2  Cosimo I de’ Medici’s doublet and martingale breeches. Displayed in the Galleria del Costume, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Getty Images).

for purpose,” suggesting that if their main purpose is to “cover those things,” then underpants (mutande) would be sufficient, and complaining that “they always do us some detriment or bring us shame.”82 Francesco Baldelli’s poem, “In Praise of Martingale Breeches” (In lode della martingala) is far more positive, stating that the “blessed martingale” was more useful to a man than his hat, beret, gloves, and shoes. Baldelli enumerates the garment’s merits, including the fact that “you can let them down by undoing a single string, oh what comfort!,” you can open your thighs to ride a wide horse without exposing yourself, and finally “you are safe with a martingale—even if you get the runs you won’t soil your breeches.”83 Not surprisingly, martingale breeches appealed to the scatological humor of Rabelais, appearing as the title of one of the books in the imaginary library of St. Victor in Paris: Martingale Breeches with Back-flaps for Turd-droppers.84 However, the impracticality and discomfort of male clothing was also a matter for serious consideration. From the same period of Cosimo’s illness in 1543 we learn that one pair of breeches was unsuitable because it was not “soft and fit for humans” but that a nightshirt (camiciola) “satisfied him divinely” and that he “was enjoying it.”85 A tailor who could produce good results was a prized asset. While other craftspeople and suppliers might change with some frequency, if a skilled tailor could be found, who would retain a record of customers’ measurements and build up an understanding of their needs, it was vital to retain his services. Florentine courtiers were often tardy in paying their clothing bills and while this

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had its disadvantages it served to lock both parties into a potentially beneficial relationship, ensuring that the customer would return while also retaining the artisan’s interest.86 A tailor did not offer practicality alone; he was capable of providing something possibly even more sought after: the most up-to-date fashions. Tailors had far greater input in the final appearance of a garment than Leonardo Fioravanti claimed. Certainly, there were collaborative aspects to the process, but it is clear tailors had the potential to propose innovative and unique designs, which were beyond the expertise of courtiers. Although only one tailor’s workshop book survives, owned by the Milanese tailor Gian Giacomo del Conte, it was presumably not unique. The sketches and designs it contains for male and female garments indicate that tailors might have offered and discussed different options with their customers, who could look at, consider, and admire new proposals.87 The ability of some members of the craft to supply new and desirable clothing styles is evident from a petition brought by Venetian tailors complaining about competition from foreign artisans and their “diabolical inventions.”88 We know that the Medici themselves were prepared to pay substantial sums of money to their tailors. Orsi Landini notes that Cosimo I’s tailors received 12 scudi a month, placing them roughly on a level with artist Agnolo Bronzino who was paid 150 scudi a year.89 Similarly, the tailors hired to work for the 1589 Medici wedding received the same rate as Bernardo Buontalenti, one of the most sought-after Florentine architects and designers.90 In both cases, tailors were viewed on a par in financial terms with artists who were admired for their design skills. Interestingly, tailors did not work exclusively for the Medici. Both Cosimo di Donato Tornabuoni and Aldobrandino Orsini used the same tailor as Ferdinando de’ Medici, one Andrea del Marinaro, presumably a connection that brought with it some cachet. Marinaro was capable of producing the finest garments: Aldrobrandino purchased an elaborate and sophisticated outfit from him consisting of a black slashed satin doublet, figured velvet breeches, an uncut velvet jerkin and a slashed grosgrain cloak lined with figured velvet in 1581, for which the tailoring alone cost a substantial 65 lire.91 There is some evidence that tailors benefited from the patronage of their customers in ways that were not only expressed in monetary terms, indicating both that they were highly prized and that courtiers were keen to please artisans who could produce the desired fashions. Carole Collier Frick discusses a letter from February 1472 addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, written by his tailor inquiring about the possibility of work for a relative. The familiar tone adopted by the tailor and the assumption that such a request would be well received leads her to conclude that their association had moved from the “economic realm into the social.”92 In the sixteenth century, we can find more examples of what Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, and Ilja van Damme have described as “long-standing personal relationships, albeit often of an informal kind” between retailers, makers, and their clients.93 In 1615,

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Francesco Riccardi’s second wife gave 70 lire to her son’s tailor for his daughter’s dowry.94 The Magalotti’s papers contain a tenancy contract for one of their favorite tailors, Francesco di Cesare Mazzanti, to rent a house and orchard behind Santissima Annunziata for three years for thirty-six florins a year.95 Although none of the Magalotti brothers are mentioned in the contract, it seems they knew the landlord and probably arranged the agreement or acted as referees for the tailor. The Orsini had various links with one of their tailors in Rome, the wealthy Giovanbattista Pacetti, which appears to have extended beyond commissions for garments as Pacetti appears on a list of Alessandro Orsini’s creditors from 1609 owed the huge amount of 2210 scudi.96 In 1604 Pacetti was the tailor who supplied all the mourning clothes for Alessandro’s funeral in Rome, including an outfit so that he himself could take part in the funerary procession, an event discussed in further detail in the following chapter. Despite concerns that the money plowed into clothing was wasted, garments retained substantial value. Even for wealthy noblemen, clothes were precious and were often altered, mended, and recycled to the point of consumption. The numerous considerations involved in selecting fabrics and ordering garments show us that Florentine men did not place their commissions lightly. The stages of planning and acquisition were crucial, phases when a nobleman could follow the advice given in the Courtier that he “ought to consider what appearance he wishes to have and what manner of man he wishes to be taken for, and dress accordingly.”97 The second half of Federico Fregoso’s recommendation, “that his attire aid him to be so regarded even by those who do not hear him speak or see him do anything whatever,” was far harder to fulfill. Once a man put on his new clothes, how they were received was not necessarily within his control.

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4 Ruinous appearances

Both outsiders and members of the Grand ducal court noticed a shift among the Florentine elite away from a mercantile way of life focused on generating money, to a courtly one that placed greater emphasis on spending it, partly on outward trappings such as clothing and carriages. The Florentine Paolo Velluti’s description of his relative, Antonio di Piero d’Andrea Velluti, sums up a common view that these different occupations were fundamentally irreconcilable. While discussing Antonio’s skills at horse riding, Paolo Velluti complained that Antonio was “more dedicated to being a courtier than a merchant, and so he frittered away most of his worldly goods.”1 Bartolomeo Cenami, an ambassador from Lucca, also described how the Florentine nobility had “abandoned its old parsimony in private life, and given itself over to courtly habits.” According to Cenami, these families scorned commerce. Instead they took to carrying swords and “lived with such splendour at home and abroad that they rivaled some titled lords from other parts of Italy.”2 Many observers felt that this love of fine clothing was an escalating problem. In 1573, Florentine chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci wrote of “such intolerable expenses in clothing, houses and games and in all sorts of things, that it seems impossible for anyone to sustain.”3 As we have seen from Giulio Cesare Croce’s satirical poem, splendid clothing could provoke ridicule. The fashionably dressed man who needed to be taken down a peg or two was a well-established trope, a famous example of which can be found in Vespasiano da Bisticci’s account of the hapless Sienese ambassador, whose showy garments attracted the disapproval of the discreetly black-clad King Alfonso of Naples. To put the ambassador in his place, courtiers deliberately jostled him until the pile on his expensive velvet cloak was ruined.4 And yet, there was a direct correlation between physical possessions and honor. Agostino Lapini’s diary describes Joanna of Austria’s 1573 pilgrimage to the shrine at Loreto, where she offered the Madonna a “beautiful gift” comprising “six silver candlesticks of a very significant height and weight, it was therefore a gift that was appropriate to the person making it.”5 Equally, the decorum of dress necessitated clothing

that was consonant with the wearer’s status, in order to maintain honor, and by extension, enhance a good reputation. Numerous sartorial requirements had to be fulfilled: not just the kinds of textiles and embellishments worn, but also whether the clothing was appropriate to the context, in terms of types of outfits, liveries for servants, and so on. The enmeshed relationship between dress and honor, appearances and behavior, are highlighted in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia, written in the 1430s, in which the narrator Gianozzo advises his son to pay special attention to his clothing: “Your clothes honour you, is it not true? You must honour, therefore, honour your clothes.”6 Similar arguments were proposed by sixteenth-century authors, such as Della Casa, who reasoned that although everyday life presented relatively few opportunities to express more noble virtues such as bravery and justice, through pleasant habits and appearances it was possible to demonstrate an honorable nature.7 Gauging the correct degree of display was not a simple matter, particularly at the courts of Cosimo and his sons, where modesty was frequently lauded as a moral virtue. The Paduan Lucio Paolo Rosello’s, Il ritratto del vero governo del prencipe dall’esempio vivo del gran Cosimo de’ Medici (1552), dedicated to a ten-year-old Francesco de’ Medici, reveals some of the contractions bound up in princely display. He suggested that Cosimo chose to “dress down” and as a consequence Florentine noblemen had to curb their levels of ostentatious display. However, the clothing of the prince still had to embody his virtue and authority: Given that he has no need of any external pomp in order to demonstrate the splendour of his dignity, while it is fitting for the Prince’s clothing and other external appearances to be more magnificent and distinguished than the clothing of the people, he should, however, avoid too much delicacy. Aristotle says that the prince’s splendour is derived from foods, clothing, many servants and horses, and an abundance of all things necessary for human life, but that they should not exceed measure, which is decided by the common agreement of the wisest. But whoever lacks these things is reputed to be uncivil and miserly.8 The Aristotelian concept of measure was not easily translatable into real life, as without any hard and fast guidelines it required a degree of personal interpretation. Bearing in mind Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder’s supposed remark that two lengths of pink cloth made a gentleman, we have seen there was much debate about what actually constituted a gentleman, let alone how exactly he should dress a century later. Sharon Strocchia points out that the new standards of civility impacted on notions of honor, resulting in even less clarity in the sixteenth century. She argues: “to accept new standards of honour that prized restraint and greater control of emotions placed Italian gentlemen in an ambivalent moral and social position as to whether they had fully discharged their debt of honour as men.”9 Maria Hayward has analyzed similar concerns about distinguishing between magnificence and

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luxury in the context of Henry VIII’s wardrobe. Here, too, it was hard to define the exact degree of ostentation required of the monarch without it turning into excess, although it remained vital that the sartorial display of courtiers never rivaled that of the king.10 It has been argued that how a “society conceived of the relationship between the personal and the public, and between the projection and perception of one’s character” is key to our understanding of honor and reputation.11 Certainly, the affirmation of honor necessitated an audience. The dress of Florentine courtiers was intensely scrutinized and perceptions of appearances were at the forefront of processes of honor and shaming. The mismatch between intention and reception could result in the loss of honor. Writing about a very different, twenty-first century context, journalist Ben Jackson sums this up very succinctly: “shaming occurs when there is a conflict between a story we want to tell about ourselves and a story that it is being told about us.”12 These tensions are usually most prominent in literary narratives and such an incident arises in the Courtier when three gentlemen react to a noblewoman’s treatment of a beggar asking her for alms. The woman distractedly ignores the beggar, simultaneously prompting “severe censure, modest praise, and biting sarcasm,” from the three male observers.13 In his analysis of this passage, Ian Frederick Moulton points out both the “overwhelming importance of interpretation” and, even more crucially, that Castiglione does not single out any one of these opinions as being “correct.”14 This instability is characteristic of other aspects of social interaction at court, epitomized, for example, by attitudes toward effeminate clothing discussed in Chapter 6. Honor could therefore only be tested and proved with the presence and consensus of others. As David Gentilcore has suggested, it was complicated by the fact that honor was not a static quality but subject to a process of change. Honor, and reputations, could be acquired, maintained, lost and possibly regained.15 Renata Ago touches on this in her discussion of the financial strain of maintaining family honor by wearing appropriate clothing. She refers to the strategies devised to deal with this potential problem, such as differentiating between clothing for private and public occasions, recycling, and hiring clothing.16 In a similar vein, this chapter will consider the issue of honor through the processes of acquiring and disposing of clothing. It will suggest that although it was important to act honorably on all occasions, there were key moments when it was necessary to affirm it more publicly. The relationship between the consumption of clothing and the manifestation of familial standing and prestige was more fluid than we might think and was perceived and exploited in a variety of ways. In the previous chapter we saw that clothes shopping depended on a network of social and business relationships and allowed wealthy Florentine men to affirm their authority as husbands, merchants, patrons, and connoisseurs. Using court correspondence, it is possible to trace another side to these activities, one that reveals that expenditure was often approached with trepidation and that ostentation

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could be curtailed by anxiety. It suggests an ongoing struggle bound up in the daily practice of dressing and the continual renewal, or maintenance, of honor. Several significant documents survive to illuminate the practical processes and decisions involved in maintaining reputation taken by two courtiers, Baron Alessandro Orsini of Pitigliano and the Marquis Matteo Botti. Both men dramatically failed to reconcile the demands of honor with the financial resources at their disposal, demonstrating that keeping up appearances could become a heavy burden that caused damage in public and private spheres. They provide excellent illustrations of what Clare Haru Crowston has termed the “economies of regard,” as well as revealing the intimate connection between the honor of the individual and the court and the delicate negotiations between the interests and reputation of the Medici and their courtiers.17

4.1 Honor and family rituals The vicissitudes of the Orsini of Pitigliano during the reign of Ferdinando I reveal the tensions between internal family divisions and the need to maintain a public appearance of collective honor. A branch of the famous Roman baronial family, the Orsini had ruled the imperial fiefs of Pitigliano and Sorano for centuries. On the border between Tuscany and Lazio, the walled fortress town of Pitigliano was much prized for strategic reasons. Disputes over the sovereignty of these territories had greatly reduced the family’s financial resources. In 1593, the engagement of Alessandro Orsini’s eldest son, Giovanantonio, to Nannina, daughter of the Baron of Porcigliano, Nero de’ Neri, presented an opportunity to assert the family’s social status and reputation in Florence. As we have seen, members of the groom’s family tended to be responsible for arranging and acquiring the most significant visual markers of this rite-of-passage. Indeed, Sharon Strocchia has described Florentine weddings, the “supreme act of familial alliance,” as indicative of the “asymmetrical terms in which they [the Florentines] cast honour and gender,” because of the prominence of male participants.18 Shortly before the wedding, Ferdinando I de’ Medici expressed his displeasure that Alessandro was not living up to these expectations and that his preparations did not do justice to the Orsini’s public reputation. Ferdinando wrote to Alessandro’s illegitimate brother, Aldobrandino, praising the merits of the bride-to-be, adding that it was Alessandro’s duty to make “the demonstrations appropriate to the honour of his house” instead of giving the impression “he would more willingly go to honour the wedding of a servant at the church of San Lorenzo” than be involved in his son’s nuptials.19 Ferdinando also criticized Alessandro for allowing his second son, Bertoldo, to waste thousands of scudi on “less legitimate desires,” presumably a reference to his predilection for gambling. Furthermore, he noted

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that Alessandro had still not presented the bride and bridegroom with the traditional gifts. In conclusion, the Grand Duke advised Aldrobandino to reason with his brother, so that “this act of holy matrimony can be celebrated with the honour and reputation it requires.”20 Ferdinando was far from being an innocent observer, given the history of enmity between the families. Most recently, Niccolò Orsini, Alessandro’s father, had supported Siena in the war that ended in its surrender and integration into the Duchy of Tuscany. Although Alessandro had opposed his father, Ferdinando was keen to keep Orsini power in check. However, the Grand Duke’s distinction between the money wasted by Bertoldo and the socially acceptable expenditure necessitated by celebrations such as weddings would have been recognized by all members of the Florentine aristocracy. While apparently no records survive of Bertoldo’s expenses, making it impossible to compare the amounts involved, the twenty-four-year-old Giovanantonio managed to spend a vast total of 10,898 scudi almost entirely on items for the wedding. A few months after the event, Alessandro was forced to write to Ferdinando to request a loan from the Monte di Pietà to help pay off his son’s massive debts. Alessandro resorted to the same discourse of family honor to justify the need for such a considerable loan: It is appropriate that always, everywhere and on all occasions he [Giovanantonio] will be revered and appreciated in accordance with the status and level of our house.21 Alessandro argued that the annual 2000 scudi stipend he already provided for his son was no longer sufficient to maintain a style of living appropriate to Giovanantonio’s social station, now he was a married man planning to raise a family. As he did not himself have the financial resources to increase his son’s allowance, Alessandro requested that the Grand Duke intervene to help them reach a compromise.22 In this letter, Alessandro included a list of some of the wedding expenses, providing an idea of the level of opulence, as well as the range of status symbols necessitated by such an event. Clothing and textiles accounted for most of the outlay. Giovanantonio’s tailors received the very large sum of 200 scudi. At a time when labor represented a small proportion of the total cost of clothing, we can assume that the outfits purchased by the groom cost as much as ten times that amount. In addition to the outfits for himself and his bride, Giovanantonio probably also purchased clothes and accessories for a substantial group of family members and household servants. Visibly swelling his retinue, this had the added advantage of consolidating patronage networks as such goods were offered as gifts. Other fashionable refinements included 200 scudi paid to a perfume seller, who would have supplied not only valuable scents but also accessories such as leather gloves perfumed with musk and amber. An embroiderer received 60 scudi, an upholsterer 120 scudi for fitting out the inside of the coaches, while almost 5000 scudi were

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spent on lengths of fabric purchased from mercers, veil makers, silk merchants, and metal embroidery threads from a gold beater. These precious textiles were not just used to clothe human bodies. Both the church of San Lorenzo, where the wedding took place, and Giovanantonio’s house were draped with textile hangings. 60 scudi were paid to a banner maker for a “hanging to be carried to the holy house of Loreto” in order to commemorate the event. The shrine was a popular pilgrimage site and such gifts were intended to improve the couple’s chances of producing heirs. The wedding was a highly public ritual, designed to proclaim Giovanantonio’s social and economic stature, and it contrasts with a more private rite-of-passage from about the same time, when Arsilia, Giovanantonio’s sister, joined the convent of Sant’Anna in Rome. Merchant Girolamo Chellini, who also supplied items for Giovanantonio’s wedding, received a much more modest 109 scudi for clothing and other goods taken by Arsilia to the convent. While some of this money was spent on clothing, it is likely that a significant portion of it was also used to purchase textiles for ecclesiastical hangings. This bill does not record all the belongings purchased for Arsilia’s new life, and by the standards of some conventual trousseaux 100 scudi was generous enough but it is notable that Arsilia’s expenses were less than the amount spent by Giovanantonio to upholster his coach.23 The decision to place Arsilia in a convent was a typical strategy designed to preserve family honor, dispensing as it did with the need to provide her with a costly dowry and marriage trousseau. But despite these economies in one area of family life, the cost of Giovanantonio’s wedding created debts the family could ill afford. The Orsini of Pitigliano took out two Monte loans and later sold off some lands in Tuscany to partly repay their debts.24 In 1597, the Grand Duke’s appointment of Alessandro Orsini as superintendent of the palace stables presumably represented a further dent in the family honor. In a letter to Alessandro, Ferdinando took pains to portray the office as a mark of his esteem but such a role was hardly consonant with the Orsini of Pitigliano’s earlier standing.25 Ferdinando I was finally able to take control over Pitigliano and Sorano after the death of Alessandro in 1604, in exchange for the smaller and far less sought-after Monte San Savino, on the condition that the Medici paid off the Orsini’s debts. Letters from Christine of Lorraine to the Marquis di Riario in 1604 provide further details of the Medici’s side of the bargain. It was agreed that the Medici would provide Bertoldo with 1000 scudi a year and would “find as rich a wife as possible for him, on the condition that he would never enter or stay in Pitigliano” again.26 The Orsini became, once again, the center of a public display of material possessions but this time of a very different nature. After Alessandro died, his household goods were auctioned off by the Magistracy of the Wards of Court (Magistrato dei Pupilli) to pay back part of the Monte debt.27 Only one of the two auction catalogues survives, listing goods worth 7000 scudi after taxes. Of this

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total, the family’s textile hangings and silver raised the most money, including a single lot of forty-three silver plates. All the garments and clothing accessories raised a comparatively modest total of 2115 lire (approximately 300 scudi). This was possibly a reflection of Alessandro’s already straitened means. The first four— most valuable—lots were outfits belonging to his wife, Virginia. One was a gown made of silver-gray moiré tabby silk, lined with pink and green taffeta, slashed and decorated all over with a type of gold lace or embroidery called giglietto, in the shape of a gillyflower or a fleur-de-lis. One of the finest items from Alessandro’s own wardrobe was a matching suit of a cloak, breeches and cassock of black moiré tabby silk, lined with gold brocaded tabby, sold for 177.10 lire. His wardrobe was predominantly black but the sale also included a more eye-catching suit of a matching scarlet cassock and breeches, decorated with gold passementerie and a cassock and breeches of green cloth decorated with silver passementerie. Several pairs of breeches were sold separately, all of striking colors, such as yellow, “seawater,” and turquoise, also decorated with gold giglietto. In contrast with these finer, fashionable garments, more intimate and meager items were sold, such as two pairs of fine knitted stockings to wear under boots, and three pairs of silk stockings of different colors with a pair of tawny brown laces with gold giglietto. Even Alessandro’s personal undergarments, twenty-four shirts, were put up for auction. The Orsini’s turquoise and black household liveries represented some of the most expensive garments in the auction. A group of thirteen black cloth cloaks, decorated with turquoise and black lace, with matching breeches and cassocks as well as a coachman’s large cloak altogether fetched 630 lire. Additionally, fiftysix  pieces of velvet from unpicked cassocks, breeches and sleeves of the livery along with three pairs of different colored taffeta roses, thirteen pairs of turquoise laces, sixteen hat braids of turquoise taffeta, and two pairs of canions were sold for 82  lire. The buyers are not listed in the auction records, but a second-hand dealer might have broken up the lot and sold the pieces individually. Alternatively the liveries could have been purchased by another family and adapted for use by their household. Recycling clothing was a common practice in Florence and even families as wealthy as the Riccardi bought items of furniture and textiles from second-hand dealers. Others sometimes sold old clothes privately through dealers who came to their houses. Such forms of reuse were seen as an appropriate means of preserving patrimonies and eliminating waste and as such rather different from the context of a public auction necessitated by rising debts.28 This confirmation of the reduced circumstances of the Orsini must have dented the family’s reputation just as the wedding of Giovanantonio had affirmed it a decade beforehand. In a culture where even festival books and souvenir accounts included estimates of the financial value of clothing worn by prominent figures, this event laid open the Orsini’s entire household contents to highly informed scrutiny. Not a single aspect of their clothing was spared, from their underwear to the household livery, what

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had once acted as a signifier of the family’s standing was now offered up in bulk to the highest bidder. Despite the family’s vast debts, Alessandro set aside 300 scudi in his will to cover some of the costs of his funeral, and two receipts show that the family went on to spend a further 1600 scudi on clothing and textiles alone.29 It was possible to preserve honor and have a relatively modest funeral, in line with a belief that as worldly riches had no place in heaven, austerity and death went hand in hand. This was purportedly the desire of Ferdinando de’ Medici, who stipulated in his will that money should be given to the poor rather than spent on a lavish ceremony.30 The exceedingly wealthy Alessandro Capponi, uncle of Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, also requested that his house should not be hung with mourning drapes after his death in 1587.31 Further manifestations of a disregard for material possessions included wearing panni bastiti, clothing haphazardly sewn together, originally derived from the Jewish practice of Keriah where clothing is torn as an expression of grief, or a long train (strascico) that dragged in the dirt, used at Florentine state funerals.32 However, several documents reveal that Alessandro Orsini’s heirs intended this funeral to be a lavish affair.33 The monks of San Bartolomeo all’Isola Tiberina were paid for the burial place in the family chapel and for saying two hundred masses for the dead man. No fewer than a hundred priests, accompanied by a group of orphans, were paid to accompany the coffin to its resting place. Lengths of black cloth were purchased to drape about the façade of the family palazzo near Santa Maria in Trastevere and a black velvet hanging with a gold and black silk fringe, embroidered with the arms and emblems of the Orsini, was made to hang over the coffin. As often happened, the funeral apparently took place at night as 120 scudi were spent on candles and torches. The event had all the hallmarks of the funerals of wealthy men in the seventeenth century, distinguished by their increasingly theatrical qualities. The body was often laid out in full view upon the coffin during the procession to the burial place. A typical display was the somewhat later Florentine funeral of Giovan Vincenzo Salviati, who was borne aloft into church dressed in black garments decorated with lace and surrounded by two hundred candles in silver candlesticks.34 To increase the sense of gravity, such ceremonies were usually very formulaic, intended to conform to universally accepted standards rather than be unique. The Orsini’s funeral expenses reveal not simply a concern for the size of the entourage, but also the extremely hierarchical nature of such events, mirroring the kinds of court celebrations described in Chapter 1. Within the narrow limitations of mourning dress, small distinctions were magnified, and working from variations noted down in clothing bills it is possible to recompose the order of the procession. The groups of religious representatives led in front, followed by the open coffin, while the mourners took up the rear, commencing with the most important family members. Complete mourning suits were made for about thirty

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people and at least fifty hats were purchased. Hundreds of meters of different qualities of black cloth were purchased to make cloaks, cassocks, and breeches, along with a staggering total of 193 dozen buttons. While most individuals already possessed mourning dress, it was considered a necessary expense to have new outfits made for a funeral. In addition, it was customary for wealthy families to distribute smaller items, such as gloves, among their circle of friends and relatives, who would swell the numbers of mourners honoring the memory of the dead man. When Francesco Riccardi’s father Giovanni died in 1569, for example, veils were provided for female members of prominent families such as the Baldovinetti, Rucellai, Tosa, Botti, and Medici.35 From the evidence of their accounts, the Orsini funeral procession was exclusively male and the participants’ clothing was designed to reflect social distinctions and to indicate the wearer’s relationship with the deceased. Three different grades of hat were bought: very fine, lined Milanese hats for the four chief mourners, Alessandro’s sons, a further twenty fine Milanese hats were supplied for the “gentlemen,” followed by twenty-four fine hats from Lyon for the “ordinary family.” Silk stockings from Perugia were also bought for extended family members, who do not appear to have been clothed entirely at the immediate family’s expense. Mourning clothes were provided for several members of the procession who were not relatives, such as the family’s tailor, their barber, a silk merchant, a priest, and five other religious figures. Sixteen household servants received outfits, each one slightly differentiated from the last, down to “the hunchback,” three coachmen, and, in final place, the stable and serving boys. The preparations for the Orsini wedding and funeral, attentive to the smallest details, reflect a culture that demanded observance of well-recognized codes of etiquette. In order to put on the best display possible, families sometimes jeopardized their own interests. In some cases, familial rites-of-passage could be seen as an opportunity for social control, hinted at here by Ferdinando I’s interventions in the Orsini wedding preparations. As we have noted, manifesting one’s own honor and being honored in turn were by necessity public activities. In the case of Alessandro’s funeral, the audience ranged from the closest family members and the local priest to the humblest servants and the spectators who gathered to witness the procession. The diverse nature of these participants indicates that a family’s reputation depended upon affirming its position within a wider local community as well as its peer group. The importance of being seen to pay respect is evidenced in the family accounts for the funeral: a mercer’s bill records payment by Cosimo and Bertoldo, “for the love of the most excellent Lord Count, their father,” while Alessandro’s gravestone is inscribed Bertoldus Filius Posuit, with no mention of his three other brothers. Although demonstrating little virtue in their dealings with one another, the Orsini’s collective and individual investments indicate their strong attachment to a notion of reputation, which bound together the family as a whole.

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4.2 Diplomatic codes of honor As a high-ranking diplomat, the success of Matteo Botti’s career depended equally upon honoring the court and being honored in his turn. J. G. Peristiany’s explanation for the importance of the notions of honor and shame in modern-day, largely rural, Mediterranean communities is also applicable here. Peristiany argues that such cultural values thrive in specific contexts, “small scale, exclusive societies where face to face personal, as opposed to anonymous, relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office.”36 Like the Riccardi brothers, Matteo Botti and the previous generation of his family worked particularly hard to be accepted within the most exclusive circles of Florentine society. Exiled from their native Cremona at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Botti’s rise to prominence under the Medici regime can be attributed to the business acumen of the brothers, Francesco, Matteo, Simone, Jacopo, and Giovambattista, who rapidly acquired great wealth in the sixteenth century.37 In the 1550s and 1560s the brothers invested in land and various companies, mainly connected to the textile trade, and were involved in banking activities, based partly in Antwerp. Matteo and Simone consolidated their financial successes in a manner characteristic of members of the Florentine ruling class: Simone acquired a palazzo in via dei Serragli in 1550–51, while Matteo became a member of the Council of Two Hundred.38 Both were known for their cultural patronage. Giorgio Vasari refers to them in his Life of Raphael, as discerning collectors as well as personal friends.39 The Botti brothers also made advantageous marriages: Matteo to Lucrezia Tosinghi, Simone to Lucrezia Strozzi, and Giovambattista to Caterina de’ Medici. The latter had three sons: the eldest died in infancy, the middle son became a cleric, and the youngest, Matteo, inherited his uncles’ great wealth. Instead of concentrating on these mercantile interests, Matteo became a diplomat under Ferdinando I and Cosimo II.40 He took on many, often demanding, ambassadorial roles that required extensive travel to Savoy, Transylvania, Poland, Spain, France, and England. Building on the stature established by his father and uncles in Florence, in 1591 he was made a member of the Order of Saint Stephen and later became a Marquis and Major-domo to Cosimo II. Moving in the upper echelons of these European courts, he sought greater visibility, spending exorbitant sums of money on an impressive wardrobe designed to express his nobility, cultivation, and refinement. However, over the course of a few decades he dissipated the entire fortune accumulated by his father and uncle, estimated at more than 250,000 scudi in 1591–96.41 We can begin to trace Matteo Botti’s clothing acquisitions in an account book kept by his mother, Caterina de’ Medici, dating from 1589 to 1590, when he was in his twenties. He took an interest in the clothing of other household members, commissioning garments for one of the family’s pages, Girolamo. He was a regular customer of a perfume seller in via dei Corazzai, named Alessandro Lioncini,

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from whom he purchased gloves scented with civet and on one occasion two hundred painted eggshells, filled with perfume, to be thrown during Carnival.42 He spent substantial amounts on various garments, including a short cloak made of a very expensive Spanish wool (7 braccia at 28 lire per braccio) with an uncut velvet collar.43 The fine wool, purchased directly from Cavalier Sebastiano Ubaldini, responsible for the wardrobe of Don Pietro de’ Medici, younger brother of Ferdinando I, might have been brought back after one of Don Pietro’s prolonged stays at the Spanish court. Some ten years older, Don Pietro acted as a mentor to Matteo Botti.44 Giuliano de’ Ricci describes a masqued event during Carnival in 1587 when some of the organizers, Antonio Salviati and Girolamo de’ Rossi, refused to allow Botti to join their team, as they considered him to be “less noble than they were.” Pietro de’ Medici intervened and asked Botti to join him, in order to “demonstrate that the young man deserved every good and every form of honour.”45 The anecdote underlines the importance of Medici patronage for the twenty-year old Botti, whose social position was clearly still considered marginal, compared with that of older Florentine families. Two years later, Botti took part in the festivities organized for the wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine. In his Memorie Fiorentine, Giuseppe Settimanni describes how Don Pietro de’ Medici, Lorenzo Salviati, and Matteo Botti organized three masques in the square of Santa Croce on May 24, 1589. Their livery, according to Settimanni, was “so rich and beautiful that it surely surpassed the value of 4,000 scudi.” This event was followed by other masques and liveries, and the participants, in competition with one another were all most diligent to exceed the invention, expense and beauty of the others; and each masque represented something, such as Dawn, the Day, Gods and similar things, but a sudden downpour spoilt the beautiful festivities.46 Botti was able to participate and stand out at these courtly events thanks to his inherited wealth, which allowed the family to “lead a splendid and cavalieresque life,” according to Giuliano de’ Ricci.47 Others who knew Botti shared this view. In 1611, Scipione Ammirato the Younger, thought not to have been an admirer of Botti, was nevertheless forced to admit that he traveled in style: with two litters, three carriages drawn by a total of twelve horses, with four horses and eight mules laden with all his ambassadorial accoutrements, and accompanied by more than forty gentlemen and servants. Ammirato concluded “in truth he behaves more like a prince than anything and there is no danger that he will not be honoured.”48 Such assessments imply that Botti was at this stage adept at controlling his reputation. Appearances were key to successful diplomacy. As well as the trappings mentioned by Scipione Ammirato, it was necessary to dress magnificently, to have a liveried retinue, and maintain an opulent household in order to reflect power, move in the right circles, and favor the good outcome of diplomatic negotiations.

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Diplomatic correspondence regularly foregrounds details about dress, as Maria Hayward has demonstrated for the court of Henry VIII. In 1516 the Bishop of Worcester reported from Rome that “Poland and Portugal have both sent splendid missions. In the train of Portugal there are over forty collars,” notably using an element of clothing to convey the size of the ambassadorial retinue. In 1518 Sebastiano Giustiniani, Venetian ambassador to the English court, wrote to the Doge: “The English ambassadors to France have taken leave. They go with very great pomp, rather regal than ambassadorial, endeavouring in every respect to outvie the French ambassadors.”49 Conversely, a poorly dressed functionary besmirched the honor of all the parties involved. The agent sent to present Thomas Wolsey with his cardinal’s hat was reported to be inappropriately clad and so was detained until he could be “newly furnished in all manner of apparel, in all kind of costly silks, which seemed decent for such a high ambassador.”50 When Botti arrived in Madrid during the night of September 5, 1609, he wrote back to Florence that he had immediately made arrangements for his livery, which would be completed very quickly. Only when it was ready would he seek an audience with Philip III of Spain to officially announce the death of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici.51 Engaged in sensitive Habsburg-Bourbon marriage negotiations in Paris in 1612, Botti wrote to the Florentine secretary of state, Belissario Vinta, giving a sense of his engagement with the competitive nature of courtly display and the importance he attached to his visibility: I have always thought that a livery would provide an important occasion to make the court here talk about the merits of this family [the Medici], but it was even more so than I imagined: in the first place because the Duke of Pastrana’s livery was not in the end as rich as expected, and then the one I commissioned proved to be so well-conceived and such a rich example of its kind, that it was infinitely pleasing; and even this morning Cardinal Suardi sent his servant, who was here on other business, to congratulate me on having the most beautiful livery that his Illustriousness had ever seen in France. It comprised six pages, six servants, two lackeys and a coachman, and even though everything here is very expensive, as your Highness knows, it will not come to more than two thousand scudi.52 Botti reiterates all the standard tropes of diplomatic livery, such as the number of participants, the cost, and the financial burden undertaken by the servant of the ruler, together with the honor it confers upon the latter. We can find a similar account from Francesco Contarini writing to the Venetian Senate, from Florence in 1589 about his appearance at the Grand ducal wedding: I procured, with the greatest expense that my weak forces and the limited wealth of our family will permit, to represent with as much dignity as possible your Highness, in whose service thirty gentlemen, both Venetian and foreign, offered to accompany me, with no limit to the cost and effort involved.53

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Although diplomacy was becoming more professionalized, it was still the preserve of aristocrats who had to be able to dig deep into their own pockets to support such an extravagant display. Diplomats received allowances, sometimes of a very generous nature, but it was not unusual to struggle with maintaining a show of magnificence, and there were frequent complaints that work expenses were eating into private funds, aggravated by the fact that promised payments often failed to materialize. Catherine Fletcher writes, for example, of Gregorio Casali’s view that he had bankrupted himself in the service of Henry VIII.54 Gaspare Bragaccia’s L’ambasciatore gave advice on how to manage these expenses: “Even if, upon the first entrance at court, you can and should appear for a few months as you would at a wedding, and even more elegantly, then carefully diminish your spending little by little,” ensuring, however, that it is not a “violent and ridiculous metamorphosis.” Bragaccia also advised that the ambassador should not overdo his clothing so that he is “considered vain and judged proud,” warning that trying to outdo other ambassadors too much would lead to envy and hate, followed by derision and laughter.55 Perhaps Botti did not approve of such tactics. In any case, he evidently found it increasingly difficult to finance a diplomatic lifestyle. On September 11, 1612, he wrote from Paris to Cosimo II with a request for more money, pleading that “for many, many years I have served with great devotion and with many expenses for weddings and travels without any provision or recompense.”56 He sent a further begging letter to Christine of Lorraine, on September 18, 1613, saying that he had paid out “thousands and thousands of his own scudi” and that he could demonstrate that this had all been on necessary expenses “apart from books and clocks.”57 Impoverished and in poor health, Botti returned to Florence in 1615. The court donation given to noblemen returning from service abroad was modified in view of his situation. Cosimo II took ownership of all Botti’s goods, in return paying off his debts of more than 130,000 scudi and providing him with a pension. The inventory of his possessions was not taken until August 1621, several months after Botti’s death, indicating that he had retained the right to use them in his lifetime. His wardrobe alone totaled more than 3600 scudi, with some individual outfits being valued at 300 or 400 scudi. The sheer quantity of garments is striking, even when compared with the total number of garments purchased by Cosimo II de’ Medici over the course of his thirteen-year reign. Cosimo II’s wardrobe accounts recorded a total of 168 cassocks, 165 breeches, 166 doublets, 191 cloaks, 12 long gowns, and 15 jerkins.58 Botti’s single inventory, providing a snapshot of his wardrobe at the end of his life, included at least 75 cassocks, 65 breeches, 76 doublets, 76 cloaks, 17 long gowns, and 19 jerkins. The clothes were made of costly materials, including nine different types of fur, such as ermine, sable, lynx, squirrel, and otter. The silks were woven with gold and silver threads, embroidered with small-scale designs of leaves and scrolling vines, the kind of sinuous floral motifs typical of early-seventeenthcentury fashionable male dress, illustrated on the gold embroidered doublet worn by twenty-one-year-old Stefano della Bella on the cover of this volume.59

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Botti’s passion for clothing can also be understood in the light of his other possessions and activities, all reflecting key spheres in which a courtier was expected to show competency. Although his letter to Christine of Lorraine placed clocks and books in a separate category, describing them as “unnecessary expenses,” there was much to link the various objects he spent his money on, suggesting they embodied similar qualities for their owner. Clocks and books were both the accessories of the cultivated courtier and collected by many other wealthy Florentines. Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, for example, purchased various types of watches and clocks. In addition to their aesthetic appeal, these objects also satisfied an interest in novelty and technological advances. Botti’s extensive library, begun by his uncles, numbered 3000 volumes at his death, including no fewer than five copies of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.60 Botti himself had some literary pretensions. In 1580 he joined the Accademia degli Alterati, using the pseudonym Insipido, and was also a member of the Florentine Academy, where in 1583 he gave “a beautiful oration, in which he discoursed upon the virtues and exercises of the body.”61 His enjoyment of public performance was indulged not only at the Florentine Academy, but also in taking part in football and Carnival as discussed in Chapter 7. In 1619, Ottavio Rinuccini published various verses entitled Lodi de’ giocatori di pallone, celebrating a football match that took place in the Piazza di Santa Croce in 1615. Rinuccini dedicated the volume to Botti and compared football matches to other kinds of “very splendid cavalieresque festivities” carried out under the aegis of the Grand Dukes.62 The garments recorded in Botti’s inventory relay both his personal experiences and the significance he attributed to the art of dressing appropriately. The complexity of his clothing is conveyed by the intricate descriptions. Every possible space crammed with decoration, his wardrobe suggests the desire to surpass all previous precedents typical of the highest levels of court display in Florence during the early seventeenth century. The entry for a single pair of shoes, valued at 6 scudi, reads as follows: A pair of black leather shoes pierced all over, covered with a plain white silk, embroidered all over with gold and silver purl and beaten gold lamé decorated with little chains of gold purl and edged with a small ribbon of spun gold with large white silk ribbon rosettes, ornamented with a deep band of large fleur-delis made with gold and silver threads.63 His diplomatic travels are reflected in the number of French-style clothes, a cloak made of English fox fur and the ruby colored semi-precious stones from Bohemia (granati di Boemia), used on breeches, a jerkin, belt, and sword belt.64 At a more practical level, he had various small- to medium- sized bags, mostly lavishly embellished, some intended to hold money and another watches.65

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The after-life of Botti’s wardrobe reminds us again of the power of interpretation, as the significance these clothes held for Botti contrasts sharply with the attitude of Cosimo II’s wardrobe staff, in charge of disposing or reallocating them after Botti’s death. The inventory included the preface: There are many clothes, which cost a great deal of money but are now worth little so they should not remain in his Excellency’s wardrobe. Apart from the furs, everything should be sent to the Magistracy of the Wards of Court and sold to the highest bidder.66 A note was added underneath: “sold as recommended and the gold buttons and furs were kept for the Grand ducal Wardrobe.” The question of value here is clearly subjective. Botti’s clothing was still worth a great deal, as many outfits were estimated as being worth hundreds of scudi. It is possible that Cosimo II was keen to recoup the debt he had taken on and it was thought that the best way to achieve this was to auction off the goods. Perhaps they were considered too flamboyant, or recognizable, to pass on to members of Cosimo’s household or alternatively they had become outdated.67 The features that had made Botti’s wardrobe so fashionable and had given him such pleasure, had probably decreased their intrinsic financial worth. Once the textiles had been embroidered, slashed, pinked, and appliquéd, the furs and gold were the only surviving transferable goods. Both the Orsini of Pitigliano and Matteo Botti supremely failed in achieving measure, putting themselves in situations in which they were increasingly subservient to the power of the Medici. While we have little evidence about how the Orsini’s public manifestations of stature were perceived, their love of ceremony did not secure their social standing. Their struggles were compounded by the fact that different members of the family had conflicting notions about honor and the correct use of material possessions to convey it. The men discussed in this chapter were competing at the highest levels in order to impress the Roman and Florentine elites, the Medici, as well as international diplomats who represented the monarchies of Europe. In such contexts the preeminence of competitive display is to be expected. In the following chapters, reputation and the management of perceptions are shown to have been vital in other ways that extended beyond demonstrations of financial wealth.

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Part Three

Modes of Masculinity

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5T  he versatility of black

From the early years of the ducal regime up to the end of the sixteenth century, Florentine male portraiture embraced black clothing to a degree almost unrivaled in other parts of Italy, establishing a model from which very few artists or patrons deviated. The brighter colors sometimes glimpsed in portraits by Venetian or Lombard artists, such as Bartolomeo Veneto or Giovanni Battista Moroni, are even rarer in representations of Florentine noblemen.1 Of course, such enthusiasm for male sartorial austerity both on and off canvas was far from unique, both in terms of time and place. It evolved as part of a European-wide trend, whose origins have been traced back to at least the fourteenth century. Over time, black became firmly established as the color of power and authority, as John Harvey and Michel Pastoureau have both shown, and to this day it is used for professional garb or for significant events, festive, ceremonial, or commemorative.2 However, color symbolism in dress was far from static and could assume different connotations according to the identity of the wearer. In Grand ducal Florence, yellow was one of Cosimo I de’ Medici livery colors, despite the fact that it was employed across Italy to mark out marginalized social groups, such as Jews or prostitutes.3 White could embody purity, holiness, and cleanliness, but each of these individual qualities was emphasized to differing degrees depending on the circumstances in which it was worn.4 No other color was as heavily laden with meaning as black, not least because of the very diverse nature of the different individuals or groups who chose to wear it. This chapter explores the significance of black clothing in paintings of Florentine men and argues that its polyvalency contributed to its appeal. At first glance, we are struck by the similarities between sixteenth-century portraits of men in black. However, on closer inspection the nuances of black clothing shift markedly depending on the sitter’s age, status, profession, or political affiliations. A study of dyes and pigments in the early modern period argues that colors “possess value

in three distinct but overlapping categories of human activity: the aesthetic, the economic, and the social.”5 To fully appreciate the significance of black we need to take account of the material aspects of clothing, such as dyeing processes and variations between textiles, in conjunction with contemporary aesthetic, cultural, and political beliefs. Count Federico Fregoso’s speech in the Courtier cited in Chapter 1 is often referred to as a manifesto for black in male clothing. The fact that Fregoso associates black primarily with “ordinary apparel” tends to be overlooked and, as we see in Chapters 1 and 7, it was not appropriate for every occasion. Moreover, Fregoso’s link between black and ordinary dress does not account for its popularity in paintings, given that a portrait was an extraordinary event even for the wealthy and clothing was often represented in such loving detail that it almost eclipsed the wearer. Patrons were prepared to leave valuable garments at an artist’s workshop so that they could be copied at leisure, while they themselves were rarely accessible for such lengths of time. Unfortunately, although clothing was selected for portraiture with some care, little evidence survives to explain why specific garments are depicted. Aileen Ribeiro notes that even for the eighteenth century we know very little about “the processes of choice” that led to the inclusion of particular types of clothing.6 In exceptional cases, documentary sources have survived to shed light on the meaning of the garments represented. A well-known example from this period is Agnolo Bronzino’s portrait of Eleonora di Toledo and her eldest son, Francesco [Fig. 5.1]. In January 1550, the family’s secretary, Lorenzo Pagni, wrote to their Major-Domo, Pier Franceso Riccio, with the Duchess’ instructions regarding her son’s clothing for the painting. Eleonora asked Bronzino to include a red satin gown (robba) over Francesco’s doublet and hose.7 In the first instance this followed standard dress decorum, as Eleonora considered it inappropriate to have her eightyear-old son and heir depicted in a simple doublet and hose without a more formal overgown. The second reason was more personal and would be impossible to reconstruct without the letter, which recalls that Francesco had worn a very similar garment on one of his first official engagements, a trip to Genoa just over a year before, with a group of ambassadors sent to greet the future King Philip II of Spain. Eleonora was keen that the portrait should serve as a reminder of such a significant event, not least because it was commissioned as a diplomatic gift for Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the Bishop of Arras, who later that year became Charles V’s Secretary of State. It seems likely that this level of consideration regarding the representation of clothing was by no means exceptional. Given that insights of this nature are extremely rare, it is fortunate that clothing in paintings often followed conventions that are easier to read. Small boys destined for ecclesiastical careers might be shown in cardinal’s robes, for example, while other sitters were depicted wearing the colors of their family coat-of-arms. Agnolo Bronzino painted the young Florentine courtier Ludovico Capponi in a white doublet and black jerkin

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Figure 5.1  Agnolo Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and her son, Francesco de’ Medici, ca. 1549, oil on panel. Pisa, Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale.

and hose, referencing the Capponi family coat-of-arms, and it has been suggested that the black jerkin in a Jacopo Pontormo portrait thought to be of Carlo Neroni alludes to the sitter’s name, although given the prevalence of black this cannot be certain.8

5.1 Clothing owned and painted For each outfit that was chosen, many other possibilities were discarded. The elimination process is an intriguing one, which can be explored further when we know exactly what was in the subject’s wardrobe. In the case of the Florentine Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, it is possible to do just that by comparing his portrait, which has been attributed to Giovanni Stradano, with the clothes he recorded in his account books [Fig. 5.2].9 Niccolò kept two household account books during the 1570s, which list 281 separate payments for clothing, totaling approximately 5800 lire (almost 830 florins). By piecing together all the individual transactions over this decade, it is possible to identify forty-two outer garments, combined with an extensive range of other items such as footwear, silk stockings, shirts, and accessories such as belts and bags. Niccolò belonged to one of Florence’s oldest and wealthiest families. His father, Luigi Capponi, together with his uncle Alessandro, headed a hugely

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Figure 5.2  Attributed to Giovanni Stradano, Niccolò di Luigi Capponi, 1579, Gift of June Pilliod Torrey, class of 1939, 1987.16. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.

successful network of banking and textile companies, operating in Spain, Portugal and France, as well as Italy. Niccolò pursued various business activities, being involved, for example, in one of the family’s companies of wool merchants and indigo dyers, one of the ingredients used to produce black textiles.10 After suffering from long periods of ill health, he died just before his thirty-third birthday, only slightly older than the average age of marriage for Florentine noblemen. In the last years of his life, Niccolò spent increasing amounts of time outside Florence, at the family’s extensive property in Vico d’Elsa near Siena: a noble residence complete with an orchard, vineyard, an olive press, and various outlying buildings, including stables and a weaver’s workshop.11 From here he continued to follow developments at court with interest. In 1578 he purchased a copy of Baccio Baldini’s newly published Life of Cosimo de’ Medici: First Grand Duke of Tuscany. An academic and doctor who attended the Grand Duke, Baldini was also a personal acquaintance of Niccolò and provided him with medical advice.12 Niccolò’s favorite pastimes were those we might expect of a cultivated courtier, such as playing music and expanding his library. His book purchases included four volumes on the art of the duel by different authors.13 Like Eleonora di Toledo, he was also partial to betting on the sex of his friends’ and relatives’ babies, losing 331 lire in the process.14

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Although no documentary evidence has been found in connection with Niccolò’s portrait, it is thought to have been commissioned posthumously by his father and, just like Eleonora di Toledo, Luigi must have deliberated over the appropriate clothing for his son. In the portrait, Niccolò’s pallid face is gaunt and pinched. Despite his direct gaze, he remains detached and remote, an attitude compounded by the gesture of pulling his cloak across his body, which simultaneously gives greater prominence to the ring with the Capponi arms on his left hand. The clock on the table behind him is inscribed with his age and the year of his death.15 He wears a black wool doublet edged with silk guards, black, slashed velvet breeches, a black short cloak with a contrasting silk lining and black silk, knitted hose. His bright white linen ruff, set into scrolling shapes, and his detachable cuffs stand out against this dark background. In the years before he died, Niccolò purchased various black garments, including a “pair of breeches of black sarcenet decorated with rivets and braid” and a “cassock of black grosgrain,” which might possibly have inspired the clothing shown in the portrait.16 While the modern viewer’s knowledge of Niccolò’s outward appearance is based entirely on this sole surviving image and a smaller copy of it, now in the Uffizi, his circle of acquaintances would have known him in several other guises.17 If we turn to the kinds of clothing worn by Niccolò during his lifetime, it is evident that the artist could have constructed numerous versions of his subject. Niccolò’s wardrobe contained many practical clothes suited to a life led in the countryside, including a winter hat made of beaver fur and different pairs of boots that were either waxed or lined with fox belly furs for extra warmth. He owned woolen gloves with a raised nap for riding, and for falconry he wore a coarse woolen cloak and a pair of goat’s leather gloves “to hold birds on a fist.”18 Hunting was a favorite pursuit: his accounts show purchases of gunpowder and a harquebus made in Brescia, a city renowned for its manufacture of armor and weapons, as well as expenses for rearing dogs and falcons and large quantities of netting used for catching birds. He purchased several buricchi, for himself and his servants, a type of cloak that is more often found in the records of Tuscan peasants than those of the wealthy.19 Niccolò also owned a padded leather jerkin, of the kind favored by Cosimo de’ Medici as a mark of valor. Domenico Mellini suggests that Cosimo used to wear a jerkin or tunic (giacco tondo) of this type during Florence’s war against Siena and this is confirmed by Roberta Orsi Landini’s findings that Cosimo owned sixty leather jerkins, half of which were made between 1546 and 1551.20 Their aggressive overtones are underlined in a 1585 law passed by the Otto di Guardia magistracy banning garments described as “Dante’s jerkins” (colletti di Dante), “designed as protection rather than ordinary garments,” made of thick leather or sometimes more unusual materials such as paste-board or fish skins.21 Similarly, an English proclamation in 1579 on the use of guns also prohibited men from wearing “privy coats and doublets of defence, thereby intending to quarrel and make frays on others unarmed.”22 The decoration of pinking on this

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English leather jerkin in the Museum of London, typically reinforces its soldierly appearance [FIG. 2.7]. Niccolò also owned two pairs of martingale breeches, the style discussed in Chapter 3, considered to be particularly comfortable for riding. As an alternative to these kinds of clothing, the portrait could have represented a more colorful view of Niccolò, who participated in Carnival celebrations as well as hosting various small gatherings and parties at his family’s country villa. On his trips to Florence he borrowed his uncle’s coach to attend commedia dell’arte performances. This was likely to have been the kind of event where he would have worn one of his outfits combining more vivid hues and striking decorative effects. His wardrobe included breeches made of shot silk, mixed serge with bands of green velvet, black velvet slashed to reveal a pink silk lining, and other pairs in green and brown taffeta, silver and gray camlet and damask. His doublets tended to be in subdued colors, black or tawny, apart from one made of yellow wool. Rather than choosing to preserve the memory of a son who enjoyed falconry and hunting in the Tuscan countryside as much as evenings at the theater, Luigi favored a far more cerebral image, almost as restrained as Luigi’s own portrait, which probably dates from about 1560 [Fig. 5.3].23 In it we see a somber individual in his mid-fifties, dressed in a black doublet and cloak with a plain white down-turned collar and cuffs with a tiny border of lace, lacking even the most restrained forms

Figure 5.3 Anonymous/Giovanni Stradano/Jacopino del Conte, Portrait of Luigi Capponi, ca. 1550, oil on wood panel, Gift of Henry White Cannon Jr., Class of 1910, in memory of his Father, y 1935–59. Princeton University Art Museum (Photo: Scala, Florence).

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of male ornamentation, such as silk buttons. As Niccolò’s portrait was painted posthumously, black dress might appear to be an obvious choice. However, there is nothing to indicate that his clothing was intended primarily as a reference to death or mourning. In the many sixteenth-century portraits of widows, it has been shown that mourning apparel was often not limited to black clothing but denoted with a series of specific markers, such as head veils or black jewelry and accessories.24 If props or accessories were used to allude to mourning, in Niccolò Capponi’s portrait this function is amply fulfilled by the inscribed carriage clock. The role of the clock as a memento mori is heightened by his gesture pointing toward it. Given that strict mourning clothes were very plain, the fact that Niccolò’s garments are embellished and partly made of silk places them within the realm of fashionable dress. Wool was considered to be the most appropriate fabric for mourning, partly because it conveyed a sense of sobriety, but also because the sheen and light-reflecting qualities of silk were thought to be too festive.25 Various sixteenth-century treatises laid out the correct decorum for female mourning dress, including Giovan Giorgio Trissino’s Epistle (1524), which typically emphasized the need for moderation. To achieve this, widows had to perform a careful balancing act, avoiding too much ornamentation and attention to worldly goods on the one hand, and excessive abjuration and neglect of appearances on the other. This call for restraint, which governed sartorial appearances in various contexts, as we have seen, is one of the key values embodied in Florentine male portraiture.

5.2  Representing restraint Being seen to distance oneself from the fickle nature of fashion was vital to constructions of male identity in many portraits. At a time when both portraiture and fashion were becoming increasingly affordable, black lent the sitter greater dignity and gravity.26 The sense of family lineage associated with portraits coupled with a desire for long-term posterity made black, with its connotations of timelessness, an obvious choice. With future generations in mind, it was felt that paintings should depict conservative rather than fashionable dress, as modish garments might seem absurd with the passing of time. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci had recommended: As far as possible avoid the costumes of your own day. . . . Costumes of our period should not be depicted unless it be on tombstones, so that we may be spared being laughed at by our successors for the mad fashions of men and leave behind only things that may be admired for their dignity and beauty.27 Da Vinci’s unpublished treatise reflects a view that held currency over a very long period of time.28 The simplicity of black commended it and for many Florentine

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men its appeal surely lay in the fact that it came to represent a kind of “antifashion,” despite its popularity. According to many sixteenth-century Italian color theorists, one of the most important properties of black was the fact that it was unchangeable. Nine out of the fourteen authors discussed in Jonas Gavel’s study of color and art theory in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy referred to the permanence of black.29 This was especially pertinent at a time when clothing was a highly recyclable good at all levels of society, and garments were regularly cut up, re-trimmed, and dyed, until they were totally worn out. Although these were common practices, Alessandro Piccolomini satirized them in his dialogue La Raffaella, ovvero dialogo della bella creanza delle donne (1539), poking fun at a woman who repeatedly alters her wedding dress, dyeing it a different color and eventually wearing it inside out.30 In contrast, black clothing intimated stability. In his Dialogo dei Colori, first printed in 1565, Lodovico Dolce went a step further, linking the properties and symbolism of the color with the virtue of the men who wore it. His underlying message was that men should rise above the concerns of dress, and that the steadfastness of black would express male disdain for fashionable clothing’s inevitable propensity to evolve and mutate. He asserted that “in addition to being virile and temperate, black also demonstrates firmness [fermezza] because this colour cannot be changed into any other.”31 Dressing in black from head to toe suggested that the wearer was capable of the kind of singlemindedness that was associated with masculine action and strength. With this in mind, Dolce recommended that no more than two colors be worn at one time: “indeed a variety of colours of different sorts, combined in one outfit, signifies a very bizarre mind, full of different appetites.”32 The various virtues of black, including this aura of moderation, were bound up in the raw materials and dyeing processes necessary for its creation. Although black was beyond the reach of many men in this period, it was by no means the most costly of dyes to produce. Workshop books belonging to Tuscan tailors based outside Florence, show that their customers, who included military officers, hostel owners, barbers, cobblers, sailors, and builders, regularly purchased black clothes, usually made of relatively cheap fabrics, such as Sangallo wool, camlet, fustian, or linen-cotton mixes.33 John H. Munro underlines this point in connection with Flemish woolens, stating: there is no statistically significant difference in the costs of dyeing woollens in any of the colours other than those created by using the scarlet kermes: that is, the prices for black-dyed woollens are no higher or lower than those for greys, browns, purples, greens, standard reds, and medley and striped woollens.34 Even for silks, black was far from the most expensive dye. An early fifteenthcentury Florentine codex, repeatedly copied until the first printed version appeared in the nineteenth century, includes prices by the pound for different dyes. Of the

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nineteen colors listed, as many as eleven are more expensive than black, which is priced at fifteen soldi per pound. The most expensive is twice-dyed cremisi (crimson from kermes) at forty soldi, followed by verde bruno (greeny-brown), alessandrino (deep violet), and different types of pagonazzo (purple). The only dyes cheaper than black cost twelve soldi per pound and include tane (tawny), and inciannomati (light blues), sbiaditi (faded colors), and bigi (grays).35 And so the primary purpose of black clothing in these portraits was not the manifestation of worldly riches. The successful production of black textiles was more about skill than cost, translating into further cultural prestige for the wearer of high-quality black clothing. It was perhaps the thought of a perfect black that excited Isabella d’Este when she ordered some “black cloth for a mantle, such as shall be without a rival in the world. . . . If it is only as good as those which others wear, I had rather be without it!”36 To achieve a good, fast, black the fabric had to be immersed in successive dye baths, to obtain an increasingly darker, even, and steadfast hue. The Venetian Giovanni Ventura Rosetti’s Il Plichto dell’Arte (1548) recommends following techniques used in Florence and Genoa, boiling the fabric in a bath of gall and the following day in a mix of green vitriol or ferrous sulfate (vetriolo Romano), iron filings, and gum Arabic.37 If the color was not strong enough, the immersion would be repeated with the same three ingredients, up to four times.38 It is striking that Rosetti includes about twenty different recipes for dying textiles black, superseded only by the number of recipes for different shades of red, including vermilion, scarlet, and crimson. The obsession with creating a perfect black reflected both its popularity and the level of skill required. The techniques for producing black improved significantly during this period. As José Luis Colomer explains, the discovery of logwood in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, by Spanish settlers and its subsequent exportation in the early to midsixteenth century was a significant development. Although it met with some initial resistance, it became a highly sought-after ingredient used to create black, as it reduced the reliance on corrosive iron filings as a mordant.39 Florentine guild laws focused strongly on the need to preserve the quality and reputation of local black cloth, highlighting both the difficulties involved in these processes, as well as the opportunities for malpractice.40

5.3 Gendered portrait conventions Women were frequently imagined as desiring and encouraging the process of fashionable change, a need that was attributed to specific traits of the female physiognomy and psychology. In medical and popular literature, cold and moist female humors were usually viewed as being more susceptible to metamorphosis. Being more malleable, women could take impressions more easily, but they were also more capable of inventiveness, which could be extended to the arenas

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of physical appearance and self-fashioning.41 Taking this further, writings on fashion often described women’s use of cosmetics and clothing to create false appearances as indications of their innate capacity for deception and trickery.42 It is not surprising, therefore, that Cesare Vecellio chose to compare his struggles to keep abreast with new forms of female dress with the waxing and waning of the moon, which was thought to have such a strong influence on women’s bodies. He lamented that because women’s clothes are so quick to change, and are more variable than the forms of the moon, it is not possible to include everything there is to say about them in one account. Rather, I am concerned that while I am in the midst of describing one garment, it will be transformed into another, so that it will be impossible to do justice to all.43 Up until Anthony Van Dyck developed his style of impressionistic undress in the early seventeenth century, dress in portraiture tended to be rendered in painstaking, minute detail. Consequently, plain black garments fulfilled the necessary function of distancing men from the negative, female associations of fashionable dress.44 This is most evident in double portraits, where wives’ flamboyant dress and costly jewelry often contrast dramatically with the more modest clothing of their husbands. Although by no means solely an Italian phenomenon, this dialectic has been fruitfully explored through a series of companion paintings by artists such as Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian.45 Agnolo Bronzino’s portraits of the courtier, diplomat, and scholar, Bartolomeo Panciatichi and his wife, Lucrezia di Sigismondo Pucci, continue this tradition in a rather more subtle way [Figs. 5.4 and 5.5]. The dark, undifferentiated background in Lucrezia’s portrait draws the viewer’s attention to her crimson dress and the brilliance of this most expensive of dyes overshadows the relatively plain surface of the garment. The decorative elements are refined, including her voluminous shoulder rolls and striped under-sleeves glimpsed through slashed over-sleeves ornamented with ribbons and aglets. The mandatory string of pearls around her neck, the longer, gold necklace, and the paternoster beads in her hair and her belt all underline the prosperity of the Panciatichi family. In terms of color, Bartolomeo’s clothing is an exact mirror image of his wife’s. He is clad in black, apart from the crimson sleeves of his doublet, which emerge from underneath his dark jerkin. In contrast, Lucrezia’s sleeves are the only dark component of her crimson dress, the color linking the two portraits. Unlike the rather hermetic image of Lucrezia, several elements in the composition of Bartolomeo’s portrait, such as the palace façades behind him, the source of daylight in the background to the left, the family arms, the large hunting dog, the closed notebook, point to a more public and active social presence. These features, according to Charles McCorquodale, are intended to ensure that Bartolomeo Panciatichi “obtains our respect for his accomplishments rather than his social status or his sumptuous clothes.”46

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Figure 5.4 Agnolo Bronzino, Bartolomeo Panciatichi, ca. 1540–45, oil on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

Although on occasion Cosimo I and his sons were represented in clothing expressing extreme pomp and circumstance, most notably when they were shown in the Grand ducal regalia, in the case of double portraiture they tended to follow this formula of vicarious consumption. In 1581, Alessandro Allori was commissioned to paint double portraits of Francesco de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello and the clothing for the portraits were left at his workshop. An entry in the artist’s workshop book records Francesco’s rather modest outfit of “grey breeches and doublet and a simple black sarcenet robe.” In contrast, Bianca was depicted in a far more costly and sumptuous “overgown of cloth of silver and purple, that is, of purple figured velvet.”47 When black-clad men were not offset by the brighter colors of their wives’ clothing, a similar function was performed by a vivid backdrop, often in the form of a green silk draped curtain.

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Figure 5.5  Agnolo Bronzino, Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1540, oil on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Getty Images).

While the fashionable clothing of the female elites was typically characterized by bold statements like Bianca Cappello’s patterned silver and purple velvet dress, representations of male dress tended to hinge upon subtle variations on a single theme. This prefigured a trend that has characterized male dress in later centuries, both worn and depicted. We can trace underlying parallels, for example, with the mentality of the nineteenth-century “hidden consumer,” described by Christopher Breward. Although many Victorian men cultivated the semblance of a disregard for fashion, they succeeded in projecting sartorial distinction by operating in a different register from women, with innovations often being based on subtle alterations, perhaps in the fit or length of a jacket.48 Similarly, in the sixteenth century, rather than gaining prestige through applied surface ornamentation or elaborate figured textiles, it was possible to convey male authority by using more understated elements of dress, such as the quality of a plain silk, a half-glimpsed lining, or the number of buttons down the front of a doublet. In keeping with these sartorial codes, in portraiture it was often only the lower, baser half of the male body that was “feminized” with added embellishments and brighter colors. We can see this in Niccolò di Luigi Capponi’s portrait where his silk slashed breeches are more ornamental than the rest of his outfit. This custom extended beyond visual representations as Medici sumptuary legislation was particularly concerned with curtailing expenditure on breeches. The 1562 law focused first on jewelry and

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over-gowns for women, the most expensive elements of their wardrobe, while the section on male dress described the quantity, type, and decoration of the textiles allowed to make their breeches, before moving onto upper garments.49 Florentine artists seem to have relished the challenges of distinguishing between black surfaces, creating a compendium of small differences. The depiction of relatively plain, black garments allowed artists to concentrate more on the silhouettes and sculptural forms of dress, as well as contrasting types of textiles, rather than prioritizing surface decoration. Representations of male clothing in Florentine portraiture generally place far more emphasis on surface texture than applied ornament. Black on black clothing was popular partly because it exaggerated the contrasts between different fibers, weaves, and heights of pile, together with the way they reflected or absorbed light, as illustrated in a portrait of an unknown gentleman [Fig. 3.1] in a black damask doublet. This is also exemplified in a portrait by Michele Tosini (Michele di Ridolfo Ghirlandaio), painted in 1575 when the unknown subject was thirty-one, details inscribed on the letter in his hand [FIG. 0.1]. Despite the differences in technique, the picture bears some obvious similarities with Niccolò di Luigi’s portrait. Tosini picks out a range of highly refined details: the braid down the doublet front, the cloak decorated with thin bands of velvet and the snipped edging on the collar, its contrasting satin lining revealed to full effect where it is pulled across the subject’s chest. The same aesthetic is eulogized in Giorgio Vasari’s commentary on a portrait of Pietro Aretino from about 1525 by Sebastiano del Piombo, now badly deteriorated. Vasari wrote that “it is a very wonderful painting to see the difference between the five or six different shades of black he is wearing: velvet, satin, sarcenet, damask and cloth, and a very black beard above these other blacks.”50 Appreciation of this particular effect was surely increased by the knowledge that these various shades of black perceptibly altered according to the wearer’s movements and surroundings. By candlelight, for example, the differences between even a limited range of blacks and dark grays would have been thrown into greater relief.

5.4 The social values of black As we have seen in Chapter 2, in Grand ducal Florence black was the color of clothing worn by the professional classes. According to Lodovico Dolce, members of the togati in Italy now included lawyers, procurators, notaries, solicitors, doctors, and so theoretically its use was becoming more widespread.51 Robert Dallington, visiting the Medici court in 1596, connected black with civic garb, writing of the Florentines: “As touching their apparel, it is both civil, because black, and comely because fitted to the body.”52 In his view, Florentine male clothing was restrained, and his choice of the word “civil” was presumably intended to signify both modesty and the association of black with civic life. As an Englishman, these

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links would have been familiar to Dallington. Although black is not mentioned specifically, it is obviously alluded to in William Harrison’s 1587 description of English merchants’ clothing, which also connects the color with civic virtue: Certes of all estates our merchants do least alter their attire and therefore are most to be commended, for albeit that which they wear be very fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses.53 Italian merchants were also identifiable by their black clothing. Michel Pastoureau offers the intriguing, although hard to substantiate, theory that wealthy patrician merchants first adopted the color in the second half of the fourteenth century as a form of “rebellion” against sumptuary legislation that forbade them from wearing more expensive, brighter colors such as scarlet and crimson.54 By the fifteenth century, in several countries, black was already associated with attributes that were fundamental for mercantile success. In his early fifteenth-century treatise Blason de Couleurs, first printed in Italy in 1593, the Burgundian author Jean Courtois wrote that when worn by merchants black signified loyalty, because it indicated reliability and honesty, both essential characteristics in the eyes of a potential customer.55 According to Cesare Vecellio, you would see “few colours except black” among Venetian merchants and well-to-do shopkeepers.56 In contrast with the black of the professional classes, black worn by courtiers was a more recent phenomenon. It is thought to have been first worn in a courtly context by Philip the Good of Burgundy, who continued to appear in black long after the normal period of mourning for his father, John the Fearless who was murdered in 1419, had run its course.57 As a consequence, his courtiers also began to demonstrate a preference for the color. The prevalence of black among the European elites in the sixteenth century was clearly boosted by many factors, including the religious asceticism of the Catholic Reformation, as well as the continuing involvement of the Spanish Empire in Italian society and politics. Although various scholars have shown that its popularity in the late fifteenth century at the courts of Northern Italy developed at the same time as its use in Spain, it nevertheless came to be seen as emblematic of Spanish court dress.58 The associations of black with Spanish fashions could be a source of antipathy, as intimated in an oration given by Scipione Ammirato following the death of Francesco, praising the Grand Duke for being free from “all vanity.” Ammirato enthused that although Francesco’s mother was Spanish and he had been accustomed to the ways and fashions of the Spanish court, he did not himself possess any trace of what Ammirato termed “Spanish haughtiness”: The honours, the grandeur and the sovreign glory of this century consist in laying out a magnificent table, gambling very large sums of money, dressing

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in very expensive robes, and the highest and most supreme peak of all is disparaging one’s inferiors. All these things were very far from the nature of Grand Duke Francesco who, having more illustrious, and longstanding goals, of greater benefit to humankind, refuted vanity.59 This emphasis on Francesco’s modesty was doubtless partly a way of compensating for the oddities of his character, his reclusiveness, and lack of what might now be called charisma. This was an important statement that Francesco, who did not assert his authority particularly well during his reign, was not subjugated to the will of the Spanish court. Even black was possible to misjudge, therefore, and if it did not appear too haughty it could also be accused of being a sign of subservience. Castiglione’s promotion of it was partly related to his emphasis on the necessity for understatement, or sprezzatura, which he considered to be a form of grace in male behavior.60 However, writing on court protocol, Daniel Javitch argues that the code of understatement was motivated by a combination of factors, which included the ruler’s need to assert his own authority, and the court’s rigid, hierarchical structure of decorum. He elaborates that a court forces “its members to subdue or at least mask their aggressive and competitive drives. That is why such qualities as reticence, detachment, and understatement are so valued at court.”61 Although this leads Javitch to take a critical view of the courtier’s appearance, Jennifer Richards has interpreted this as an opportunity for the courtier to wield a positive, moderating influence, pointing out Castiglione’s conception of temperance as a “moral, political and aesthetic value,” taken from Cicero’s De Officiis, which suggests that the courtier’s example was intended to actively inspire similarly moderate behavior in his monarch.62 Far from being simply an aesthetic preference, wearing black was a way of masking desires, vanity, and unbridled masculinity, of oneself and others, a prerequisite for survival at court. The ubiquity of black, worn by so many different social groups, contrasts sharply with the notion that social hierarchies should be easily distinguished through dress. Stefano Guazzo was just one author who outlined this widely shared view in his Civil Conversazione (1574), where he argued that merchants and courtiers should be distinguished by different forms of clothing. He complained that this ideal was no longer reflected in contemporary fashions: You see that peasants dare to compete in their clothing with artisans, and artisans with merchants, and merchants with noblemen, so much so that once a grocer has taken up the habit of carrying arms and wearing the clothing of a noble, you cannot tell who he is until you see him in his shop selling his wares.63 However, the fact that black was such a fluid signifier might in fact have been one reason why Florentines were so eager to be portrayed wearing it.

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As we have seen, the true nature of nobility was the source of much debate at this time. Pastoureau speaks of the “dual nature” of black, in other words the black of kings and princes versus black of monks and clerics, yet it could be argued that for wealthy Florentines the color had three primary meanings simultaneously; it acted as a summation of their mercantile, civic, and courtly identities. The fact that restrained and steadfast black was fitting for men of different political persuasions and occupations perhaps contributed to its almost uncontested rule in Florentine portraiture throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. The notion of black as the universal color of the elites would have had a strong appeal in Florence, where it was still possible to combine roles that were considered to be incompatible in many other parts of Italy and abroad. As such, black glossed over some of the social and sartorial distinctions that were inconvenient truths for many Florentines. While there might have been other noticeable sartorial differences between professionals, merchants, and courtiers, it is significant that black had key associations with each of these groups, all gaining in different ways from the color’s inherent gravity. Black was therefore highly suited to what Wayne Rebhorn has termed the “protean nature” of the courtier.64 When the portraits of Luigi and his son Niccolò Capponi were commissioned, black was able to create visual harmony where others might have perceived dissonance. In Luigi Capponi’s portrait, his very plain black gown was presumably intended to emphasize his mercantile and civic, rather than courtly affiliations. His advancing age was perhaps also a deciding factor in the choice of this particularly sober attire, but, more importantly, it alluded to his position as a businessman and diplomat.65 Despite their wealth, the family had a public reputation for restraint. Luigi’s brother Alessandro avoided all forms of self-aggrandizement, preferring to wear a modest cape rather than a civic gown and, as we have seen, he chose to forego the customary mourning drapes on the family home after his death.66 Niccolò’s black is more aristocratic: the fine fabrics perhaps referring to his family’s silk trading interests, while the elegance of his outfit pushes at the boundaries of black as the renunciation of fashion. Furthermore, the three-quarter-length pose relates to developments in international court portraiture, while his cloak draped over one shoulder and drawn around the waist is a typically courtly gesture, also employed in the Tosini portrait. A deep-rooted preoccupation with circumscribing sartorial display in Florentine portraits continues to strike modern viewers. In the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of Medici portraiture, two of the most successful Florentine artists working on the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Tiberio Titi and Cristofano Allori, are described as embodying an “austerity that limited sumptuous excesses,” “free of any heroic overtones.”67 This muted quality is apparent in the two, earlier portraits of Luigi Capponi and his son and such a marked continuity reflects a caution regarding flamboyance in male dress in paintings that belied the extravagance of court display in other areas of Florentine life.

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6 Yo  uth, fashion, and desire

The relationship between advancing age and sartorial restraint is central to a portrait of four brothers from the Magalotti family [Fig. 6.1]. Painted in 1601, just after the death of their father Filippo di Antonio Magalotti, it is suffused with a sense of loss, poignantly heralding approaching adulthood and its accompanying responsibilities. In the absence of a paternal guide, it is also a powerful didactic image.1 Tiberio Titi’s painting alludes to the momentousness of this occasion in various prominent ways.2 The date of the portrait is inscribed on the architrave of the door next to the conjoined Magalotti-Capponi arms while the children’s ages are painted onto their clothing or the objects they hold: Marcantonio, 11 ½, Orazio, 6 years 4 months, Luigi 4, and Filippo 2 ½.3 Baptized Ottavio, the youngest boy was renamed in memory of his father. Now the eldest male member of the family, Marcantonio’s pose reflects his new responsibilities. His hand gently resting on the shoulder of his youngest brother, he closes the small group of children and solemnly regards the viewer. The interplay of the boys’ hands focuses attention on the objects they hold, each with its own symbolism. The youngest brothers, Filippo and Luigi, still occupied with the pursuits of childhood, clutch a small bunch of flowers and a ball. In contrast, Orazio and Marcantonio hold a pocketbook and a letter, respectively, hinting that they are poised to enter the world of adult affairs. The boys’ clothing was selected equally carefully to represent the upward trajectory toward masculine continence and adult codes of conduct. Unlike widows, children did not tend to wear mourning clothes for extended periods of time. Instead, Filippo, the youngest, is shown in a crimson damask gown, an ungherina, woven with a fashionable small-scale geometrical motif. Although wealthy children were often dressed as miniature adults, there was a growing feeling that they required new types of clothing suited to their specific needs. The ungherina was the first garment designed specifically for children. Popular in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, it was worn by both boys and girls up to around

Figure 6.1  Tiberio Titi, Portrait of Marcantonio, Orazio, Luigi, and Filippo Magalotti, 1601. Private Collection (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

four to six years of age.4 As its name suggests, it was inspired by the Hungarian-style overgarments as depicted by Cesare Vecellio, with loose, floor-length skirts, and long sleeves, fastened down the front with frogging.5 It was a practical alternative to breeches for boys who were not yet toilet trained and its long, hanging sleeves could be gripped by an adult, like leading reins. A rare illustration of this particular function can be seen in a Florentine depiction of a betrothal or wedding ceremony from the 1620s [FIG. 2.8]. It was also felt that looser garments were appropriate because they would not impede a child’s growth.6 A wider range of colors was considered suitable for young children’s dress, as advised by philosopher and theologian Tommaso Campanella in his La Città del Sole (1602).7 The bright, patterned silks worn by the younger Magalotti boys and their pure white, silk stockings and white-and-gold striped doublets conform to his recommendation for “beautiful and multi-coloured” dress.

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This portrait predates early English family records that convey the excitement and anticipation marking a boy’s breeching in the seventeenth century.8 Visually it relays this same transition from unisex infant clothes, redolent of a feminized, domestic world, to a form of male dress appropriate to public society. The three older brothers are shown in adult dress, composed of matching outfits of breeches and tight-fitting doublets worn under jerkins, with subtle variations in keeping with their different ages. The eldest two wear more sober, plain fabrics. Marcantonio has a dark red, satin doublet, black stockings, and dark shoes in place of his younger brothers’ white doublets, stockings, and shoes. Like Orazio, he sports the cropped hair of an adult, whereas Filippo and Luigi still have the fair hair of infancy, encouraged to grow into longer curls. Similar male dress codes are employed in the depiction of a group of children in Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli’s painting of St Ives, Protector of Widows and Orphans [Fig. 6.2]. Two young boys and a girl wear vivid yellow, blue, and scarlet clothing, but with the older boy bright colors

Figure 6.2  Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Saint Ives, Protector of Widows and Orphans, 1616, oil on panel, 291 × 215 cm, Palatine Gallery, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

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and decoration are confined to the lower half of the body, or semi-concealed garments. Fragments of silk damask and velvet woven with motifs almost identical to those worn by Filippo and Luigi can be found in the Textile Museum in Prato.9 It is certainly possible that the Magalotti boys owned the garments depicted here, although they have not been traced in the family’s surviving archival records and paintings were not necessarily faithful representations of clothing possessed. Yet the Magalotti accounts do show that Camilla used clothing to visually enhance the strength of the family unit, creating a coherent group with a dignified, and often uniform, appearance. As in the portrait, the two youngest boys often dressed in a way that distinguished them from Marcantanio and Orazio. On one occasion, Camilla purchased about 15 meters of white mock-velvet (mocaiardo) to make clothing for the “little boys” (fanciulli piccini).10 White was a color she avoided for her oldest child, for whom she selected muted greens, browns, and blacks. Camilla also dressed the children in identical garments. In 1605, the family stayed in Basilicata with Camilla’s brother in order to make a pilgrimage to the holy house of the Virgin at Loreto and Camilla ordered large quantities of goods from a mercer, paying a tailor to make them up into matching outfits of green perpignan wool with green Neapolitan silk stockings and four Spanish-style cloaks decorated with lace.11 Similar examples of family members dressing in matching clothing have been traced in archival records dating back to the fourteenth century.12 From the mid-sixteenth century, when portraits of whole family groups gained popularity, this was an arresting way to assert group identity and status. The predella panels to Alessandro Allori’s altarpiece of Christ and the Adulteress at the church of Santo Spirito also show similarly attired family members, with the two sons in matching doublets and hose with black Spanish-style capes [Fig. 6.3]. The visual unity created by the complementary clothing of these relatives gains greater force when juxtaposed with the drama of the divided family enacted above them.13 As the boys grew older, they reaped the benefits of the advantageous marriage of their older cousin, Costanza Magalotti, to Carlo Barberini, brother of the future

Figure 6.3  Left predella panel to the altarpiece Christ and the Adulteress attributed to the workshop of Alessandro Allori, 1577. Cini Chapel, Santo Spirito, Florence (Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze).

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pope Urban VIII. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Camilla Magalotti prepared her sons for Roman noble society. She hired tutors for them, including a dancing master, and sent Marcantonio to lodge with Carlo Barberini in Rome, where he probably participated in the celebrations for the coronation of Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici as Pope Leo XI.14 Marcantonio stayed on to attend the prestigious Clementine College and the younger boys also began to visit. Little is known about Marcantonio’s career, but the three other brothers all benefited from Grand ducal or papal patronage. Orazio was elected master general of the papal post and officially accepted as a member of the Roman patriciate in 1643. Luigi became a knight of Malta and a colonel in the papal army, commanding troops in Avignon. Filippo became director of the University of Pisa and prior of the Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen.15 During their first visits to Rome, Camilla continued to replenish her sons’ wardrobes, sending them basic garments, such as linen shirts and more luxurious items, including an embroidered stomacher.16 The boys began to order and record their own clothing purchases, increasingly controlling their own appearances. The kinds of clothing they purchased strayed far from the sartorial ideals of male sobriety formulated in Tiberio Titi’s portrait. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, their combined clothing cost on average was 141 florins per year, compared with the 75 florins Camilla spent on her own wardrobe. In contrast, a single cache of clothing receipts recorded in Rome from 1617 to 1621 for all four boys comes to a grand total of 1430 scudi. Unfortunately, no account books survive for these five years, so we can only gain a partial sense of their overall outlay. Yet this demonstrates that their total average annual expenditure had at least doubled from 141 florins to 286 scudi.17 The nature of the clothing the brothers purchased was even more striking than the sums of money spent. In 1614, Orazio Magalotti purchased a pair of gloves for 24 lire from Orazio Veli, one of several perfume sellers patronized by the young men. The receipt described the gloves in detail: A pair of gloves perfumed with amber with pink silk stitching on the outside and gauntlets in the French style, of pink checked satin embroidered in gold with naturalistic silk flowers with gold lace around the lace border. The ruffle around the edge of the gloves is made of two widths of pink silk ribbon edged with gold lace.18 The pink, checked gloves were typical of the twenty-year-old’s whole wardrobe. Like his brothers, Orazio was drawn to a style of dress remarkable for its complexity and profusion of ornament. Marcantonio’s first independent purchase was a doublet made of cloth of gold and purple silk, far more valuable than anything his mother had procured for him.19 All the brothers favored silks with the smaller-scale motifs that were popular at the time, with a variety of floral or geometric designs,

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such as pinecones, waves, floral sprigs, and herringbone stripes, in fashionable colors, mainly subtle half-tones, muted, or pastel shades [Fig. 6.4].20 The very names of these silks—dried leaves, dried roses, seawater, sky, and razorbill black—suggest products valued as much for their fashionable qualities as their intrinsic worth. The plain and patterned fabrics used for the brothers’ clothing were embellished by a range of specialist artisans, including pinkers, slashers, and embroiderers.21 With not an inch of their clothing left plain and even the linings of their garments decorated in some manner, the brothers enthusiastically embraced the fashion for what Avril Hart termed the “decorative abuse of expensive textiles.”22 The Magalotti often had their clothing altered to keep up with the latest silhouettes: doublet collars heightened in accordance with the prevailing Spanish styles and Italian-style voluminous breeches taken in to follow the French lead.23 On the whole, their upper garments, such as cassocks, cloaks, and doublets, showed Spanish influences, while their breeches were French-style, sometimes made with “large French pleats.” Their garments testify to the continuing impact of Spanish dress, even as French fashions entered a dominant phase that would last for centuries across Europe.24 The sophistication and fashion-conscious nature of the brothers’ clothing is reflected by the number of payments made to tailors for disegnatura, a reference either to garment design or types of surface decoration, such as slashing or embroideries. Tailors were usually paid simply for cutting and sewing garments, so this new service indicates a fundamental shift in attitudes, suggesting that clothes making might aspire to have something in common with those more esteemed art forms based upon the concept of disegno.25 In 1611,

Figure 6.4 Italian silk velvet, late sixteenth century, Fletcher Fund, 1946, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 46.156.88. www.metmuseum.org

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the tailor Francesco Mazzanti made two expensive outfits for Marcantonio, which were meticulously described in the bill: And on 4 December for making a pair of sky-coloured breeches out of mixed wool and a matching cassock and short cloak, with two different types of decoration on the cloak and the breeches, one on the cassock, one on the sleeves and two along the seams, with pickadils decorated with buttonholes on the sides, with the same type of ornament on the cloak, namely four narrow bands of razorbill-coloured satin along the length and four with spangles with a silver stripe alongside the said bands and the same on the breeches as on the cloak and cassock, lined with taffeta and the cloak edged with satin and covered with a silver braid and the same decoration for the cassock lire 140 For the design (disegnatura) of the mixed cloth suit and cloak

lire 1426

As Orazio’s pink silk gloves indicate, the brothers’ accessories tended to be as intricate and varied as their clothing. In 1621, a small beret made of rich tawny sarcenet with an upturned brim, decorated with a thin gold cord, and lined with taffeta, was purchased “for evening wear” (per la notte), while other hats were trimmed with nightjar or heron feathers.27 The association of garments with particular social activities, or times of day, hints at the impact of court etiquette on dress. Already, new ideas regarding hygiene and civility had increased the importance of underwear.28 Alongside their fine linen undershirts, the Magalotti accounts record underpants (mutande) some of which were finished with silk ribbons and purchased from tailors rather than the cohorts of domestic and semiprofessional women who usually made items of linen underwear.29 The brothers’ refined appearances would have been entirely in keeping with their new surroundings and companions. In Rome, they enjoyed the society of a sizable group of male relatives. Costanza Magalotti’s brothers were their shopping companions and joint clothing receipts were made out to the four Magalotti brothers and their cousin, Neri. Another cousin, Antonio Magalotti, lent Marcantonio money for a joint shopping trip as well as for goods needed to make a doublet, including gold and black embroidery silks. He also paid the Convent of Sant’Anna for the doublet’s embroidery.30 Clothing played a significant role in Rome’s reputation for ostentatious public displays of wealth. Visiting the city in 1581, even Michel de Montaigne, used to the sartorial splendors of the French court, was impressed, declaring, “there is no comparison between the richness of their clothing and ours: everything is covered with pearls and precious stones.”31 Rome’s flourishing tailoring trade is indicative of the high level of demand for lavish clothing. A census carried out in 1526–27 listed 261 tailors working for a population of 55,000.32 Another census of 1622 showed that almost a third of the city’s workshops were connected in some way with the production of clothing, including 382 mercers’ and 361 tailors’ workshops.33 In this respect, at least,

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Florence lagged behind the papal city: in the Florentine workshop census of 1561, only 70 tailors are listed in the service of a population of about 60,000.34 Over the course of the sixteenth century, the wealth of the pope’s relatives began to eclipse that of the old Roman nobility, but the scale of Urban VIII’s nepotism was unprecedented.35 Costanza’s brothers and sons all profited as a result and several of them came to enjoy vast personal wealth together with elevated positions in the church. A cardinal’s hat did nothing to prevent Costanza’s youngest son, Antonio Barberini, from becoming renowned for his flamboyant lifestyle.36 Against this backdrop, the extended Magalotti family would have felt increasing pressure to look the part.

6.1 The threat of effeminacy While the role of children’s dress in binding familial ties was uncontroversial, the sartorial appearance of boys on the verge of adulthood was a source of mounting concern. Toward the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the Magalotti brothers had taken responsibility for the family accounts, they were subject to adult sumptuary laws and their dress would have received greater scrutiny.37 The brothers’ interest and investment in clothing was typical of a much broader trend among the wealthy and not surprisingly clothing was increasingly used to frame discussions of codes of conduct for young men. Some authors considered it acceptable for young men to take greater interest in their appearances than their elders. The Roman author Giacinto Gigli, for example, argued that the clothes of a prince should express majesty, those of an elderly gentleman gravity, those of a young one elegance, those of a cleric dignified modesty, those of a matron should be decorous, and those of a maiden should be comely and stylish.38 Similarly, Leonardo Fioravanti reported that young men wore “clothing with a thousand braids and colours,” but that when men matured they changed in themselves and in their clothing, dressing in a more virtuous or upright manner (honestamente).39 However, the extravagant appearances of young men attracted at least as much, if not more, opprobrium in contemporary literature than those of their female counterparts. Medical and moralizing tracts, prescriptive texts and political treatises, plays and verse, all expressed anxieties about the damage that inappropriate clothing could wreak on young men’s reputations. Despite the very diverse scope of writings engaged with this theme, male sartorial transgressions tended to be categorized as displays of effeminacy. Contemporary views on the instability of sex and gender increased the threat posed by womanly men and

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manly women to the social order and consequently dress played a vital role in shoring up distinctions.40 Exploring ideas about clothing and effeminacy in a Florentine context reveals that shifting cultural and social expectations for young men added further intensity to these underlying debates and fears. Effeminacy could be manifested through a variety of culturally produced behaviors, including speech or posture but above all it was bound up with clothing, given the latter’s deeply rooted associations with female comportment and desires. Although women were often berated for their pursuit of fashion, it was also understood to be a legitimate female preoccupation. The use of clothing to achieve greater visibility and ingratiate oneself among one’s peers was thought to be a prerogative of the female sex particularly when employed by women of a marrying age, whose physical appearance might help to secure an advantageous match. A small but significant number of women spoke out publicly against sumptuary legislation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries arguing that clothing was one of their only means to assert social status and thus they deserved to dress as they pleased. They presumably voiced the feelings of many others who also had little opportunity to contribute to public life and for whom appearances were profoundly significant. When the Sienese Battista Petrucci was offered a reward for her skill in performing a recital in Latin in front of Emperor Frederick III in 1452, she requested personal exemption from sumptuary laws.41 The following year the Bolognese noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti made a similar plea, explicitly referring to clothing as a form of self-expression.42 In the late sixteenth century, the women of Cesena continued to petition against sumptuary legislation, declaring that as for us, we are driven out of all public offices, excluded from the magistracies, and deprived of all dignities, large or small . . . in order to alleviate such misery we should be allowed this devotion to clothing and these ornaments.43 The tone of these appeals add weight to Stanley Chojnacki’s suggestion that the low-cut gowns, so popular with Venetian women in the sixteenth century, were part of a calculated strategy to use clothing to obtain greater public visibility and power.44 In contrast, it was hoped that noblemen would attain distinction through nobler acts.45 However, young Florentine males had limited access to power and authority. As the average age of marriage continued to rise into the early seventeenth century, the so-called “long age of youth” showed no signs of abating. Men were still regarded as “young,” or giovani, up to the ages of twenty-five or thirtyfive, sometimes even forty, both in legislation and government deliberations.46 Furthermore, noblemen were often excluded from political life until the age of about thirty.47 The lack of a well-defined role for Florentine giovani was already a pressing concern in the fifteenth century and fueled the perception that they were instigators of socially disruptive activities.48 Donato Giannotti, one of the leaders of

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the Florentine Republic of 1527, lamented the political marginalization of youths in Florence, comparing them unfavorably with their Venetian counterparts.49 Longstanding worries about the sartorial and physical appearances of young men were exacerbated by new fears about the effects of court life on young men, seen to promote a shift from labor to leisure.50 In 1566, Venetian ambassador Lorenzo Priuli noted: “Led on by pleasure the youth of the city throw themselves more freely into courtly life, than staying in their workshops and attending to their business.”51 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Venetian ambassador Francesco Badoer again reported a lack of productivity among male youths: “For some time now, the nobility has begun to abandon mercantile activities, the young have started to spend more time than they did before at horse riding, promenading, or at the court, bringing a very decorative effect to this city.”52 Such accounts implied that young noblemen did not aspire to any more gainful employment than the perfection of their appearances. This epitomizes the “classical stereotype of effeminacy,” as defined by David Halperin, embodied by men “who abandoned the competitive society of men for the amorous society of women, who pursued a life of pleasure, who made love instead of war.”53 The extensive range of social ills encompassed by effeminacy in early modern culture has been summed up by Amanda Bailey, who describes it as “a concept that indexed an ideological faultline and conjured up a disconcerting nexus of leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, and decadence.”54 As a sign of promiscuity or unfettered sexual desire, effeminate dress was not yet exclusively linked with homosexuality as it came to be in later centuries, with fashionable male groups such as the English “fops” and “mollies.”55 Michael Rocke’s research into convictions for sodomy in the fifteenth century has underlined the prevalency of homosexual acts in Florence. In this context we might expect men to have been further incriminated by their physical appearances, however Rocke notes that although clothing was described at trials, no explicit connection was made between these garments and effeminate manners or cross-dressing. Furthermore, he points out that although female-gendered names and metaphors were used to refer to “boys’ receptive sexual behaviour,” this “did not imply any particular mannerisms, dress, or other characteristics that might be considered ‘effeminate’.”56 The majority of Florentine trials involved men below marriageable age and homosexual experiences were often considered to form part of a life phase that was eventually abandoned for wedlock.57 Clearly delineated cultural conventions relating to age and power governed these practices, which were held to be particularly transgressive when an older man submitted himself passively to a younger partner. Discussions about the dangers of effeminacy in clothing also imply that the manner of expressing and yielding to desire was part of the problem. Effeminate dress in the Courtier is construed as a sign of sexual subjugation, just as Castiglione lamented the demise of an Italian style of clothing because it

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symbolized Italy’s political subjugation to French and Imperial Spanish powers.58 The soft, delicate man criticized by Castiglione reflected one of the prevailing views of effeminacy, namely that it was the hallmark of men who found excessive pleasure in the company of women, to the extent that they allowed themselves to be disempowered by women and even resemble them in their outward appearances. Giovanni Della Casa’s evocation of “Ganymede’s hose” in his Galateo has been discussed by several authors in relation to early modern male sexuality. In David Kuchta’s view, Della Casa intended to link “immoderate dress with homosexuality.”59 The same source is referred to by Jose Cartagena-Calderon, who argues that there was a direct association between effeminate clothing and sodomy in Renaissance Spain.60 However, Della Casa’s advice is rarely read in its entirety and when considered in full it apparently has wider implications. Della Casa warns, “Your garments should not be extremely fancy or extremely ornate, so that no one can say that you are wearing Ganymede’s hose, or that you have donned Cupid’s doublet.”61 While Ganymede, the beautiful boy abducted by Zeus, was a homoerotic symbol, Cupid was associated with multiple forms of desire, both acceptable and transgressive. An increasingly frequent subject of visual representations, Cupid was often portrayed with female companions, sometimes entwined with his mother Venus, or as the lover of Psyche, a story familiar in the Renaissance from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.62 It would seem that Della Casa was warning men away from fashion not just to discourage homosexuality, but to encourage self-control among all sexually active men to make them more virile. The allusion to Ganymede and Cupid implies young men who are emasculated by giving themselves up to love and luxuriating in it, while their clothing enhances their attraction, inspiring similar excesses in others. In different ways these men “play the woman’s role” because they have relinquished restraint or they have encouraged and submitted themselves passively to the desires of others, be they male or female. This broader interpretation of effeminacy is supported by Mario DiGangi who argues that it caused “heteroerotic or homoerotic disorder” in the sixteenth century.63 It is pertinent that the same line from the Galateo appears in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, a play in which the central characters foreswear the company of women for three years in order to cultivate the masculine virtue of restraint. One of the protagonists, Lord Biron, conflates the different forms of dress mentioned by Della Casa, declaring that “rhymes are guards on wanton Cupid’s hose” (Act IV, Scene III).64 The sartorial signifiers of effeminacy outlined in contemporary sources can all be interpreted as indicators of lasciviousness, luxury, self-love, or excessive desire. Several basic markers appear repeatedly in Italian writing over a prolonged period from at least the late fifteenth through to the seventeenth centuries. Surface decoration was regularly criticized. In his Vita Civile (1431–38), Matteo Palmieri stated that “young men should not be allowed clothing which is too fine, overly neat, or embroidered or multi-coloured. All feminine ornament should be

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avoided.”65 Discussing ideal forms of dress in a similar vein, Giovanni Pontano wrote in 1498: “As regards young men, they need loveliness and that elegance, which is not, however, in any way womanly.”66 In 1504, Marco Parenti attacked the feminizing influence of French fashions, referring to the low-necked, decorated shirts well documented in Italian portraiture of the first two decades of the sixteenth century: “Young men seemed to have turned into women, displaying their throats and necks with shirts lasciviously embroidered around the top.”67 As dress fashions for both sexes became more ornate, these criticisms became more detailed, for example, in Sabba da Castiglione’s warnings to young men in 1559: Shun all signs of excess and showy ostentation in your dress and hosiery. Always be grave, plain and modest. Avoid lace, or edgings, fringing, stripes, slashing, pinking, borders and embroideries, and other conceits and frivolities of this corrupt and foolish world, as they are not fitting to your situation or condition.68 Intricate types of surface ornament, such as embroidery, were thought to be superficial in contrast with more masculine elements of dress, such as form and structure. This hierarchy of value reflects an Aristotelian privileging of form over matter, which was central to Renaissance theories on the visual arts. We can see its influence in terms of color theory, for example, as in Paul Hills’ note that it fostered a belief in “the superiority of austere colours over florid ones.”69 In the context of Elizabethan England, Karen Newman has pointed to the link between the decorative and the feminine, tracing the devaluation of ornament from classical antiquity onward. She suggests that the ornamental also had the capacity to produce “anxiety and restlessness” because of its tendency to proliferate.70 This in itself flew in the face of continence, a staple virtue of masculinity. Time-consuming processes of dressing and grooming were considered to be as feminizing as the appearances they were designed to achieve, as they promoted concerns about idleness. In the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti had already drawn a direct connection between fine dress and a lack of industriousness, an essential male virtù. In his Ecatonfilea of circa 1429, Alberti warned young women away from men who dedicated too much time to their appearance, because they would not make suitable husbands: To me it seems senseless to love those idle and tame creatures who for want of something to do practice lovemaking almost as a business and an art, and wander about in their pretty wigs and slashes and little embroideries and liveries that show their foolishness, and wander around trifling and talking. Avoid them, my daughters, avoid them: for men like these are not able to love. When they spend their days in promenading it is not that they are following you; they are only trying to escape from boredom.71

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Although productivity had different implications in the female domestic sphere, an overly carefully maintained appearance was also seen as damaging for women as they appeared to be neglecting their role as household managers. This is discussed in Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione (1574): “Women who devote so much time to the outer ornament of their person, are careless and dirty in the tasks of the household, while on the other hand I have met many enemies of this kind of sumptuousness who are extremely diligent when it comes to the running and the decoration of the household.”72 For a man the fault was magnified in proportion to the ideally more public and substantial nature of his occupations. Consequently, intricate hair arrangements and ringlets were regularly the subject of satirical jibes aimed at exposing a range of typically female defects, such as slothfulness, a lack of rigor, or an inability to temper one’s passions.73 Matteo Palmieri, for example, disdained long hair and curls on men, saying that they were “not required for the well-born.”74 Curls were childish things, underlined by their appearance on the two youngest brothers in the Magalotti portrait, while on adults they hinted at time misspent, very distinct from beards that confirmed virility.75 In his will of 1611, Riccardo Riccardi advised his young nephews, Cosimo and Gabriello, against “fringes and curls as they are ignoble and base in men and noble people.”76 Criticism of long hair on men continued in the later seventeenth century and Eugenia Paulicelli has noted its appearance in the writings of Venetian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti.77 Head hair was vilified because it could be tangibly linked with the quality of softness associated with the overall appearance of the effeminate courtier as we can see from Count Canossa’s diatribe: I would have our Courtier’s face be such, not so soft and feminine as many attempt to have who not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows, but preen themselves in all those ways that the most wanton and dissolute women in the world adopt.78 The Neapolitan Giovanni Battista Della Porta used similar language to describe the problem in La Fisionomia dell’Uomo: Aristotle adds in his Rhetoric that long hair is the emblem of a free man, but these days, as things go from bad to worse, the custom of cultivating long hair has been abused so that it has become a bad habit, one of effeminate softness, and so luxurious and effeminate men have started to cut into their hair in different places to create different lengths in order to appear beautiful and decorative. . . . Only a woman should have long hair.79 Soft and delicate were adjectives traditionally applied to the physical and sartorial appearance of the ideal woman. The trait of softness, or mollezza,

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which suggested a yielding nature, was therefore directly opposed to a series of masculine virtues, primarily perseverance, in a tradition that extended from Aristotle through to Aquinas and also strongly influenced many sixteenthcentury authors, including Della Porta.80 This rejection of softness percolated through to other forms of cultural expression, such as music where the note B molle (B flat) was perceived to have feminine qualities.81 It is interesting that Italian texts did not make more of a connection between softness of character and the tactile qualities of fabrics, as William Tyndale did in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) which describes: “A kinge that is soft as silke and effeminate/that is to saye turned to the nature of a woman.”82 This perhaps reflected Italian pride in local manufacturing, whereas English commentators had more reason to demonize this foreign fabric.83

6.2 Distinguishing fashionable from effeminate Despite being sensed everywhere, effeminacy seems to have evaded a conclusive definition. We have seen that Italian texts associated effeminate appearances with qualities of softness, excessive ornament, or the processes of dressing; however, they very rarely referred to specific colors or garment types. We could contrast this with the case of seventeenth-century Spain, described by Elizabeth Lehfeldt, where the ruff became the primary target of similar critiques.84 Gerry Milligan has pointed out that the underlying sartorial code for the male courtier was that “a man may dress as he pleases, but he can never be assured that he will not be called effeminate as there is no comprehensive and easy distinction between appropriate dress and womanly dress.”85 The obvious similarities between effeminate and masculine typologies of fashionable dress are illustrated in a pair of engravings from Cesare Vecellio’s Costume Book, which depict two “giovanetti (little youths) from Venice and other parts of Italy [Figs. 6.5 and 6.6].”86 Both men are equally elegantly dressed and are shown gazing downward, unlike older, Venetian male citizens, who are usually depicted in profile or forward facing. The first young nobleman, however, maintains his virility through his sword and the swagger implied by his hand on hip and jutting elbow.87 The second youth wears equally ornate clothing, including a “beret of uncut velvet with a silk veil tied around it arranged into a rose at the front” and a “doublet slashed with designs in the shape of crosses or stars to reveal a coloured taffeta lining.” Yet the meaning of this second outfit is subtly altered in light of the accompanying text that crucially describes the subject as being “in love.”88 He is shown carrying a handkerchief, an archetypal love token, instead of a more virile attribute. His head turns down toward the flower held out in his other hand, with an air of

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Figure 6.5  Dress of Young Men of the City of Venice, and Students and throughout all of Italy, Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590). © The British Library Board, 810.i.2, p. 160.

bashfulness that would be more commonly associated with women. Individually innocuous, these different signifiers work in combination to communicate the overall effeminacy of his stance. Given that the majority of sixteenth-century Italian portraits of young men followed Baldassare Castiglione’s ideal of restraint, as discussed in the previous chapter, the fashionably dressed male subject requires careful interpretation. Interestingly, often the sitter’s identity is unknown in the clusters of sixteenthcentury portraits of men in more vibrant, decorated, ostentatious dress, making them tantalizingly elusive. In this respect, they are reminiscent of exemplary depictions of female beauty intended to be gazed upon to conjure up feelings of love.89 While it has been assumed that some of these women were courtesans, others seem to be generic portraits, possibly stock images painted for the open market. In paintings of fashionable young men, the subject often averts his gaze rather

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Figure 6.6  Dress of the Young Men of Venice and of other Places in Italy, Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590). © The British Library Board, 810.i.2, p. 162.

than assertively confronting the viewer, thereby assuming a pose more typical of female portraits. The combination of their longing attitude and the “effeminate” elements of their dress suggest that, like the Vecellio engraving, some might be images depicting men “in love,” as the objects of love, or as personifications of celibate love, something that contemporary viewers would have fully understood and appreciated. Discussing Italian portraits of youthful men, Bette Talvacchia notes that some sitters are “wilfully constructed as beautiful, ornamental and sensual; in sum as objects of desire, a classification that would not have been seen as trivial or pejorative, given the nobility the period bequeathed to such desires transmitted by beauty.”90 She argues that this mode of depiction sought legitimacy through its adoption of “a poetic approach” that gave the subject an “ethereal quality.” As depictions of Neoplatonic love they championed a model of celibacy that removed men from the dominance of women.91

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The impact of effeminate behavior on clothing, rather than the reverse, is revealed in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, first published in 1581. In the enchanted wood, enslaved by his love for the witch Armida, the warrior Rinaldo is horrified by a glimpse of his reflection in the shield brought by his rescuers, knights Carlo and Ubaldo: Turning his glance to that gleaming shield, He in that mirror sees himself at once, Effeminately groomed, his hair, his cloak Beribboned, fragrant with lascivious smell. A sword—where is his sword? Oh, there it is: A useless piece of luxury, a toy, so dainty, it seems a futile ornament, and not a soldier’s deadly instrument.92 Rinaldo sees his manhood reduced to a trifling decoration, a metaphor that appears in more prosaic form in conduct book descriptions of limp and languid male courtiers. It should be noted that Rinaldo’s clothing is, of course, materially unaltered as his true metamorphosis takes place in spirit only. His cloak was always beribboned and his hair groomed, but it is only now that he has been emasculated by Armida that he sees himself as effeminate. This is reflected in Bernardo Castello’s engraving to accompany this canto, where Rinaldo wears exactly the same clothing as his liberators, although his helmet is missing and his curls are longer [Fig. 6.7]. His recumbent pose is another reference to his unmanliness. More than fifty years after the first edition of Castello’s illustrations, the Vicentine artist Franceso Maffei reinterpreted the scene [Fig. 6.8]. Here, however, the sartorial contrast between Rinaldo’s embellished clothing and floral hairpiece, and the spartan attire of the two warriors arriving to release him is made concrete, creating an evident divide between effeminate and masculine dress codes. By investing so heavily in fashionable dress, the Magalotti brothers blatantly disregarded calls for male sartorial restraint. When Camilla Magalotti still clothed her young sons she would have been proudly aware of the striking impression created by the four young boys in their matching Spanish-style green outfits. As adults, when inviting such attention risked notoriety, the Magalotti brothers continued to dress in the latest fashions. Heavily decorated with ribbons, embroideries, and braiding, many features of late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century male fashions coincided with contemporary definitions of effeminacy. Their multiple layers, ties, and fastenings also meant that putting on an entire outfit could be a lengthy affair in itself, doing little to dampen concerns about male inactivity. There is insufficient evidence for us to interpret the brothers’ pursuit of fashion as an act of rebellion, yet it does conform to Alexandra Shepard’s definition of anti-patriarchal behavior in that

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Figure 6.7 Bernardo Castello, Engraving of Rinaldo and the Mirror Shield, from Torquato Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, unnumbered folios (Genoa: Pavoni, 1617). © The British Library Board, 80.h.8.

Figure 6.8  Francesco Maffei, Rinaldo and the Mirror Shield, about 1650–55, oil on copper (85.PC.321.1). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

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“it was a deliberate inversion of the norms commonly claimed for patriarchal manhood.”93 How was it possible for young men like the Magalotti to wear ornate clothing that could easily be called effeminate without damaging their reputation? The sources discussed here corroborate David Kuchta’s sense that clothing could be “innocent.”94 Fashionable dress did not in itself create womanly men. Rather, it magnified or revealed a preexisting lack of masculine virtue and therefore clothing excesses provided an opening to publicly criticize transgressive behavior. Discussing Polonius’ advice in Hamlet to buy clothes that are “rich, not gaudy,” Kuchta makes the point that behavior transcends clothing as “the difference [between the two] was determined more by attitude than actual garment.”95 In other words, in this context it would be less accurate to say that clothes “made” men than to argue that they could be used to expose their failings. Given the many nuances of dress decorum, the same outfit could be shameful or honorable, depending on a series of factors such as social context, status, and an individual’s comportment. The Magalotti brothers were able to “pull off ” the aspects of their appearance that might have been deemed insufficiently masculine because their social power, their illustrious circumstances, and companions, all helped to protect their honor. Throughout this period, sartorial effeminacy was used as an insult and as an anti-exemplary, instructive device intended to control a social group often viewed as subversive and unruly. The visual similarities between appropriate and inappropriate display increased its effectiveness, fanning anxieties that this boundary could be crossed at any time.

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7 Festive dress

According to Castiglione, if you were to see “a gentleman pass by dressed in a habit quartered in varied colours, or with an array of strings and ribbons in bows and cross-lacings” you would be justified in taking him for a fool or buffoon.1 Combining different colors in one outfit, or wearing stripes, could be interpreted as a sign that the wearer was either lewd or mad.2 However, in certain contexts male appearances were unleashed from the rules that normally governed male dress decorum. We have seen in Chapter 1 that noblemen wore brightly colored clothes when they participated in court festivities and Federico Fregoso identified two other scenarios that required extraordinary clothing, namely games and masques. It is significant that Fregoso considered these quite disparate events in tandem, unified by their associations with festive sport, and indeed the types of clothing they required offered uncommon freedoms to Florentine noblemen. This chapter explores the outfits worn at football and Carnival, analyzing their capacity to project the mental or physical attributes of wearers, and to emphasize virtues that were less overtly conveyed by other forms of clothing. Dressing up, masquerading or disguising oneself was most common during the period around Carnival, in the weeks preceding Lent, but important state occasions offered further opportunities throughout the year, and the time spent devising and commissioning festive outfits meant they were far from incidental to the way Florentine noblemen thought about their physical appearance. Italians were seen to be leaders in these kinds of revelries. A masque celebrated in 1512 at Henry VIII’s court was described as an Italianate invention: “The king with xi others was disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not sene before in England.”3 The celebrations to mark the 1589 marriage of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine scaled new heights of magnificence and inventiveness, resulting in, as James Saslow puts it, “the theatricalization of the whole spatial environment” of Florence.4 A great variety of different musical and dramatic art forms, including intermezzi, ballets, tournaments, and masquerades, thrived at the Medici court, many of them guided by a shared aesthetic and spirit.5

Their ingenuity and popularity must have surely contributed to the enthusiasm of Florentine noblemen for donning fantastical costumes. The alacrity with which they created disguises or alter egos for themselves is reflected in the nicknames, often of a humorous nature, adopted by members of the Florentine Academy, such as Matteo Botti and his rather unflattering Insipido, or the poet Anton Francesco Grazzini, better known by his pseudonym, Il Lasca (the Roach). There is already a substantial literature on Florentine court masques and the professionals involved in staging them.6 Instead, this chapter focuses on the role of courtiers who appeared in allegorical and musical entertainments such as buffalo races, tournaments, or Saracen jousts, dressed in costumes or liveries. These could mostly be described as “non-scripted events,” although many of the themes portrayed were intellectually sophisticated, such as the union of the arts, the cosmos, or the battle between love and war. These creatively cerebral elements contributed to their attraction. As discussed in Chapter 1, festivities were central to the exercise of power under the Medici, playing a fundamental role in aggrandizing and glorifying the court and the city of Florence. Henk Th. Van Veen argues that from the 1560s Cosimo used these occasions to “create a climate in which the Florentine elite was constantly reminded of its own exclusivity and prominence.”7 Taking part in public ceremonies, sporting events, and celebrations was also a question of personal honor, and their competitive nature is evident from the way that individual courtiers jostled one another for prominence. This is relayed by an incident that took place during the entry of the new Florentine archbishop Antonio Altoviti in 1567. According to longstanding tradition, a representative of the Strozzi had the right to take care of the bridle and saddle of the Archbishop’s horse after he dismounted at the church of San Pietro Maggiore. A dispute erupted between the different branches of the family as to whom this honor should fall and was so divisive that the matter was only resolved after the intervention of Francesco de’ Medici.8 The example of Matteo Botti also shows that organizing a masque could provide an important opportunity to display or consolidate status at court. Florentine noblemen were bound up in all stages of these performances: joining the planning committees, providing financial support, performing, and later being commemorated for their contribution. Courtiers who paid for their own liveries or costumes were guaranteed lasting fame in official records of events, named in festival books or in engravings of festival floats by court artists such as Giulio Parigi and Remigio Cantagallina. Participation in the majority of the events discussed in this chapter was restricted to male members of the court, although there was scope for female involvement in some kinds of festive performance, mainly semi-private events held among peers. Male and female courtiers danced together, for example, in a masquerade at the Pitti Palace in 1611.9 It was more acceptable, though still unusual, for elite women to take on the role of patron, as in Margherita Gonzaga’s sponsorship of the famous balletto delle donne at the Ferrarese court, originally danced by courtiers who were

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later replaced by professional singers and dancers, sometimes with women crossdressing as warriors.10 Decorum did not loosen its grip on female lives even when it came to spectatorship. Anton Francesco Grazzini’s poem Il Canto di Zanni e di Magnifici, describes a troupe of zanni (an early form of commedia dell’arte) staging separate performances in private households for women who were not allowed to attend in public halls.11 Nevertheless, as we have seen in Chapter 1, noblewomen could play a vital role as onlookers, witnessing and heightening the masculinity of performing courtiers. As Louise Fradenburg explains in the context of the medieval joust, which inspired many of these sixteenth-century activities, “the lady dramatizes the masculinity of the warrior by being what he is not and by watching his effort from another place.”12 One of Niccolò Martelli’s letters provides a vivid description of liveried noblemen carousing about Florence at the end of Carnival in 1546, reminiscent of soldiers returning home from a great victory: “With an infinite number of candles, they went about the city, singing to the gentlewomen about their great exploits that day.”13 An event without spectators lost much of its meaning and it was to be hoped that a match was watched by “the most beautiful women and the most important gentlemen of the city.”14 In Federico Fregoso’s account of the importance of “being seen” in combat the spectators are not gender specific. He advises that courtiers should look “fine and comely” and “draw the eyes of the spectators to you like a magnet attracts iron.”15 When courtiers showed off in front of women, they were simultaneously demonstrating to male spectators their ability to impress the opposite sex. In this respect, football was the ideal sport, perfectly configured to enable noblemen to be seen in the public squares of Florence and to enjoy the admiration of onlookers. A football game was much more visible than tennis, another popular pastime with the Medici, but one that was restricted to purpose-built courts in Medici villas, often outside the city.16 The large-scale spectacles and operas in Florence have received most scholarly attention, but court life was also enlivened by a succession of smaller entertainments and parties. Costumes could take many different forms, ranging from the simple and spontaneous, such as a cloak and mask, as when Cosimo de’ Medici attended a party in a lucco, to clothes that differed only moderately from ordinary ones, to truly fantastical outfits. When garments were worn out or simply no longer fit for normal use they could be turned into costumes. The items auctioned off by the Orsini included “two Carnival outfits that are worth little.” There is nothing in the description to mark them out as Carnival wear, apart from perhaps the jujube (giuggiolino) color of a pair of taffeta breeches and cassock.17 A list of old dresses, some described as having old-fashioned embroideries, in the Medici Wardrobe in the last decade of the sixteenth century contains suggestions for possible uses for them, including selling them on, turning them into domestic furnishings or ecclesiastical textiles, or alternatively using them for “masques or parties.”18 Whatever the Medici costume store lacked could be obtained by hiring

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outfits: Jewish second-hand dealers from the Blanis family rented out male and female Carnival costumes to the Medici, including Turkish costumes with turbans for Carnival in 1619.19 For grander occasions, such as the 1589 Medici wedding, bespoke costumes were commissioned, from the same artisans who produced fashionable dress or from makers who specialized in theatrical productions.20 The different mechanisms for the production and distribution of costumes reinforce a sense of their prevalence. Similar patterns can be traced at the court of Henry VIII: the wardrobe paid for many masquerade costumes and the king sometimes gave them as gifts to courtiers afterward, but he also had a store of clothing for masques, with items being recycled and remade when necessary.21 The frequency with which costumes were required must have boosted the trade in new and second-hand clothing. If an item were made for a specific event, it might not be worn again in the same form but could be recycled into something else. Benvenuto Cellini and his apprentice, Ascanio, fell out when the latter asked if he could have a doublet made for himself out of Cellini’s blue satin cloak, described as only having been worn once, “in that procession.”22 Susan Gaylard’s analysis of Pietro Aretino’s reactions to gifts of clothing from his patrons throws up interesting questions about the meanings of garments.23 Gaylard shows Aretino employing different strategies in order to reduce the obligation these gifts placed him under, including suggesting he would pass clothing on to his friends to be used for Carnival. Such examples demonstrate that costumes or liveries could become fashionable dress and vice versa, and that festive wear could be relatively fluid both in terms of function and meaning.

7.1 Dressed to fight Rather in the same way that myths had evolved about the lucco, by the sixteenth century Florentine football was layered with heroic overtones drawn from both the classical world and the more recent republican past. The Vocabolario della Crusca states that “football is also the name of an ancient game, particular to Florence, played in the manner of an ordered battle with an inflatable ball, similar to the ‘battle of the ball’ (sferomachia), passed down from the Greeks to the Romans and from the Romans to us.” It began to be played more frequently in the second-half of the fifteenth century and under the ducal regime the Medici appropriated various aspects of the game’s visual symbolism, starting with the connection of the football itself with the Medici emblem of six balls. Its spherical shape enabled further allusions to the names of Grand Dukes Cosimo I and II and the cosmos as a whole.24 Games took place to coincide with Medici family events, players sometimes wore Medici colors and were captained by members of the Medici family. In Raffaello Gualterotti’s depiction of a match that took place in 1589 as part of the celebrations for Ferdinando and Christine of Lorraine’s wedding, the Grand Duke’s team wore

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Figure 7.1 Raffaello Gualterotti, Gioco del Calcio—Piazza Santa Croce, Florence, 1589, oil on canvas. Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University.

pink and the Grand Duchess’ dark blue, edged with gold braid [Fig. 7.1]. The team leaders are distinguished by doublets and breeches entirely covered with gold braid. By the mid-seventeenth century, Florentine football was on the wane. Nobleman Orazio Capponi attempted to revive its popularity with his Memorie del calcio fiorentino (1673), which was strategically dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo III, requesting him to play an active role in the game’s rehabilitation. The rules of the game in the Renaissance version had very little to do with modern football. Teams were usually made up of twenty-seven players and points (caccie) were scored when a team succeeded in touching the ball down at the opposite end of the pitch. Players could run with the ball and the game involved a high degree of physical contact. In The Book of the Governour (1531), diplomat and scholar Thomas Elyot described English football as more of a “bloody and murthering practise, then a felowly sporte or pastime.”25 Elyot’s distaste can be attributed partly to the fact that in England it was a popular sport, without the nobler aspirations of the Florentine version. Certainly, there seem to have been fewer fatalities on the pitch in Florence than in England.26 An English visitor to Italy in the seventeenth century, Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest and well-seasoned traveler, considered the Italian version of football to be more civilized. He gave a uniquely detailed account of the buildup to the game, which he characterized as a kind of council

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of war. The two opposing captains were in charge of galvanizing their players and antagonizing the other team with witty speeches and proclamations, as they prepared for the ultimate match at the end of Carnival. Lassels explained: In Winter their Giuoco di Calcio (a play something like our Football, but that thay play with their hands) is played every night from the Epiphany till Lent, with their Principi di Calcio. This being a thing particular to Florence, deserves to be described. The two Factions of the Calcio, the Red and the Green, choose each of them a Prince, some young Cavalier of a good Purse. These Princes being chosen, choose a world of Officers . . . receive ambassadors from one another . . . hear their Counsellors one after another, disswading from or perswading to war.27 Lassels was well aware that this kind of play-combat helped to diffuse genuine rivalries in a controlled environment. He explained: The Florentines enjoying, by the goodness and wisdom of their excellent Prince, the fruits of peace, have many other recreations, where the people pass their time cheerfully, and think not of rebellion by muttering in corners. This function of physical sports has been repeatedly underlined by historians, as summarized by Tim Edwards: “The rise of modern sports is, in particular, seen as a prime example of a civilising process, or growth of civility and control of violence, that is seen to start in the sixteenth century with various shifts in the class system and the rise of court society most prominent.”28 Richard Trexler traces this process developing in Florence toward the end of the fifteenth century, pointing to the role of football in the policy of marking out “neighbourhood youth as festive units.”29 Football teams were often drawn up from the rivaling neighborhoods of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. The game also offered an opportunity for the city to unite and express dissent against a common, stronger enemy, as in the case of the landmark match intended to boost morale, marking the city’s defiance of Charles V’s troops during the siege of Florence. This momentous occasion set a precedent for the people of Siena, who chose to stage a similar demonstration of bravura and resilience when besieged by Medici troops in 1555. A contemporary description of this match compounds the links between football, military might, youth, and virility: The most joyful ball game that on the day of Fat Thursday in the piazza of Santo Agostino was played by the flower of the noble Sienese youth bedecked in rich and ornate livery in the presence of the finest young women.30 The 1530 match reinforced the image of Florence as a David figure standing up to Goliath in the form of the Imperial troops. Although the matches were, as Lassels noted, recreational, they also represented a significant opportunity to shake off

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accusations of a feminized aristocracy and to present an image of active, forceful manhood. For similar motives, sixteenth-century English writers were keen to distinguish between supposedly feminine sports, for example dancing and chess, and masculine ones, such as running and wrestling, which “helped to prepare men for the hardships of war.”31 Carolyn Springer argues that because sixteenth-century Italian courtiers were rarely involved in battle the public display of physical strength and agility took on increasing importance. Although “prowess at arms” could not be demonstrated, it remained an ideal: “A courtier’s lack of military experience in the field could be disguised by proficiency in the tournaments and exercises that substituted for actual combat among members of his class.”32 Furthermore, those with the finest armor were often the least likely to fight and so appearances became a substitute for action. In Florence the most significant matches were also the most ritualized. Liveried football (calcio a livrea) was a form of pageant, a competitive sport, and a mock battle all rolled into one, a worthy heir to the medieval tournament. It usually formed part of an event that lasted two hours, split between an initial procession and the game itself. Both lengthy and costly to stage, they were sponsored by the wealthiest noblemen, a point made by Lassels’ reference to the football “masters” needing to be “cavaliers of a good purse.”33 In 1558, the spendthrift Paolo Giordano Orsini sponsored a match where one team wore gold and red, the other silver and red, presumably calculating that the vast expense was justified by the opportunity to promote himself in Florence.34 The team leaders of the match for the wedding of Vincenzo Gonzaga and Eleonora de’ Medici in 1584 paid for outfits for no fewer than 100 noblemen.35 The whole scenography of the game revolved around the drama of the battlefield, including the trumpeters and the peripheral figures wearing components of armor, emphasized in contemporary depictions, such as Jacques Callot’s engraving showing a match in Piazza Santa Croce [Fig. 7.2]. At either side of the pitch are stationed figures in helmets holding lances and shields. The drummer dominating the scene in the foreground carries a sword and his ripped breeches are an allusion to images of Landsknechts and marauding soldiers in tattered clothing. His raggedness and dynamism convey the sense that he has at this moment emerged from the fray, creating a contrast with the football match behind him. In comparison it appears orderly and rational: an idealized battlefield. As he is shown in the act of drumming, we are encouraged to imagine the noise and general fracas of the event, with sound acting as another channel to express bravado. Written descriptions usually mention such festive noise, referring to the games being accompanied by artillery bombardments that “echoed around the world,” or harquebuses and other types of guns firing “infinite shots” every time a point was scored.36 The clothing worn by football players strengthened these military overtones. As we have seen, there were many overlaps between military apparel and male civilian dress. As Bette Talvacchia comments, it is hardly surprising that the

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Figure 7.2  Jacques Callot, “Game of Football in Piazza Santa Croce,” from Capricci di varie figure, ca. 1617, Florence, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi. (© 2016. Photo Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali).

appearance of soldiers was so frequently referenced at a time when clothing’s function of distinguishing between the sexes was so vital.37 The origins of the fashionable codpiece lay in the need to cover the gap between separate leg armors and it is noticeable that its sole appearance in Cesare Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi et moderni is in connection with the dress of soldiers.38 The popularity of leather for cassocks, doublets, and jerkins was also boosted by its soldierly connections. Often worn under armor to give the wearer extra protection, its resilience and malleability were also useful in civilian life.39 Similarly, the prevalence of other kinds of reinforcements, such as padding and quilting, took their inspiration from clothing for combat.40 The influence was reciprocal, as the bulbous forms of sixteenth-century male dress, including voluminous trunk hose and peascod belly doublets, were incorporated into suits of armor.41 We have also seen how soldiers’ off-duty clothing was often problematic, construed alternately as a sign of their bravery and physical prowess or their debauchery.42 Peter Paret describes the subversive nature of the image of the soldier in sixteenth-century art, embodied by “the soldier’s freedom from constraint and convention, the threat he posed to the peaceful routine of society, but also his changeable and dangerous existence.”43 The clothing of football players avoided these negative connotations. It is noticeable, for example, that slashing hardly features in visual representations or descriptions of matches. The military associations lay in the players’ brightly colored garments, an important feature of soldiers’ manly bravery as Keith Thomas

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notes.44 The contrasting colors helped to distinguish more easily between the two teams on the pitch, just as they enabled commanding officers to stand out on the battlefield. In Castiglione’s view, when worn by soldiers, parti-colored clothing became a mark of virtue. His description of these “vivid and cheerful” garments reflects the boldness of the wearer and by extension his valor.45 Without fail, team colors are picked out in contemporary descriptions of matches. Giuseppe Settimanni describes a game in 1569, played by two teams made up of sixty young Florentine noblemen, one in yellow and turquoise, the other pink and white, and the referees in cloth of gold of the same colors.46 The 1584 Medici Gonzaga wedding match was even more magnificent: the yellow team wore satin doublets with plain cloth of gold breeches decorated with bands of silver lace and yellow velvet berets embellished with feathers (an accessory often seen on soldiers), gold studs, medallions, and pearls, while their opponents were similarly dressed in red.47 In visual depictions, these striking effects are thrown into greater relief as they contrast with the more soberly clad male spectators [FIG. 7.1]. There are obvious parallels between the garments worn for liveried football and other sports. Treatises on fencing show men in highly decorative clothing, often with clear military references, for example, wearing stripes, or pluderhosen. Tobias Capwell points out the very elaborate appearances of swordsmen in the Bolognese Angelo Viggiani da Montone’s Lo Schermo (first printed in 1575).48 Each figure is shown in a different outfit, often wearing hats with feathers, and pinked or slashed doublets, breeches and shoes. Capwell states that “for Viggiani, the great swordsman clearly must have superb fashion sense.” However, this was a very specific form of fashion, one that could be considered excessive or effeminate if not coupled with weaponry or physical exertion. It is clear that the sartorial appearance of football players was a “civilized” version of the typology of the brutish and unruly soldiers recurrent in representations from the late fifteenth through to late sixteenth centuries. Just as the staged violence of the Florentine game was largely innocuous and cathartic, the subversive overtones of male flamboyant dress were neutralized on the football pitch. The perception of players was also governed by what they did not wear. Before play noblemen removed their cloaks, apparently the single concession that permitted greater ease of movement in this highly physical and energetic game. Again, this sense of freedom contrasts with the more decorous ethos of dancing at court. Fabrizio Caroso in his Nobiltà di Dame (1600) recommended: “Be careful never to dance without your cape, because this looks most unsightly and is not appropriate to the nobility.”49 Caroso provides written instructions and engravings to illustrate different ways of wrapping one’s cloak around the waist or shoulders, freeing the arms to make it possible to dance with a partner [Fig. 7.3]. For the courtier, appearing in public without a cloak was effectively a state of undress. Castiglione describes King Ferdinand of Spain seeking out opportunities to appear in just a doublet because “he felt he had a good physique,” as well as referring to a Roman cardinal who, priding

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Figure 7.3  Engraving from the dance manual by Fabrizio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1581) Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale (Getty Images).

himself on his athleticism, invited visitors into his garden “urgently pressing them to strip to their doublet and try a turn with him at leaping.”50 Freed from a cloak’s draperies, the male torso, physical prowess, and stature were easier to assess and admire. Francesco Beccaruzzi’s portrait of A Ballplayer and his Page (ca. 1545), showing the subject being dressed for play, demonstrates how clothing for sport could model and enhance the physique [Fig. 7.4]. The figure’s military-style quilted doublet serves to protect him against the knocks of the game and its neat, simple waistline accentuates his slim body. Our attention is drawn to the cinched waist, as his page concentrates on lacing together the doublet and breeches, and then downward to the codpiece, ostentatiously decorated with guards that match the color of his doublet. Although at the time of this painting the ideal male form was broader and bulkier, the ballplayer’s waistline, padded torso and codpiece all reprise elements of the clothing depicted in Pontormo’s 1530 portrait, thought to represent Francesco Guardi the Halbadier, which belonged to Riccardo Riccardi and was bequeathed to the same nephews who received his advice regarding short hair [Fig. 7.5]. Although the clothing in Pontormo’s painting is not an exact rendition of the standard clothing of mercenary soldiers, the silhouette, padding, large codpiece, and brightly colored breeches are evidently intended to portray a fighting man.51

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Figure 7.4  Francesco Beccaruzzi, A Ballplayer and his Page, ca. 1550, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

Figure 7.5 Jacopo Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier, 1529–30, oil on panel transferred to canvas, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (89.PA.49).

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This kind of clothing allowed players’ bodies and movements to be appraised. A compendium of writings on Florentine football, printed in 1688 and dedicated to Grand Duke Ferdinando II, includes recommendations on adapting dress for sport: “Every player’s clothing should be as short and streamlined as possible, but we believe that one should not wear any more than breeches, doublet, beret, and light shoes, because the less impeded one is, the more one can move and make use of one’s limbs and be agile in running.”52 It is not until 1650, however, that we can find an account of players wearing doublets of white muslin, a fabric much more suited to physical exertions than the usual satins and taffetas.53 Although it is evident that nobility and wealth were important prerequisites for potential players, it is not clear to what extent the players were selected for their sporting skills. A late sixteenth century description of players “stripping down” and practicing in the evenings before the big match therefore stands out: Those who are robust and agile of body, and youthful, of noble blood, two hours before dusk, about a month before the beginning of Lent, get together every day in this square, and take off their cloaks, which impede physical movement.54 The bodies of Florentine noblemen not surprisingly came to symbolize the body politic, their health reflecting that of Florence. After watching a football match in 1575, visiting King Arrigo Valesio of Poland is reported to have asked whether “all the Florentines were as large and handsome as the players?.”55 Equally, the sporting ruler also gained political stature. We can see this operating in the admiring account by a Venetian ambassador of Henry VIII playing tennis. The King’s shirt is particularly noted, perhaps because in Italy it was customary to retain a doublet, but also because the monarch’s flesh and fine complexion are revealed through the semi-transparent linen: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.”56 It is significant that Francesco de’ Medici, often seen as an aloof and solitary ruler, joined his courtiers in the team sport of football. Florentine author and soldier Giovanni de’ Bardi describes the forty-year old Grand Duke demonstrating his shared human nature on the pitch, firstly by casting off a key sartorial marker: “He removed his royal mantle and went onto the middle of the field and amongst the ranks, and ran and sweated and shouted and pushed and won.”57

7.2  Masquerade Costumes Like football, the cultural and social significance of Carnival activities, including dressing up, has frequently been analyzed from the twin perspectives of subversion and containment. This has provided a useful framework to understand fifteenthcentury Florentine Carnival, which offered the city’s youth an opportunity to take

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part in sanctioned forms of chaos and irreverence. Various studies have shown that Carnival in Florence took on an increasingly elite nature under Lorenzo de’ Medici, who set his mark on the principal events and is considered to have played a key role in making masques a fundamental part of the city’s culture. Nicole Carew-Reid traces the politicization of Carnival rituals, characterizing them as “a celebration of the established powers. They were greater and greater tributes to the personalities of the leaders who would manipulate their elements in order to acquire personal prestige.”58 In a similar vein, Nicholas Scott Baker analyzes the Medici’s involvement in the 1513 Carnival as a means of smoothing over their return to the city after eighteen years of exile.59 Under the Grand Dukes, Cosimo I exercised final approval on the contents of Carnival songs to ensure they were not too critical of the regime.60 The Medici’s grip on Carnival did not eradicate the “world upside-down” element to costumes. Noblemen continued to masquerade in garments associated with a different gender, social status, or nationality, as the variety of disguises broadened in the sixteenth century, partly inspired by the development of the Commedia dell’Arte. Dressing up as members of different professions became popular and provided ample opportunity for burlesque humor and sexual innuendo, illustrated by the Carnival songs performed by noblemen masquerading as shoemakers, muleteers, perfumers, and so on.61 Although noblemen cross-dressing as women do feature in descriptions of Carnival festivities, it was not the most prevalent form of disguise. One instance occurred at a Carnival football match in 1599, when the teams wore ripped women’s clothes but, on the whole, courtiers were more likely to dress up as Turks than as the opposite sex.62 These costumes allowed Florentines to indulge a fascination with Turkish clothing, fabrics, and accessories, which also seeped into fashionable dress, and items such as bifurcated swords or intricately embroidered silks are given prominence in Carnival descriptions.63 Beyond this, such costumes were clearly a means of expressing Florentine and Christian authority, reinforcing the priorities of the Medici as founders of the Order of Saint Stephen, committed to the fight against the Ottomans. The chivalric order “positioned the Medici as warriors for the true faith, gaining papal approval and prestige abroad, specifically with prominent Catholic powers like Spain and France,” while furthering the Medici’s interests at a domestic level, weakening opposition to the Medici and rivalries among Florentine noblemen.64 Joseph Roach’s observation that “elite cultures produce themselves by contrast with the excluded” is applicable here.65 In 1546, a Carnival float involving Turks dressed as Africans reflects a frequent conflation of the non-Christian other, as suggested by William Harrison’s grouping together of Turkish, Moorish, and Barbary styles, cited in Chapter 3. This aspect of Florentine Carnival costumes can be related to a broader phenomenon in Italian visual arts associating Ottoman Turks and Africans.66 Three Florentine noblemen were followed by a buffalo dressed as an elephant, bearing a castle on its back, and four Turks disguised as Africans from Guinea, with “silk curls on their heads the colour of dragon’s blood,

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with small turbans embroidered ‘alla moresca’ with beautiful skill.”67 Although not specified, the four performers were presumably intended to represent slaves. The enduring popularity of Turkish disguises corroborates Miriam Eliav-Feldon’s assertion that “no other costume defined identity for Europeans more clearly than the Muslim dress.”68 Set against the backdrop of the Habsburg-Ottoman wars of the 1680s, it became the theme for one of the last great liveried football events, to mark the wedding of Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici and Violante Beatrice di Baviera in 1689, with teams representing Asia and Europe. The Asian team wore turbans and full-length zamberlucchi, a Turkish garment similar to a kaftan or dolman, decorated with frogging, which presumably impeded movement even more than satin doublets and breeches.69 Such practices were symptomatic of a widespread appetite for the staging of warfare at court festivities across Europe. Torquato Tasso’s dialogue on masques portrays this as one of the duties of a ruler, describing how Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere “does not miss any opportunity to demonstrate his greatness and valour, and when there are no real battles, he shows us the image of them.”70 Although masking can be seen as a kind of “safety valve,” a potentially disruptive activity that was nevertheless sanctioned by the Grand Dukes, it was also a manifestation of a culture that increasingly prized invention. Examining the taste for mechanical devices at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, Jessica Wolfe highlights the value placed on the qualities of ingenuity, dexterity, and grace, coupled with “a passion for difficulty and by a penchant for artful display.”71 The same ethos was epitomized in numerous aspects of Florentine court design, as evidenced, for example, in the banquet menu for the wedding of Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena of Austria in 1608, which included “sliced ham shaped like a cockerel,” “balls of veal in the form of swans,” and “bell-shaped jellies with live fish inside them.”72 Many Florentine masques and parade floats involving courtiers were similarly ambitious, explicitly designed to make spectators marvel. Anton Francesco Grazzini was one of a large group of Florentine intellectuals, thinkers, and writers, who invented and performed masques and took a leading role in shaping Florentine Carnival in the 1540s–50s. A poem written when he was “Master of Ceremonies” emphasizes his ability to innovate and surprise, suggesting that the purpose of Carnival was to breathe new life into the Florentine court and its young courtiers. This is reinforced by an anecdote involving those “leisurely youths” so prominent at the Florentine court, who resolved to make a masque in February 1549 but could not think of any “invention” and so turned to Grazzini, who was “only capable of praiseworthy and pleasing things.”73 Grazzini boasts of his contribution: And meanwhile to my great delight Carnival came, cheerful and longed for, And I was elected as usual to be the principal supervisor Of the celebrations within the palace and without,

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And of the football too, With the trumpeters and footballs and players, And I had found costumes Of lovely colours, cheerful and strange, I had provided for towers and quintains and buffaloes Masks and inventions never seen before, So that for joy at both this and the other I almost could not stay in my skin.74 Inspiration for these festivities came from a multitude of sources.75 Many were classical, such as the Medusa emblem at Carnival in 1546 involving the Grand Master of Altopascio, Ugolino Grifoni, leading on horseback with a retinue of followers dressed in cloth of gold and silver bouclé, their faces transformed to look like marble with snakes entwined around their hair.76 Others were more humorous, including a “merry” canto in 1549 with twenty-four young men disguised as German swimmers wearing light pink to appear naked, with “cloth of gold underpants” (mutande di tocca d’oro) and swimming floats made of gourds tied around their shoulders.77 Coming soon after the marriage of Joanna of Austria and Francesco de’ Medici, Carnival festivities in 1566 were particularly lavish. One of the masques was sponsored by Niccolò di Luigi Capponi and Vincenzo Giraldi.78 Described as “beautiful, graceful, ingenious and rich,” it represented Osiris riding on a buffalo, dressed in a knee-length tunic of red satin embroidered with tools thought to have been invented by the Egyptians to work the soil, inspired by a statue belonging to Bernardetto d’Ottaviano de’ Medici. Events such as these have been critiqued for the “promiscuity” of their imagery or their “naivety,” in that they raided emblem books and mythologies to assemble a jumble of allusions.79 Yet this exuberant pillaging of very disparate material constituted one of the essential pleasures of masquerading, the search for new guises that would challenge the skills of makers and surprise onlookers. As with football, it was necessary to be wealthy to play a lead role in such elaborate masques and therefore it is not surprising that Matteo Botti was an avid participant. In Chapter 4, we noted Settimanni’s admiring description of the joust he organized with Don Pietro de’ Medici and Lorenzo Salviati, followed by masques representing Dawn, Day, and various Gods.80 Even allowing for the hyperbole typical of such accounts, it is significant that such an ephemeral occasion, reportedly “ruined by rain,” was considered worthy of such huge financial investment. The 1621 inventory of Botti’s possessions includes several masquerade items. One costume was made of a yellow figured silk woven with gold threads and a turquoise and brown silk, all of it lined with green taffeta. It had half-length and full-length sleeves of gold, pink and green silk, striped with gold and silver. It was decorated all over with large, flat, gold buttons with false pearls, narrow gold braid embellished with little silver lamé leaves, and

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gold and turquoise silk bows.81 Another outfit was made of smooth black silk woven with three sorts of gold thread, with silk sleeves in three different colors, woven with gold threads and covered with little glass beads.82 It was accompanied by a green stamped velvet saddle cover for a masque, with a pink and gold silk fringe, complete with a serpent’s tail of green silk with a small figured pile also decorated with glass beads. The glass beads would have shone as they caught the light, helping to transform the horse into some form of mythical beast. Carolyn Springer provides examples of similar “animal hybrids” in parade armor, such as the Milanese shaffron in the shape of a dragon’s head, made for Henri  II of France.83 A sketch of a magnificently caparisoned horse from about 1620, sometimes associated with Giulio Parigi, Bernardo Buontalenti’s heir as court designer, conveys the striking nature of such costumes [Fig. 7.6]. These imaginative disguises satisfied the Florentine appetite for the bizarre, representative of a particular type of court taste, epitomized by the unexpected and intricate engravings of court artist Jacques Callot. John Florio’s translation of bizzarro as “phantasticall, humorous, toyish, fangled, selfe conceited” highlights an important distinction between bizarre things and people. The latter could be considered irascible and inconstant, as in Lodovico Dolce’s view that a male outfit made up of more than two different colors, “signifies a very bizarre mind, full of different appetites.”84 Conversely, bizarre objects were esoteric and unusual,

Figure 7.6  Anonymous, Parade Horse, 1619?, pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Delia E. Holden Fund 1963.241. © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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hard to make and acquire, and therefore particularly desirable. Rather like the closely related concept of the grotesque, the bizarre did not yet hold the negative connotations it accrued in later centuries.85 The term bizarre was used to refer to costumes for Carnival or masques, conveying a sense of refinement and sophistication rather than chaos or subversion. This is hinted at in Giorgio Vasari’s description of an album of Carnival costumes by Francesco Salviati as a “very beautiful book of bizarre clothes and different styles of headwear for men and horses, for masquerades.”86 We can also find a growing number of examples of the bizarre in fashionable dress. Varchi’s Storia Fiorentina describes Charles V wearing a “saio (tunic) of gold tabby and a velvet cloak of a very extravagant and bizarre colour, all spotted with purple and red, lined with gold tabby” for his arrival in Genoa in 1529.87 In 1612, Prince Francesco di Ferdinando I’s secretary ordered a sword and dagger for the Grand Duke instructing it be made “with fantasy, in some bizarre fashion, of silver, gold or iron, or any other material by some valiant craftsman, without sparing any costs.”88 The pursuit of the bizarre was to influence fashionable taste for centuries. Susan Miller has traced the trajectory from its first stirrings in the sixteenth century through to the later development of what are now known as bizarre silks.89 It was still a sought-after quality in Florentine dress in the eighteenth century, when the 1723 Board of Trade reported that consumers “look for bizarre and lively colours and for novelty.”90 This trait of masquerade costume is a reminder that fashionable dress and disguises should be viewed in conjunction and that if the bizarre exerted an attraction in fashionable clothing it could be pursued without limits in masquerade. For male courtiers, accustomed to their appearances being constantly analyzed and interpreted according to the often confining framework of court etiquette, masquerade costumes offered new forms of expression. This is hinted at in Castiglione’s advice, which also suggests that Carnival was a time to test preconceptions: “Masquerading carries with it a certain freedom and license, which among other things enables one to choose the role in which he feels most able.”91 The same impulses guided other forms of court culture, characterizing for example the spirit of the precursor to the Florentine Academy, the Accademia degli Umidi, many of whose members were prominent in Carnival activities.92 The transformative nature of the masque lay also in the fact that it was, essentially, another layer of performance within the everyday performance of the courtier. Guido Guerzoni has proposed that the “act” customarily performed by the courtier was cancelled out by masking, leading to a “reweaving and redefinition” of the usual hierarchies through games.93 This is a mechanism alluded to in Girolamo Bargagli’s Il Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare (1572), which explains that “as in a masquerade, even if you recognise the Prince behind his mask, you still pretend not to recognise him, just as when a noblemen is exposed, almost covered by the mask of the game, in that instant you do not recognise him as a nobleman.”94

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Carnival disguises gave courtiers leeway to act and move in ways usually denied to them. Castiglione recommends that courtiers should only perform the moresca dance in public when wearing a Carnival mask because of its exaggerated movements.95 The dance lacked the kind of grace and continence that was an essential component of courtly dance.96 More akin to the kinds of uncontrolled merry-making and self-expression that typified the depiction of peasant figures in works by artists such as the Breughels, in normal circumstances it was thought to be inappropriate for members of the nobility.97 Furthermore, as it was often performed alone rather than in pairs the individual male dancer placed himself in the uncustomary position of being the sole focus of the gaze of onlookers.98 Concealed by a disguise, therefore, courtiers could engage in experiences that contravened accepted decorum. In turn this offered new sensations, as underlined in the poem “On Masks” (Sopra le Maschere) by Florentine Matteo Franzesi. Various kinds of disguise are mentioned, such as Turks, Moors, barbers, ironmongers, or one with a “peasant’s withered moustache,” so ugly it would “scare a mirror.” To explain the attraction of such costumes, Franzesi cites a Florentine expression, “Magnolino’s pleasure” (il piacere di Magnolino), which refers to a kind of contrary enjoyment derived from something that would normally cause displeasure.99 Franzesi elaborates on the idea that disguises can bring new emotions in the way they overturn everyday values and experiences: In other words a new pleasure A pastime that is even more than divine This is a release for the mind This is the real transformation And the true model for every fantasy.100 Festive dress, whether for football or masquerade, provided a form of release, a chance to wear clothing that exceeded the usual parameters defining court dress, allowing noblemen to play at being soldiers or heroes from classical mythology. Their success was predicated on an awareness and complicity between the participating courtiers and a mastery of the ways social behavior and expectations could be controlled by appearances. Rather than being an inversion of fashionable dress, however, such costumes and liveries only reveal their full meaning when situated within a broader culture of appearances. One of their primary functions was to express a magnified version of attributes central to the courtier’s identity, including military aggression, strength, and competition. Their playfulness can be linked with many other forms of social interaction at court, which prized similar forms of wit and ingenuity, while their emphasis on artifice and technical skill mirrored values that were strongly embedded in the fashions of the time.

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Conclusion

This study has examined clothing’s potential to reflect manhood within a maledominated, early modern court. It is therefore hardly surprising that the majority of sources cited privilege the experiences of men looking at other men, and at themselves. We are offered a rare insight into how women might “see through” the performance of male dress by poet Lucrezia Marinella, who lamented: The impossibility of finding a man who does not swagger and play the daredevil. If there is such a one people call him effeminate, which is why we always see men dressed up like soldiers with weapons at their belts, bearded and menacing, and walking in a way that they think will frighten everyone. Often they wear gloves of mail and contrive for their weapons to clink under their clothing so people realize they are armed and ready for combat and feel intimidated by them. What are all these things but artifice and tinsel?1 Marinella pinpoints one of the fundamental tensions in contemporary male dress, what could be called the distinction between “hard” and “soft looks,” borrowing a term used to describe the male fashion consumer of a much later era.2 Frequently recurring stereotypes in the construction and enactment of masculinity, these were embodied with particular clarity in fashionable dress of this time. The growing potential of fashion to destabilize was balanced by attempts to create a hypermasculinity in clothing, wherein the male form was padded with buttresslike apparel, and virility was emphasized with devices such as codpieces and breeches that revealed muscular legs. Male appearances during the reigns of the first Grand Dukes marked a parenthesis between the lithe, resplendent garments, and elongated silhouettes of the fifteenth century and the more flowing, looser fashions of the later seventeenth. The artificial aggression described by Marinella can be seen as a means of counteracting the fear of clothing opening up a potential descent into an effete, redundant aristocracy. Yet male dress was simultaneously, emphatically, a projection of civility and grace. Michelangelo Buonarroti the

Younger’s account of the palio, held after Maria de’ Medici’s proxy wedding in 1600, clearly conveys the nobility and power of the sartorial ostentation of the collective elite, describing male participants congregating: “Just like very many and highly noble jewels, sprinkled and sown widely among the people, they seemed to blossom with beautiful colours.”3 Dress visually expressed aspects of the gendered codes guiding men’s lives at the Florentine court.4 Noblemen’s clothing followed a sophisticated logic dependent upon numerous factors, such as age, status, situation, activity, and geographical location. However, as befitted the multifaceted nature of the courtier described by Castiglione, male sartorial ideals were often fugitive and contradictory. Consequently a courtier had to swap guises, reminiscent of Wayne A. Rebhorn’s representation of the courtier shifting “from role to role with the lightning speed of a quick-change artist.”5 Courtiers experienced in Carnival disguises were no strangers to the transformative aspects of clothing, while the overlap between performers and spectators in many of the public arenas at court, even for everyday dress, required constant recalibration to avoid slipping into deviance or excess. Dress became a mechanism for “balancing out” behavior and smoothing over peculiarities. While it was usually cited as a mark of dishonesty or trickery in female clothing, the crafting of appearances was often condoned among male courtiers. Reinstating the consumer at the heart of this picture enables us to assess the cultural significance of long-lost garments and analyze the extent to which individual experiences adhered to or deviated from official sartorial codes. Reconstructing the minutiae of clothing purchases over time and reassembling the varied components of courtiers’ wardrobes reveals a degree of autonomy even within the “behavioural and cultural disciplining” associated with the European aristocratic elites of this period.6 Sources such as account books, which relay the active processes and social interactions involved in commissioning garments, can temper the emphasis on anxiety and dissimulation conveyed by literary texts on courtly appearances. Florentine men’s enthusiasm for fashionable clothing emerges alongside the more considered calculations that underpinned their ways of wearing it. It is clear how far personal necessities shaped clothing choices, with noblemen seeking to control their public image in markedly different ways. Although it has been argued that the heightened focus on dress at this time reflected an underlying lack of real masculine power, fashion nevertheless constituted one of the most effective tools available to carve out a role within court society.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Benedetto Varchi, Storia Fiorentina (Florence: Pietro Martello, 1721), Book 15, 589. 2 See Amedeo Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero: Moda e cultura nell’Italia del

Cinquecento (Vicenza: Angelo Colla, 2007), 73–78, 122–32.

3 Guido Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in the Italian Renaissance

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 21.

4 On the use of the term “masculinity” for the early modern period see, for example,

Alexandra Shepard, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in England, circa 1500-1700,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April 2005): 288–89, and Milligan and Tylus, “Introduction,” 28–29.

5 Franco Angiolini and Paolo Malanima, “Problemi della mobiltà sociale a Firenze tra la

metà del Cinquecento e i primi decenni del Seicento,” Società e Storia, no. 4 (1979), 19.

6 Quoted in Marcello Fantoni, La Corte del Granduca: forma e simboli del potere mediceo

fra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 37–39.

7 For an overview of the Florentine textile industries, see Richard Goldthwaite,

The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 265–340.

8 Patricia Allerston, “Consuming Problems: Worldly Goods in Renaissance Venice,”

in The Material Renaissance, eds Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11–46.

9 Niccolò Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere (Lanciano: R. Carrabba

Editore, 1916), 91.

10 Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo: Or, the Rules of Polite Behaviour, ed. and trans.

M. F. Rusnak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 34.

11 Translation from Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret Rosenthal, The Clothing of the

Renaissance World: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 255.

12 Relevant recent literature on this subject includes Valeria Finucci, The Manly

Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3–16, and Kirsten Gibson, “Music, Melancholy and Masculinity,” in Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, eds Ian Biddle and Kirsten

Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 43–50. For an analysis of the malleability of gender and its creation through “prosthetic” devices, such as beards, dress, and accessories in England, see Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–35. 13 Cathy McClive, “Masculinity on Trial: Penises, Hermaphrodites and the Uncertain

Male Body in Early Modern France,” History Workshop Journal 68, no. 1 (2009): 45–68.

14 Finucci, The Manly Masquerade, 5. 15 Quoted in Eugenia Paulicelli, “From the Sacred to the Secular: The Gendered Geography

of Veils in Italian Cinquecento Fashion,” in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed. Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 51.

16 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, ed. Daniel

Javitch (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), Book 1, Ch. 19, 27.

17 Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2010), 15.

18 Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, ed. Plinio Carli, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni,

1927), 2:126.

19 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of

Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–2.

20 Fredrika Jacobs, “Sexual Variations: Playing with (Dis)similitude,” in A Cultural

History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 81.

21 Quoted in Finucci, The Manly Masquerade, 173–74. 22 Corazzini, Giuseppe Odoardo, ed., Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini dal 252 al 1596

(Florence: Sansoni, 1900), 96.

23 Ilaria Taddei, “Perizia, adolescenza and giovinezza: Images and Conceptions of Youth

in Florentine Society During the Renaissance,” in The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2002), 15.

24 Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption Masculinities and Social Space in Late-Twentieth

Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996), 10.

25 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, c. 1560-1640

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.

26 The extensive literature on early modern England includes Tim Hitchcock and

Michèle Cohen, eds, English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1999); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On other European countries, see Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus, eds, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010).

27 Caroline P. Murphy, “Masculinity, Manliness and Mediocrity: The case of Paolo

Giordano Orsini (1541-1585),” in Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to

150

Notes

Early Modern Women and Men, eds Amy Leonard and Karen L. Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 347. 28 Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006), 111. 29 Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity, 2. See Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early

Modern Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014); Valeria Finucci, The Prince’s Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Douglas Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, their Professions, and their Beards (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Relevant studies focusing on male clothing of the Italian Renaissance include Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Timothy McCall, “Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts,” I Tatti Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (2013): 445–90; Roberta Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580: lo stile di Cosimo I de’ Medici (Florence: M. Pagliai, 2011) and Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero.

30 Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century

Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 463–94.

31 Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory: the Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press), 42–47.

32 David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity, 1550-1850 (Berkeley: CA:

University of California Press, 1993b), 233.

33 See, for example, Milligan and Tylus, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy

and Spain, 2010.

34 Lehfeldt, “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain,”

463–94.

35 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book IV, Ch. 10, 213. 36 See Gerry Milligan, “Masculinity and Machiavelli: How a Prince should avoid

Effeminacy, Perform Manliness, and be Wary of the Author,” in Seeking Real Truths: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli, eds Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 160 fn. 30.

37 Quoted in Kate Van Orden, Music, Discipline and Arms in Early Modern France

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 104.

38 Lorenzo Giacomini, Della nobiltà delle lettere e delle armi ragionamenti, ed. Tebalducci

Malespini (Florence: Magheri, 1821), 14.

39 For an introduction to Renaissance virtù, see Jerrod E. Seigel, “Virtue in and since

the Renaissance,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 476–86.

40 Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome:

Trials before the Papal Magistrates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 27.

41 There was a comparable range of male vices and virtues in England, see Alexandra

Shepard, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in England, circa 1500-1700,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April 2005): 292.

42 Van Veen, “Princes and Patriotism,” 69. 43 John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200-1575 (Malden, MA and Oxford:

Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 458.

Notes

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44 Caroline P. Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2008), 220.

45 John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Criminal Underworld,” in Society and the Individual

in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 303–04.

46 The connection between heterosexual promiscuity and effeminacy versus continence

and masculinity has been explored through the sexual reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici, see Nicholas Scott Baker, “Power and Passion in SixteenthCentury Florence: The Sexual and Political Reputations of Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (September 2010): 432–57. This draws on the equation of tyranny, representing disorder and a lack of self-control, with effeminacy as outlined in Rebecca Bushnell, “Tyranny and Effeminacy in Early Modern England,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 339–54. There was a greater tolerance of excess if it had been achieved with ease, increasing the need for the successful courtier to perfect the art of sprezzatura.

47 McCall, “Brilliant Bodies,” 468–73. 48 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 116 and Elizabeth Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 99–101.

49 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: the History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books,

1978), 53–163. Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy, 12–13.

50 On the elbow, see Joaneath Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” in A Cultural History of

Gesture, eds Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 84–128.

51 Cohen and Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, 27. 52 María M. Carrión, “Men with Style. Sprezzatura, Costume, and Movement for Men in

the Spanish Comedia,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, eds Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010): 364–65. Paulicelli underlines that sprezzatura “is a men’s, and apparently, a men’s-only term,” Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy, 53.

53 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988), 520.

54 Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity during the Hundred

Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 4.

55 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980), 162–63.

56 Shepard, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen?,” 293. 57 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 163.

58 Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men, 151. 59 Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early

Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–9.

60 See the introduction to Milligan and Tylus, The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern

Italy and Spain, 18.

152

Notes

Chapter 1 1 Stefania Ricci, “Tra storia e leggenda: cronaca di vita medicea,” in Moda alla Corte dei

Medici: gli abiti restaurati di Cosimo, Eleonora e don Garzia, ed. Roberta Orsi Landini (Florence: Ente Cassa di Risparmio, 1993), 18.

2 Domenico di Guido Mellini, Ricordo intorno ai costumi, azioni, e governo del

Serenissimo Gran Duca Cosimo I (Florence: Magheri, 1820), 13.

3 Roberta Orsi Landini, “L’amore del lusso e la necessità della modestia: Eleonora fra

sete e oro,” in Moda alla corte dei Medici: Gli abiti restaurati di Cosimo, Eleonora e don Garzia, ed. Roberta Orsi Landini (Firenze: Ente Cassa di Risparmio, 1993), 35–45.

4 Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law

(London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 29, 33, 36 and Catherine Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200-1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–8.

5 Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 33–34. 6 Della Casa, Galateo, trans. Rusnak, 26–27. 7 Lorenzo Cantini, Legislazione toscana raccolta ed illustrata dal Dottor Lorenzo Cantini,

vol. IV (Florence: Stampa Albizziniana da Santa Maria in Campo, 1800-1806), 402–03.

8 The letter is transcribed in Carlo Carnesecchi, Cosimo I e la legge suntuaria del 1562

(Florence: Stabilimento Pellas, 1902), 37–39. The archival reference is now ASF, MDP 615, Ins. 19.

9 Ibid. Over fifteen years later, Cosimo di Donato Tornabuoni purchased a string of

fifty-five pearls for his wife, Maria di Pandolfo della Stufa, for 471 scudi, ASF, Carte Galletti 36, 6v.

10 See Julius Kirshner, “Li emergenti bisogni matrimoniali in Renaissance Florence,” in

Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 79–109 on the negative financial and social consequences of the imperative for large dowries, trousseaux, and marital gifts.

11 See also Giulia Calvi, “Abito, genere, cittadinanza nella Toscana moderna,” Quaderni

Storici 110 (2002): 480.

12 In 1567 the dowry of Giovanbattista Capponi’s first wife, Camilla Salviati, was

2000 scudi, see Archivio Capponi, File III, n. 4, Libro A, 57v. The wealthier Giovanni Riccardi left his two daughters, Nannina and Contessina, dowries of 5000 scudi each when he died in 1568, see Paolo Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze (Florence: Olschki, 1977), 48. The 1562 sumptuary legislation put a cap of 300 scudi on the trousseau, stating that it could represent up to a tenth of the whole dowry, see Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. IV, 405.

13 Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 577. 14 Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, vol. VII, 35. 15 Marcello Fantoni, “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” in Storia d’Italia: La Moda, eds Carlo

Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 752.

16 Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 86–91 mainly offers examples from the fifteenth

century, and a few from the fourteenth.

17 Anna Bellavitis, “Family and Society,” in A Companion to Venetian History 1400-1797,

ed. Eric R. Dursteler (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 321 and 325–27.

Notes

153

18 See Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,”

in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 97–99, Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200-1500, 85 and Ludovica Sebregondi, “The Sumptuary Laws,” in Money and Beauty, eds Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks (Florence: Giunti, 2011), 191.

19 Enrico Coppi, ed., Cronaca Fiorentina, 1537-1555 (Florence: Olschki, 2000), 64. 20 Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 105. 21 Alessandra Contini, “La nobiltà toscana e il poter mediceo tra Cinque e Seicento,”

Archivio Storico Italiano IV (1997): 750.

22 Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia, Secoli XIV-XVIII (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 129–30. 23 Fantoni, “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” 753. 24 Alberto Liva, “Note sulla legislazione suntuaria nell’Italia centro-settentrionale,” in

Le Trame della Moda, eds Anna Giulia Cavagna and Grazietta Butazzi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), 45.

25 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. I, 318–21. 26 Ibid., vol. IV, 409. 27 Carnesecchi, Cosimo I e la legge suntuaria del 1562, 28. See also Calvi, “Abito, genere,

cittadinanza,” 489.

28 See, for example, Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and

Betrayal from the Court of Duke Cosimo I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 91 and 99.

29 ASF, MDP 615, Ins. 19. See also Calvi, “Abito, genere, cittadinanza,” 484. 30 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. VII, 40. 31 ASF, Pratica Segreta 11, n. 31. 32 ASF, MDP 497, III, 715. Quoted in Carnesecchi, Cosimo I e la legge suntuaria del

1562, 24.

33 Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590), 131v.

Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” 90.

34 Fantoni, La Corte del Granduca, 44 and Samuel Berner, “Florentine Society in the

Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Studies in the Renaissance XVIII (1971): 224.

35 Anna Maria Testaverde, “La decorazione festiva e l’itinerario di ‘rifondazione’

della città negli ingressi trionfali a Firenze tra XV e XVI secolo”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 32 (1988a): 323–52 proposes that the imperial entrance of Charles V in 1536 provided a new model for these occasions.

36 Matteo Casini, I gesti del Principe: La festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età

rinascimentale (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 215–16.

37 See James Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

38 Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Gallimard,

1983), 310.

39 Henri Zerner, “Looking for the Unknowable: The Visual Experience of Renaissance

Festivals,” in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe,

154

Notes

eds J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, vol. I (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 84. 40 For a discussion on the contradictory nature of such accounts, see Giorgia Clarke,

“The Emperor’s Hat: City, Space, and Identity in Contemporary Accounts of Charles V’s Entry into Bologna in 1529,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013): 197–220. On the limitations of festival books, see also Katherine Poole, “Christian Crusade as Spectacle: The Cavalieri di Santo Stefano and the Audiences for the Medici Weddings of 1589 and 1608,” in Push Me Pull You: Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, eds Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand, vol. II (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 387–92.

41 Liveries were linked to sixteenth-century notions of harmony, which governed

many areas of court life, including theories of dance, Margriet Hoogvliet, “Princely Culture and Catherine de Médicis,” in Princes and Princely Culture, eds M. Gosman, A. MacDonald, and A. Vanderjagt, vol. I (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 124.

42 Sally J. Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 277–82.

43 Descrizione delle Feste Fatte (Florence: Giunti,1608), 59. 44 Bruna Niccoli, “Official Dress and Courtly Fashion in Genoese Entries,” in Europa

Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, eds J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, vol. I. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 264.

45 La descrizione dell’apparato fatto in Firenze, nel Battesimo del Serenissimo Principe di

Toscana (Florence: Giunti 1577), 26.

46 Jones and Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, 129. 47 Quoted in Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 70. 48 ASF, MDP 5962, 216. 49 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 27, 89. 50 ASF, Libri di Commercio 747, 27r. 51 Descrizione dell feste fatte nelle reali nozze, 76. 52 Maria Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 138.

53 Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 5. 54 Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,” in

Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 290–92.

55 Sicillo Araldo, Trattato dei colori nelle arme, nelle livree, e nelle divise (Venice:

Domenico Nicolino, 1565), 31–32.

56 ASF, MDP 5962, 521r & v. Perhaps intended as a variation on the French royal livery

of blue, red, and white, the colors are written in French to avoid mistakes.

57 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 71–72, lists some of the livery provisions for the

1589 wedding, including clothing for visiting aristocrats such as the Duke of Mantua, as well as pages and musicians.

58 Giulio Cesare Croce, Livrea Nobilissima del Croce nell’occasione delle nozze del Gran

Principe di Toscana (Bologna: Bartolomeo Cocchi, 1608), unnumbered folios.

Notes

155

59 Fantoni, “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” 739. 60 Li sontuosissimi apparecchi trionfi e feste fatti nelle nozze della Gran Duchessa di

Fiorenza (Florence and Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini, 1589), unnumbered folios.

61 Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell,

1984), 146.

62 The event appears in various accounts; see Angelo Solerti, ed., Musica, ballo e

drammatica alla Corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637. Notizie tratte da un diario tenuto da Cesare Tinghi (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1905), 26.

63 ASF, Riccardi 80, 37v & 38v. According to one report there were pitture di valenti

huomini on display during the event, see Michelangelo Buonarroti, Descrizione delle feste fatte (Florence: Marescotti, 1600), 10r.

64 ASF, Riccardi 80, 17r. 65 Quoted in Piero Marchi, “Le feste per le nozze di Maria de’ Medici,” in Rubens e

Firenze, ed. Mina Gregori (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1983), 96.

66 Strong, Art and Power, 147. 67 Paola Bassani Pacht, “Marie de Médicis et ses artistes,” in Le ‘Siècle’ de Marie de

Médicis, eds F. Graziani and F. Solinas (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2002), 90. Various details suggest particular attention was paid to aspects of the clothing in this painting, such as the Medici jeweled headpiece and the Florentine straw hat.

68 Caterina Caneva, “Vita di Corte a Firenze nell’Anno 1600,” in Rubens e Firenze, ed.

Mina Gregori (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1983), 80.

69 Quoted in Marchi, “Le feste per le nozze di Maria de’ Medici,” 98 fn. 12, from ASF,

Miscellanea Medicea 18, Ins. 4: “..tutti ugualmente, et in medesimo modo in tutto e per tutto, e li piace che l’habito sia bianco . . . giubbone, e calzoni alla simiglianza di raso bianco, et con guarnitioni di trine d’oro, calzetti di seta bianca, scarpe bianche di corame, spade, e pugnale indorato, con fodero, e cintura bianca, berretta di velluto nero tagliato con penna bianca, e tornata di cordoni a sattisfatione, ferraiolo nero d’ermisino vellutato a opera con fodera, o, mostra paonazza purché l’effetto sia, che non vi sia distintione alcuna dall’uno all’altro, ma tutti apparischino della medesima qualità.” Buonarroti’s account describes the forty noblemen dressed in this livery, see Buonarroti, Descrizione delle felicissime nozze, 2v.

70 ASF, Riccardi 76, 88v & 116r. 71 Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze, 82. Elizabeth Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a

Halberdier (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), 15.

72 Buonarroti, Descrizione delle feste fatte, 10v.

Chapter 2 1 Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200-1575, 487. Giorgio Vasari’s Ragionamenti

describes Cosimo’s government growing out of the republic, just one example of how “even as he [Cosimo] buried the republic, he allowed its memory to be preserved.”

2 See Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X and the

two Cosimos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Henk Th. van Veen, “Republicanism in the Visual Propaganda of Cosimo I de’ Medici,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 55 (1992): 200–09.

156

Notes

3 Van Veen, “Princes and Patriotism: The Self-Representation of Florentine Patricians in the

Late Renaissance,” in Princes and Princely Culture 1450-1650 (vol. II) eds Martin Gosman, Alasdair MacDonald, and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 65.

4 Roger J. Crum, “Lessons from the Past: The Palazzo Medici as Political ‘Mentor’ in

Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 49.

5 Alison Brown, “De-masking Renaissance Republicanism,” in Renaissance Civic

Humanism, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197.

6 James Hankins, “The ‘Baron Thesis’,” in The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad, ed. John

Jeffries Martin (Routledge: London, 2003), 80.

7 Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200-1575, 490. 8 This chapter develops themes discussed in Elizabeth Currie, “Clothing and a

Florentine Style, 1550-1620,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 1 (February 2009): 40–46.

9 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia: l’Inferno, ed. Giuseppe Vandelli (Milan: Hoepli,

1961), 124, Canto XVI, 7–9.

10 For the significance of the lucco in fifteenth-century Florentine culture, see Juliana Hill

Cotton, “Il lucco del Poliziano ed altre allusioni al lucco fiorentino,” Italica, XLIII, no. 4 (1966): 353–68.

11 Ibid., “Il lucco del Poliziano,” 359. 12 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori scritte da Giorgio

Vasari pittore aretino, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1878), vol. III, 374.

13 Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495-1525 (The Pasold Research Fund,

Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 9–11. See also Bronwen Wilson, “Foggie diverse di vestire de’ Turchi: Turkish Costume Illustration and Cultural Translation,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 104.

14 Translation from Jones and Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, 158. 15 Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 103–4 and 214–17. 16 Jane Bridgeman, Aspects of Dress and Ceremony in Quattrocento Florence

(Ph.D. Thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 1986), 101, 108, and 130.

17 Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, Book 9, 265. 18 Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years

1340-1365 (Woodbridge Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1980), 6.

19 Ibid. 20 Melissa Rothfus, “The Gens Togata: Changing Styles and Changing Identities,”

American Journal of Philology 131, no. 3 (Fall, 2010): 425.

21 Caroline Vout, “The Myth of the Toga: Understanding the History of Roman Dress,”

Greece and Rome (Second Series), 43, no. 02 (October 1996): 219.

22 Robert Burr Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians,

1530-1790 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 46. Bridgeman, Aspects of Dress and Ceremony, 48.

23 Alexandra Croom, Roman Clothing and Fashion (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), 40. 24 See Berner, “Florentine Society in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,”

203–46, Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia, and Contini, “La nobiltà toscana e il poter mediceo tra Cinque e Seicento,” 735–54.

Notes

157

25 Arnaldo Segarizzi, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, iii, pt. I, 17–18 (Bari:

Scrittori d’Italia, 1912–), 347.

26 Jean-H Mariéjol, Catherine de Médicis (Paris: Librairie Jules Tallandier, 1979), 96. 27 Paolo Mini, Difesa della città di Firenze, et de’ fiorentini contro le calunnie et

maldicentie de’ maligni (Lyon: Filippo Tinghi, 1577), 19.

28 Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 32–33. 29 See Van Veen, “Princes and Patriotism,” 68 and 76. 30 Vincenzo Borghini, Storia della nobiltà fiorentina (Pisa: Marlin, 1974), 31 [336] no. 21. 31 Borghini, Storia della nobiltà fiorentina, 97. 32 Mini, Difesa della città di Firenze, 62. 33 Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 25, 46, 48, 73–77, 86. 34 Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano Flandrus

Pictor et Inventor (Milan: Jandi Sapi, 1997), 86–92.

35 Mellini, Ricordo intorno ai costumi, 2–3 and 73. 36 Ibid., 74. 37 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. I, 320. 38 Ibid., vol. IV, 406. 39 Quoted in Suzanne Butters, “‘Magnificenza, non senza eccesso’: riflessioni sul

mecenatismo del Cardinale Ferdinando de’ Medici,” in Villa Medici: il sogno di un cardinale, ed. Michel Hochmann (Rome: De Luca, 1999), 39, fn. 187–88. According to the Ferrarese ambassador, Hercole Cortile, he was particularly ill-suited to such garb.

40 Giuliano De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1532-1606, ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan and Naples:

Riccardo Ricciardi, 1972), 522 (vol. II, 50v, 1588).

41 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. XII, 117–18. 42 Ibid., 118–19. 43 ASF, Manoscritti 130, 64v, 72r & 183r. 44 Bastiano Arditi, Diario delle cose successe nella città di Firenze et in altre parti della

cristianità, 1574-1579, ed. Roberto Cantagalli (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970), 83–84. See also the account in Corazzini, Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini, 272–74.

45 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. XII, 395. 46 Giovanni Villani frowned on the growing popularity of shorter tunics, which he attributed

to French influences. See Odile Blanc, “From Battlefield to Court; The Invention of Fashion in the Fourteenth Century,” in Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress, eds Désirée Koslin and Jane Snyder (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 159, 161.

47 Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 32. 48 See Paul William Richelson, Studies in the Personal Imagery of Cosimo I De’ Medici,

Duke of Florence (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978), 20. See also Mellini, Ricordo intorno ai costumi, 10.

49 Scipione Ammirato, Gli opuscoli di Scipione Ammirato, vol. III (Florence: G. Marescotti,

1583), 217.

158

Notes

50 Quoted in Ann Rosalind Jones, “Dress and Gender,” in A Cultural History of Dress

and Fashion 1450-1650, ed. Elizabeth Currie (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 102.

51 This episode is discussed in Jonathan Davies, Culture and Power: Tuscany and its

Universities, 1537-1609 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 133–34.

52 The poem is discussed further in J. L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2010), 60–62.

53 Anne Reynolds, “Galileo Galilei and the Satirical Poem ‘Contro il Portar la Toga’: The

Literary Foundations of Science,” Nuncius 17, no. 1 (2002): 60–61.

54 Margaret F. Rosenthal, “Clothing, Fashion, Dress, and Costume in Venice (c. 1450-

1650),” in A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797, ed. Eric R. Dursteler (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 922.

55 Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From sprezzatura to satire

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 140.

56 Aldo Manuzio, Vita di Cosimo de’ Medici primo Granduca di Toscana (Bologna,

1586), 165. Quoted in Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his SelfRepresentation in Florentine Art and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 235, fn. 10.

57 Francesco Berni, ed. Opere Burlesche, vol. II (Usecht: J. Broedelet, 1726), 318–21. 58 Rublack, Dressing Up, 140–44 on ambivalent attitudes toward the fashionable

Landsknechts in Germany. See also Angus Patterson, Fashion and Armour in Renaissance Europe: Proud Looks and Brave Attire (London: V&A Publications, 2009), 36–38. There are long antecedents for this and Odile Blanc provides examples from the fourteenth century, From Battlefield to Court, 163.

59 See, for example, scenes illustrated in the financial registers, the Tavolette di Biccherna,

held in the Archivio di Stato, Siena.

60 John R. Hale, “The soldier in Germanic graphic art of the Renaissance,” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History xvii (1986): 85–114. Peter Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 35–37.

61 Giuseppe Molini, ed. Vita di Cellini (Florence: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1832), 37. 62 A comparable situation occurred in Rome, where inventories from around 1650 show

that the toga “fell out of fashion” with professionals, including lawyers and magistrates, Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 108.

63 Illustrated in Currie “Clothing and a Florentine Style,” 45. 64 ASF, Riccardi 55, 44v, Riccardi 56, 65v & 84v. 65 Recorded in the 1612 inventory, these included three of wool and velvet and two of

purple and red sarcenet and damask, see ASF, Riccardi 258, 71r.

66 See Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze, on the social and economic rise of the Riccardi. 67 See ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 398 and 391, Ins. 5, 21r. The lucchi were sold on by a

Jewish second-hand dealer named Adam.

68 The Venetian ambassador, Marino Cavalli, commented on the demand for these cheaper

silks in 1546, quoted in Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 96. See also Jordan Goodman,

Notes

159

“Tuscan Commercial Relations with Europe, 1550-1620,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del cinquecento. Strumenti e veicoli della cultura: relazioni politiche ed economiche, vol. I, ed. Giancarlo Carfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 327–41. 69 Angiolini and Malanima, “Problemi della mobiltà sociale a Firenze,” 26. 70 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. XIII, 23. 71 Ibid., 114. 72 Archivio Capponi, file III, no. 4, account with an unspecified mercer from 1585 to 1588. 73 Compendio di Tutte le Gride et Ordini Pubblicati nella Città & Stato di Milano (Milan:

Pandolfo & Marco Tullio Malatesti Stampatori, 1609), 35–36.

74 On the practice of withholding livery to punish the misdemeanors of members of the

Medici household, see Fantoni, La Corte del Granduca, 82–83 and 89 and “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” 740.

Chapter 3 1 See, for example, Victoria de Grazia, “Introduction,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and

Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 1–10.

2 See Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 252–58.

3 Pietro Belmonte, Institutione della sposa del cavalier Pietro Belmonte ariminese (Rome:

Gigliotti, 1587), 21.

4 Elizabeth Currie, “Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in

Florence from the mid-Sixteenth to Early Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 483–509.

5 For female involvement in the “government” of household goods, their administration

and accumulation, see Daniela Frigo, Il padre di famiglia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1985), in particular 160–68.

6 Murphy, “Masculinity, Manliness and Mediocrity,” 350. 7 Quoted in Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 2005), 222.

8 Ibid., 218. Apprentices and household servants could pick up goods and payment

and pedlars and artisans would sometimes come to the home, so it was not always necessary to leave the home to commission clothing.

9 Quoted in Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal from the

Court of Duke Cosimo I, 112.

10 Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale (Venice: Sessa, 1572),

Ch. XLIIII, 109.

11 Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern

Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.

12 See ASF, Decima Granducale 3784. 13 Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 122–23.

160

Notes

14 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1985), 219–41.

15 Samuel Cohn, Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 13.

16 Caroline P. Murphy, “Lavinia Fontana and Female Life Cycle Experience,” in Picturing

Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds Geraldine Johnson and Sara Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115.

17 ASF, Carte Galletti 36, 8r & 8v. 18 Thomas Roscoe, ed. and trans., The Spanish Novelists (London: Frederick Warne,

1832), 341–42.

19 ASM, Notarile 14356. 20 Ago, Gusto for Things, 103. 21 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 26, 88. 22 See, for example, Thomas Dekker’s, The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), quoted in

Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 113–14.

23 Gerry Milligan, “The Politics of Effeminacy in Il Cortegiano,” Italica 83, nos. 3–4

(2006): 353–57.

24 Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Cambridge, MA:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997), 188.

25 William Harrison, The Description of England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare

Library, 1994), 145–46.

26 Silk trimmings and haberdashery had been produced in England from the fourteenth

century and during the second-half of the sixteenth century immigrant silk workers helped to establish the production of mixed-silk fabrics but high-quality silks were still only woven on the continent, see Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice, 25–26. See also Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England, especially Ch. 4, 103–28.

27 Maria Hayward, “Luxury or Magnificence? Dress at the Court of Henry VIII,”

Costume 30 (1996): 40.

28 T. S. Willan, The Inland Trade: Studies in English Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 65.

29 Quoted in Norah Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 1600-1900 (New York: Theatre Arts

Books), 43.

30 Ronald M. Berger, The Most Necessary Luxuries: The Mercer’s Company of Coventry

1550-1680 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 51.

31 Lisa Monnas, Merchants, Princes and Painters (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 2008), 4–7.

32 ASF, MDP 1171, ins. 1, fol. 7. 33 Sperone Speroni, Lettere Familiari, eds Maria Rosa Loi and Mario Pozzi, vol. I

(Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993), 258–59 and n. 17.

34 Quoted in Jane Bridgeman, “Dates, Dress and Dosso: Some Problems of Chronology,”

in Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Europe, eds Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and Salvatore Settis (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998), 198 (fn).

Notes

161

35 ASF, MDP 4624, ins. 57, Paris, June 3, 1610. 36 Gasparo Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore (Padua: Francesco Bolzetta 1627), 626. 37 Goodman, “Tuscan commercial relations with Europe,” 331. 38 Ibid. 39 Niccoli, “Official Dress and Courtly Fashion in Genoese Entries,” 267. 40 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 72, discusses the financial involvement of

patrician families in Medici celebrations.

41 Rosalia Bonito Fanelli, “I drappi d’oro: economia e moda a Firenze nel Cinquecento,”

in Le Arti del Principato Mediceo, ed. Candace Adelson (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1980), 412 lists some of the main Florentine silk merchants of this period, including the Berardi, Capponi, da Verrazzano, da Filicaia, Machiavelli, Niccolini, Rucellai, Salviati, Strozzi and Torrigiani families.

42 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 66. 43 For a more detailed summary of these investments, see Malanima, I Riccardi di

Firenze, 73–76 and Rita Mazzei, Pisa Medicea: L’economia cittadina da Ferdinando a Cosimo III (Firenze: Olschki, 1991), 74, 76, and 77.

44 ASF, Riccardi 81, 43r. 45 Orsi Landini, “L’amore del lusso e la necessità della modestia,” 40. See also Elizabeth

Currie, “Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in Florence,” 487.

46 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 72. 47 See Currie, “Clothing and a Florentine Style,” 50. 48 Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 100–1, 315. 49 ASF, Riccardi 27, 55, 56, 76, 77, and 224. 50 Claire Walsh, “The Social Relations of Shopping in Early Modern England,” in Buyers

and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 338.

51 ASF, Carte Galletti 36, fol. 20r. 52 ASF, Magalotti 11, loose letters. 53 ASF, MDP 5925, 194. Transcription on the “Medici Archive Project” documentary

sources website, http://bia.medici.org/DocSources/Home, Doc ID 3784 (accessed June 7, 2015).

54 ASF, Pratica Segreta 13, number 20. 55 Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice, 171–76. 56 See, for example, the case against a Florentine, Zuane Fabrini, accused in 1562 of

selling foreign silks in Venice, ASV, Arte della Seta, b. 578, Processi, unnumbered pages. I am grateful to Luca Molà for sharing this document with me.

57 Patrick Chorley, “The Volume of Cloth Production in Florence 1500-1650,” in Wool:

Products and Markets (13th to 20th century), eds Giovanni Luigi Fontana and Gérard Gayot (Padua: CLEUP, 2004), 563.

58 Currie, “Clothing and a Florentine Style,” 50–51. 59 Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 280.

162

Notes

60 Quoted in John H. Munro, “The anti-red shift—to the ‘Dark Side’: Colour Changes

in Luxury Flemish Woollens, 1300-1550,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, eds Robin Netherton and Gale Owen-Crocker, vol. 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 93.

61 Carlo Cipolla, “The Decline of Italy: The Case of a Fully Matured Economy,”

The Economic History Review, new series 5, no. 2 (1952): 183, fn. 4.

62 Roberta Orsi Landini and Stefania Ricci, “Il guardaroba di un sovrano: Cosimo II de’

Medici, metodologia di studio,” in Le Trame della Moda, eds Anna Giulia Cavagna and Grazietta Butazzi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), 195.

63 Ibid., 197, Table 7. 64 Ibid., 185. 65 Valeria Pinchera, Lusso e Decoro: vita quotidiana e spese dei Salviati di Firenze nel Sei

e Settecento (Quaderni dell’archivio Salviati, III, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1999), 72.

66 For further details, see Currie, “Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the

Clothing Trade in Florence,” 485–86.

67 Rublack, Dressing Up, 108. 68 Quoted in Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth, 103–04. 69 Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 38. 70 Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, Ch. IX, 28. 71 See Bonito Fanellli, “I drappi d’oro, 411. The silk guild regulations are listed in detail in

Cantini,” Legislazione toscana IV–XII.

72 ASCM, Materie 869/39. 73 ASF, Università dei Linaioli 3, 96r. 74 ASF, Università dei Linaioli 3, 97r. 75 ASF, Libri di Commercio 747, 23r. 76 ASF, Venturi Ginori Lisci 342, 91r/v. 77 Arditi, Diario delle cose successe nella città di Firenze, 73. 78 Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 35. 79 See Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze, 1540-1580, 84 and 90. ASF 1170, ins. 7, fol. 364, and

ins. 7, fol. 374. Transcriptions on the “Medici Archive Project” documentary sources website, http://bia.medici.org/DocSources/Home, Doc IDs 6068 and 6073 (accessed June 7, 2015).

80 Janet Arnold, “Cut and Construction,” in Moda alla corte dei Medici: gli abiti restaurati

di Cosimo, Eleonora e don Garzia, eds Roberta Orsi Landini et al. (Florence: Centro di, 1993), 58.

81 Ibid., Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women,

Circa 1560—1620 (London: Macmillan, 1985), 86.

82 Francesco Berni, ed., Opere Burlesche, vol. I (Usecht: J. Broedelet, 1726), 296–305. 83 Ibid., vol. II, 262–64, quoted in Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 84–85. 84 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, ed. and trans M. A. Screech (London:

Penguin, 2006), 43.

Notes

163

85 ASF 1170 ins. 7, fols. 364 and 376. See the “Medici Archive Project” documentary

sources website, Doc IDs 6068 and 6075 (accessed June 7, 2015).

86 Currie, “Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in Florence,”

490. Renata Ago refers to the same practice in Rome, Economia barocca: mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento (Rome: Donzelli, 1998), 59.

87 Paolo Getrevi, ed., Il Libro del sarto della Fondazione Querini Stampalia di Venezia

(Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1987).

88 ASV, Provveditori di Comun, b. 14, reg. 21, numerazione II, c. 1r-v. My thanks to Luca

Molà for drawing this to my attention.

89 Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 176. 90 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 65. 91 ASF, Capponi 176, Orsini XVII, Amministrazione, loose receipts. Saslow, The Medici

Wedding of 1589, 71 names Marinaro as one of Ferdinando’s tailors.

92 Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 69–70. 93 Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, and Ilja Van Damme, “Retail Circuits and Practices in

Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Introduction,” in Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 19.

94 ASF, Riccardi 99, 167v. 95 ASF, Magalotti 12, loose documents, April 4, 1617. 96 ASF, Capponi 176, folder marked debito containing a four-page list of Bertoldo

Orsini’s debts.

97 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 28, 90.

Chapter 4 1 Isidore Del Lungo and Guglielmo Volpi, eds, La cronaca domestica di messer Donato

Velluti (Florence: Sansoni, 1914), 331.

2 Amedeo Pellegrini, Relazioni inedite di ambasciatori lucchesi alle corti di Firenze,

Genova, Milano, Modena, Parma, Torino (Lucca: Alberto Marchi, 1901), 123.

3 De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1532-1606, 46. 4 Quoted in Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism

(New York: Colombia University Press, 1983), 178.

5 Corazzini, Diario fiorentino, 180. 6 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, eds R. Romano and A. Tenenti (Turin:

G. Einaudi, 1969), Book III, 247.

7 Della Casa, Galateo, trans. Rusnak, 3–4. 8 Lucio Paolo Rosello, Il ritratto del vero governo del prencipe dall’esempio vivo del gran

Cosimo de’ Medici (Venice, 1552), 25–26.

9 Sharon Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour in Italian Renaissance Cities,”

in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Routledge, 1998), 59.

10 Hayward, “Luxury or Magnificence?,” 137–46.

164

Notes

11 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, “The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in

late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (December, 1996): 201.

12 Ben Jackson, “Having Fun,” London Review of Books 37, no. 7 (April 9, 2015): 12. 13 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 47, 107. 14 Ian Frederick Moulton, “Castiglione: Love, Power and Masculinity,” in The Poetics of

Early Modern Masculinity, eds Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2010), 119–20.

15 David Gentilcore, “The Ethnography of Everyday Life,” in Early Modern Italy

1550-1796, ed. John A. Marino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 201.

16 Renata Ago, “Il linguaggio del corpo,” in Storia d’Italia: La Moda, eds Carlo Marco

Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 124.

17 Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

18 Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honour,” 45. 19 ASF, Capponi 173, ins. 141. 20 Ibid. 21 ASF, Capponi 176, Orsini XVII, Amministrazione Patrimoniale, folder marked debito e

confessione di debito.

22 Ibid. 23 On convent trousseaux, see Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 141–44, 237–39. 24 See Giuseppe Clusina Fabriziani, I conti Aldobrandeschi e Orsini: sunti storici

(Pitigliano, 1897), 44–54, Giuseppe Bruscalupi, Monografia storica della contea di Pitigliano (Florence, 1906), 39 and ASF, Capponi 173, ins. 169.

25 ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 14, ins. 13, c. 1r, Copia di Patente del Conte Alessandro

Orsino. Fantoni cites this appointment and the title of Marquis bestowed upon Giovanantonio in 1608 as part of the Medici’s strategy to win over powerful figures in outlying fiefs, see Fantoni, La corte del granduca, 108 and 127.

26 ASF, MDP 6020, fol. 166. 27 ASF, Capponi 176, Orsini XVII Amministrazione Patrimoniale, unnumbered. 28 For attitudes toward used and second-hand clothing and other goods, see Patricia

Allerston, “L’abito usato,” in Storia d’Italia: La Moda, eds Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 561–81.

29 ASF, Capponi 176, Orsini XVII, folder marked debito e confessione di debito. 30 See ASF, Diari di Etichetta della Guardaroba 4, 153v and also Riguccio Galluzzi,

Istoriato del Granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della Casa Medici, vol. III (Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1781), 255.

31 De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1532-1606, 152–53, fn. 1. 32 Giovanna Lazzi, “Il ‘bruno’ a corte,” in La Morte e la Gloria: apparati funebri medicei

per Filippo II di Spagna e Margherita d’Austria, ed. Monica Bietti (Florence: Sillabe, 1999), 80–83.

33 ASF, Capponi 176, Orsini XVII, document titled “i debiti dell’Illustrissimo Bertoldo

Orsino in Roma” in the folder marked debito e confessione di debito, also a bill

Notes

165

headed vestiti diversi per la morte della buona memoria di sua eccellenza in the folder Amministrazione, conti, note di opere. 34 Valeria Pinchera, “Vestire la vita, vestire la morte: abiti per matrimoni e funerali,

XIV-XVII secolo,” in Storia d’Italia: La Moda, eds Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 257.

35 ASF, Riccardi 21, 87v. 36 J. G. Peristiany, “Introduction,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean

Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), 11.

37 Françoise Point-Waquet, “Les Botti: fortunes et culture d’une famille florentine

(1550-1621),” Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome 90, no. 2 (1978): 690.

38 Ibid., 692–96. 39 Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, vol. IV, 355–56. 40 See Point-Waquet, “Les Botti: fortunes et culture d’une famille florentine,” 689–712. 41 Roberto Cantagallli, “Matteo Botti,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 13 (1971).

http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/matteo-botti_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ (accessed June 7, 2015).

42 ASF, Libri di Commercio 747, 16r, 20r, 27r. 43 Ibid., 15v, January 27, 1590. 44 Although in this instance it served Botti well, it was a dubious connection given

Don Pietro’s character, see Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus, 280–81.

45 De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1532-1606, 460–61. The event ended in disaster: a violent dispute

over the allocation of prizes caused a stand full of spectators to collapse, killing several people underneath them.

46 ASF, Manoscritti 130, 155r. 47 Roberto Cantagalli, “Matteo Botti,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. XIII

(Rome: Treccani, 1971), 447.

48 ASF, MDP 4622, fol. 318v, Paris, April 14, 1611. 49 Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds: Maney Publishing,

2007), 228–29.

50 Catherine Fletcher, Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador

(London: Bodley Head, 2012), 28.

51 ASF MDP 5079, ins. 2, fol. 87. Transcription on the “Medici Archive Project”

documentary sources website, Doc ID 13344 (accessed June 7, 2015).

52 ASF, MDP 4624a, fol. 157. 53 Eugenio Alberi ed., Le relazioni degli ambasciadori veneti al Senato, series II vol. 5

(Florence, 1858), 446.

54 Fletcher, Our Man in Rome, 29. See also Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry

VIII, 229.

55 Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore, 420. 56 ASF, MDP 4624a, fol. 164. 57 Ibid., fol. 314. 58 Orsi Landini and Ricci, Il guardaroba di un sovrano, 176–90.

166

Notes

59 The portrait was painted in 1631 by a fifteen-year-old Carlo Dolci, commissioned by

Don Lorenzo de’ Medici, see Il Seicento Fiorentino: arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Pittura (Florence: Cantini, 1986), 434–35.

60 Point-Waquet, “Les Botti: fortunes et culture d’une famille florentine,” 703–12

discusses Botti’s library in some detail.

61 Ibid., 697. 62 Ottavio Rinuccini, Lodi de’ giocatori di pallone (Florence: Zanobi Pignoni, 1619)

unnumbered.

63 ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 398, 175r/v: un paio di scarpe di corame nero tutte straforate

sotto teletta bianca piana e ricamate tutte piene di canutiglio d’oro e d’argento e lama d’oro battuto con un riguardo attorno di catanelle di canutiglio d’oro e orlate di nastrino d’oro filato con rosoni grandi di nastro di seta bianca guarnita con gigliettone alto di oro et argento filato.

64 Ibid., 61r, 25r, 170v. 65 ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 398, 42v. 66 Ibid., 42v, unnumbered second page. 67 ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 391, ins. 5, names some of the individuals who purchased

items from Botti’s estate when it was auctioned off by the Magistrato dei Pupilli, a rigattiere, a valigiaio, two materassai and two Jews, one of whom, Abramo Tedesco, bought a very large quantity of clothing worth 1135 ducats.

Chapter 5 1 A notable exception to this is the red doublet in portraits of Francesco de’ Medici as

a young man. See, for example, Francesco di Cosimo de’ Medici, attributed to Agnolo Bronzino, c. 1565, Florence, Stibbert Museum, illustrated in Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 60.

2 John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1995); Michel Pastoureau,

Black: The History of a Color (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008).

3 Cecily Booth, Cosimo I, Duke of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1921), 179. ASF, 1176b, ins. 3, fol. 464 records an order of yellow velvet ducal liveries in 1543 (transcription on the “Medici Archive Project” documentary sources website, Doc ID 3275 (accessed June 7, 2015). On the association between prostitutes and Jews and the color yellow, see Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Guardaroba Medievale: vesti e società dal XIII al XVI Secolo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999), 295.

4 White could denote purity, worn at weddings and funerals and young children were

often dressed and buried in white. Its religious connotations are evident in its use for the robes of the Order of Saint Stephen and, in 1619, the Medici Wardrobe recorded the gift of an entirely white outfit, including hat, belt and garters, presented to “a Jew who is to be baptized,” see ASF Guardaroba Medicea 391, ins. 4.

5 Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., The Materiality of

Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 1.

Notes

167

6 Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750-1820 (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 7.

7 See Bruce Edelstein, “Bronzino in the Service of Eleonora di Toledo and Cosimo I de’

Medici: Conjugal Patronage and the Painter-Courtier,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, eds Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 226–27.

8 Carol Plazzotta, “Pontormo: Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap,” in Renaissance

Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, eds Lorne Campbell, Miguel Falomir, Jennifer Fletcher, and Luke Syson (London: National Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 2008), 224–27.

9 Philippe Costamagna, “Deux portraits de Luigi Capponi et de son fils Niccolò peints

par Giovanni Stradano,” Paragone 479–81 (1990): 101–04 attributes the portrait to Stradano, but Alessandra Baroni suggests that it is stylistically dissimilar to other works by the Flemish artist, see Alessandra Baroni, “Portrait of Luigi Capponi,” in Stradanus, 1523-1605. Court Artist of the Medici, eds Alessandra Baroni and Manfred Sellink (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 193.

10 The 1561 workshop census records him renting two workshops, see ASF, Decima

Granducale 3784, 157r, 163r. Further documentation about his involvement in the textile trade can be found in the Archive of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence.

11 ASF, Capponi 68, no. 97. 12 ASF, Capponi 146, 81r. 13 Niccolò purchased a trumpet and paid for lute lessons. His reading matter included

volumes on cookery, agriculture, medicine, and works by Plutarch, Guicciardini, Malaspina and Baccio Baldini as well as books on duels by Muzio, Fausto, Pigna, and Possovino. Pietro Bembo’s Rime and a book of satire were accompanied by a concordance between the Old and New Testament and penitential psalms translated into Tuscan, see ASF, Capponi 146, 1r, 48v, 57v, 58r, 58v, 81r.

14 ASF, Capponi 146, 41r, 43v and 147, 46r. 15 NICH.VS CAPP.US/. ALOISSI F/.OBIIT.AN.S.D./M.D.L. XXVIIII./AETATIS.SUE./

AN.XXXIII.

16 ASF, Capponi 147, 61v, 95v. 17 The head and shoulders version in the Uffizi (Inv. 1890 n. 763) has been catalogued in

the past as depicting the poet Torquato Tasso.

18 ASF, Capponi 147, 1r/v. 19 Paolo Malanima, Il lusso dei contadini: consumi e industrie nelle campagne toscane del

Sei e Settecento (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990), 29 notes buricchi in inventories belonging to Tuscan peasants. See also Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 99–102.

20 Mellini, Ricordo intorno ai costumi, 1820, 10. Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze

1540-1580, 99.

21 Calvi, “Abito, genere, cittadinanza,” 491. On the military origins of leather garments

see also the Museo Stibbert exhibition catalogue L’abito per il corpo, il corpo per l’abito: Islam e Occidente a confronto (Florence: Artificio Edizioni, 1998), 72–78.

22 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1824), 296.

See the forthcoming work on “doublets of defence” from the Tudor Tailor team (www.tudortailor.com).

168

Notes

23 The authorship of the portrait is debated. Costamagna, “Deux portraits de Luigi

Capponi et de son fils Niccolò,” 103–04, Baroni, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano, 148 (cat. 40) and ibid., “Portrait of Luigi Capponi,” 192–93, consider it to be the work of Giovanni Stradano. It has also been attributed to Jacopino del Conte, see Antonio Vannugli, “Conte, Jacopino (Jacopo) del,” in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, 20, München-Leipzig 1998, 602.

24 Murphy, “Lavinia Fontana and Female Life Cycle Experience,” 131. 25 Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, Epistola del Trissino de la vita, che deve tenere una donna

vedova (Venice, 1524), unnumbered folios.

26 See the complaint from Pietro Aretino, himself a cobbler’s son and frequently

portrayed, “It is the disgrace of our age that it tolerates the painted portraits even of tailors and butchers,” quoted in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 165.

27 Quoted in Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (London:

I. B. Tauris, 2002), 30.

28 See Joshua Reynolds on the subject, quoted in Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth

Century Europe 1715-1789 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 163.

29 Jonas Gavel, Color: A study of its Position in the Art Theory of the Quattro- & Cinquecento

(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell international, 1979), 138. See also Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo, vol. I (Milan: Dalla Societa Tipografica de Classici Italiani, 1807), 275–76.

30 Alessandro Piccolomini, La Raffaella (Milan: Longanesi, 1969), 38–39. 31 Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo dei colori (Venice: Sessa, 1565), 25. 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Monica Cerri, “Sarti toscani nel seicento: attività e clientela,” in Le Trame della Moda,

eds Anna Giulia Cavagna and Grazietta Butazzi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), 421–35.

34 Munro, “The anti-red shift—to the ‘Dark Side’,” 91. 35 Girolamo Gargiolli, ed., L’Arte della seta in Firenze. Trattato del secolo XV (Florence:

Barbèra: 1868), 78–79. See also Franco Brunello, The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind (Vicenza: N: Pozza, 1973), 163–64.

36 Quoted in Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 250. 37 A mix of ingredients, including roots and tree bark, or the rarer and more costly oak

gall, usually imported from eastern Europe, were used in conjunction with a mordant rich in iron oxide, see Paolo Bensi, “La tintura delle stoffe in nero nei centri di produzione italiani nel XVI secolo,” in Giovanni Battista Moroni. Il Cavaliere in Nero, eds Annalisa Zanni and Andrea Di Lorenzo (Milan: Skira, 2005), 57–60. There were already concerns in the fifteenth century that ferro-tannic compounds would damage textiles, see Brunello, The Art of Dyeing, 190.

38 Giovanni Ventura Rosetti, Plico dell’arte del tingere tutte le sorte di colori (Venice:

Alessandro Vecchi, 1611), 54–56.

39 J. L. Colomer, “Black and the Royal Image,” in Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early

Modern Europe, eds J. L. Colomer and A. Descalzo, vol. I (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 91–93. See also Munro, “The anti-red shift—to the ‘Dark Side’,” 92–93.

40 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. XIV, 291. Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color,

90–92.

Notes

169

41 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1980), in particular 42–43 and 50.

42 Patricia Phillippy, Painting Women. Cosmetics, Canvases and Early Modern Culture

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 1–22.

43 Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni (1590), 140. 44 Alison McNeil Kettering, “Gentlemen in Satin: Masculine Ideals in Later Seventeenth-

Century Dutch Portraiture,” Art Journal 56, no. 2; “How Men Look: On the Masculine Ideal and the Body Beautiful” (Summer, 1997): 41–47. See also Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 94–119.

45 See Rosalia Bonito Fanelli, “The Textiles of Italian Renaissance Dress as seen in

Portraiture: A Semiological Interpretation (I),” Bulletin de Liaison du Cieta 74 (1997): 83–95; Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 98 and Patricia Simons, “Alert and Erect: Masculinity in some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,” in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghamton and New York: Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 173–75.

46 Charles McCorquodale, Agnolo Bronzino (London: Chaucer Press, 2005), 60. 47 I. B. Supino, ed., I ricordi di Alessandro Allori (Florence: Alfani & Venturi Editori,

1908), 24–26.

48 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life

1860-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 24–53.

49 Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. IV, 405–06. 50 Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, vol. V, 575. 51 Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo dei colori, 24. 52 Robert Dallington, A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany, 1596 (London:

Edward Blount, 1605), 63.

53 Harrison, The Description of England, 148. 54 Pastoureau, Black: the History of a Color, 96. 55 Jean Courtois, Le Blason de Couleurs (Paris: Pierre Sergent, 1535), 35. 56 Jones and Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, 168. 57 This has been discussed by many scholars, including Michel Pastoureau, who notes

however that John the Fearless had himself already demonstrated a preference for black, Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color, 102.

58 Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 119–37, McCall, Brilliant Bodies, 481–88. Rosita Levi

Pizetsky, Storia del Costume in Italia, vol. III (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1966), 220 notes that Matthäus Schwarz referred to “Venetian black.”

59 Scipione Ammirato, Orazione fatta nella morte di Don Franceso de’ Medici (Florence:

Giunti, 1587), 9 and 13.

60 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book I, Ch. 26, 32–33. 61 Daniel Javitch, “Il Cortegiano and the Constraints of Despotism,” in Castiglione: The

Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, eds Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 25–26.

170

Notes

62 Jennifer Richards, “ ‘A Wanton Trade of Living’? Rhetoric, Effeminacy, and the Early

Modern Courtier,” Criticism 42, no. 2 (Spring, 2000): 185–206.

63 Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedeo Quondam, vol. I (Ferrara: Franco

Cosimo Panini, 1993), 140.

64 Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances, Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book

of the Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 14.

65 Franco Angiolini, “Luigi Capponi,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. XIX

(Rome: Treccani, 1976), 65–67.

66 De’ Ricci, Cronaca 1532-1606, 152. 67 Caterina Caneva, I Volti del Potere: La ritrattistica di corte nella Firenze Grand ducale

(Florence: Giunti, 2002), 13.

Chapter 6 1 The Magalotti’s presence in Florence can be traced back to 1020. Guelph supporters,

they contributed actively to the government of the republic and three of their members were elected gonfalonieri, see Giulia Camerani Marri, “L’archivio Magalotti,” Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato XXX (1970): 257–59.

2 The family records contain a payment to Santi di Tito, manager of the workshop where

his son Tiberio worked, although it is thought on stylistic grounds to be the work of the latter, see Simona Lecchini Giovannoni, “Tiberio Titi,” in Il Seicento Fiorentino: arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Biografie (Florence: Cantini, 1986), 176.

3 Now in a private collection, the portrait appears in the exhibition catalogue, Il Seicento

Fiorentino: arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Pittura, 139–40. It is also illustrated in Daniela Degl’Innocenti, “Le produzioni seriche fiorentine: tipologie e iconografia,” in La Grande Storia dell’Artigianato: il Seicento e Settecento, ed. Riccardo Spinelli, vol. V (Florence: Giunti, 2002), 192.

4 See Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti, ed. I Principi Bambini (Florence: Centro di, 1985),

26–27.

5 Turkish influences on Italian dress during this period are explored in the exhibition

catalogue L’abito per il corpo, il corpo per l’abito, 1998.

6 Grazietta Butazzi, “Indicazioni sull’abbigliamento infantile dalle liste della Guardaroba

Grand ducale tra la fine del secolo XVI e il secolo XVII.” in I Principi Bambini, ed. Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti (Florence: Centro di, 1985), 26–27.

7 Quoted in Aschengreen Piacenti, I Principi Bambini, 40. 8 Anne Buck, Clothes and the Child: A Handbook of Children’s Dress from 1500-1900

(Carlton: Ruth Bean, 1996), 149–53.

9 See Degl’Innocenti, “Le produzioni seriche fiorentine: tipologie e iconografia,” 192–93. 10 ASF, Venturi Ginori Lisci 341, 179r. 11 ASF, Magalotti 11, purchases recorded in a group of unnumbered receipts dating July

to September 1605.

12 Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations,” 87–88 and Frick, Dressing Renaissance

Florence, 175–76.

Notes

171

13 For details of the predella, see Simona Lecchini Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori (Turin:

U. Allemandi, 1991), cat. no. 55, 240.

14 Costanza’s brother, Antonio, was among the forty “noble and generous Florentine

adolescents” in the papal procession, see Irene Fosi, All’ombra dei Barberini: fedeltà e servizio nella Roma barocca (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 37.

15 For details of the Magalotti family, see Luigi Passerini, Famiglie celebri italiane del Conte

Pompeo Litta, vol. XIII, issue 165 (Milan: Luciano Basadonna, 1870), 2, table XII and ASF, Carte Sebregondi 3181 (Magalotti). See also Fosi, All’ombra dei Barberini, 104.

16 ASF, Venturi Ginori Lisci 341, 238v, 249v. 17 ASF, Magalotti 11, loose receipts. The Roman scudo was approximately equivalent to

the Florentine florin.

18 ASF, Magalotti 165, unnumbered receipt from 1614: un paio di guanti d’ambretta

con le cuciture di fuori di seta iscarnatina con monopole alla francese a scacchi di raso iscarnatino ricamate d’oro passato con fiori di seta del naturale con pizzillo d’oro intorno a detti merletti con nastro di seta iscarnatino a due larghezze e pizzillo d’oro intorno a detto nastro per fare la lattugha intorno a detti guanti levò detto lire 24.

19 ASF, Venturi Ginori Lisci 341, 286r 1607. 20 For the increasingly fashionable nature of silks like velvets and the development of a new

design repertoire, see Roberta Orsi Landini, “Il velluto da abbigliamento. Il rinnovamento del disegno,” in Velluti e Moda tra XV e XVII secolo, ed. Roberta Orsi Landini (Milan: Skira, 1999), 57–72. On Venice, see Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice, 132.

21 ASF, Magalotti 151, unnumbered receipts. 22 Avril Hart, “Men’s Dress,” in Four Hundred Years of Fashion, ed. Natalie Rothstein

(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), 52.

23 French fashions are often described as shorter and more figure-hugging. William

Harrison, for example, mentions “short French breeches,” see Harrison, The Description of England, 145. Pisetzky, Storia del Costume in Italia, 138 links tighter hose with the court of Henri III.

24 Flavio Orlando, Storia del costume maschile al tempo di Cosimo III de’ Medici

1670-1723 (Milan: Idea, 1991) discusses the influence of French fashions at the Medici court in the later seventeenth century.

25 The significance of the use of the word disegno in these tailors’ receipts is discussed in

greater detail in Elizabeth Currie, “Diversity and Design in the Florentine Tailoring Trade,” in The Material Renaissance (Studies in Design and Material Culture), eds Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 154–73.

26 ASF, Magalotti 151, unnumbered loose receipts: e a di 4 di dicembre per fattura d’un

paio di calzoni di panno misto di colore dell’aria e una casacha e un ferraiolo di detto con 2 finiture al ferraiolo e 2 in su calzoni e una alla casacha e una alle maniche e 2 in su le costure con pistagne guarnite con ucchielliere da fianchi cioe la guarnizione che venne fatta cioe al ferraiolo che vi è 4 bastoncini di raso gazzera marina per lungo e 4 a occhiolini con vergola d’argento accanto a detti bastoncini e a calzoni detti come al ferraiolo e alla casacha detti come di sopra soppanato di taffeta e il ferraiolo orlato di raso e passato di vergola d’argento e a detta casacha con sue appartenenze lire 140 per disegnatura del vestito misto e ferraiolo lire 14.

27 ASF, Magalotti 11, loose receipts.

172

Notes

28 Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the

Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), in particular 7–16 and 58–69.

29 ASF, Magalotti 151, loose receipts from 1610 to 1613. For various exceptionally fine

surviving examples of linen underwear, see Janet Arnold, Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, Smocks, Neckwear, Headwear and Accessories for Men and Women, c.1540–1660, completed by Jenny Tiramani and Santina Levey (London: Macmillan, 2008), 50–51, 106.

30 ASF, Venturi Ginori Lisci, 341, 316v. 31 Montaigne, Journal de Voyage, 173. 32 Jean Delumeau, Vita economica e sociale di Roma nel Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni,

1979), 94.

33 Ibid., 95–96. 34 See ASF, Decima Grand ducale 3784. On the Florentine population, see Goldthwaite,

The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 337.

35 Delumeau, Vita economica e sociale, 119. 36 Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1992), 34–36 on the careers of Costanza Magalotti’s three sons.

37 In Florence, for example, Grand ducal sumptuary legislation included separate

categories for boys under twelve and unmarried girls. The former were prohibited from wearing the most expensive kinds of silk, such as velvet. See, for example, Cantini, Legislazione toscana, vol. IV, 408.

38 Translated in Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 158. 39 Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale, Ch. IX, 27. 40 See the essays on hermaphrodites and cross-dressing in early modern England,

Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Ambiguity (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).

41 Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 122. I am grateful to Gerry Milligan for further

clarification regarding the details of this episode.

42 See discussions of the Bolognese Nicolosa Sanuti in Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and

Social Relations,” 86–87 and Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 124–32.

43 Quoted in Elisa Tosi Brandi, “Cesena,” in La legislazione suntuaria. Secoli XIII-XVI.

Emilia-Romagna, ed. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Rome: Publicazioni degli archivi di Stato. Fonti, 2002), 345, n. 11.

44 Stanley Chojnacki, “La Posizione della Donna a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Tiziano e

Venezia, eds Massimo Gemin and Giannantonio Paladini (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980), 67–68.

45 For a counterpoint to this, see McCall’s, “Brilliant Bodies,” 445–90, which discusses

how men at the Northern Italian courts derived prestige from clothing in the fifteenth century.

46 Taddei, “Perizia, adolescenza and giovinezza,” 16–17. 47 Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 5–7 outlines similar circumstances for male youths in England in this period.

Notes

173

48 Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York and London: Academic

Press, 1980), 387–89.

49 Anthony Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity and Early Modern Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate,

2009), 77.

50 See, for example, Ludovica Sebregondi, “Clothes and Teenagers: What Young

Men Wore in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150-1650, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2002), 27–50 on moral condemnation of tight-fitting and revealing clothing worn by Florentine adolescents in the fifteenth century.

51 Quoted in Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze, 47. 52 Ibid., 119. 53 David Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2000), 93–94.

54 Amanda Bailey, “Monstrous Manner: Style and the Early Modern Theater,” Criticism

43, no. 3 (Summer 2001), 261.

55 This has received less attention in an Italian context, for an example of an analysis of

the phenomenon in early modern English society, see Garrett P. J. Epp, “The Vicious Guise: Effeminacy, Sodomy and Mankind,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, eds Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 303–20.

56 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance

Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106–09.

57 Ibid., Forbidden Friendships, 3–16. 58 On the political ramifications of foreign fashions, see Milligan, “The Politics of

Effeminacy in Il Cortegiano,” Italica, 353–57.

59 David Kuchta, “Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England,” in Sexuality and

Gender in Early Modern Europe: Texts, Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993a), 239.

60 José Cartagena-Calderon, “Of Pretty Fops and Spectacular Sodomites: El lindo don

Diego and the Performance of Effeminacy in Early Modern Spain,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, eds Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 326–27.

61 Giovanni Della Casa, Il Galatheo (Florence: Giunti, 1574), 100–01: Niuna tua veste

vuole essere molto molto leggiadra, ne molto molto freggiata, accioche non si dica, che tu porti le calze di Ganimede, o che tu ti sii messo il farsetto di Cupido.

62 On the influence and meaning of visual representations of Cupid, see Jane Kingsley-

Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–23, 133–42.

63 Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), 5.

64 Della Casa, Il Galateo, trans. Rusnak, xxi–ii discusses the possibility of Shakespeare

reading the Galateo. The playwright was twelve when the first English translation was published.

65 Translated in Bridgeman, “Dates, Dress, and Dosso,” 26–27.

174

Notes

66 Giovanni Pontano, I libri delle virtù sociali, ed. Francesco Tateo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999),

237: per quanto riguarda I giovani, serbino la leggiadria e tale eleganza, che non sembri tuttavia avere nulla di muliebre.

67 Quoted in Bonito Fanelli, “I drappi d’oro,” 415: i giovani parevano diventati femine

mostrando la gola, e il collo con camice lavorate da capo lascivamente.

68 Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi overo ammaestramenti (Milan: Giovanantonio degli

Antoni, 1559), ricordo XIII, fol. 10.

69 Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, and Glass, 1250-1550 (New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 1999), 91–92.

70 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1991), 122–23.

71 Translated in Stefano Cracolici, “Flirting with the Chameleon: Alberti on Love,”

Modern Language Notes 121, no. 1 (2006): 102–29, 126.

72 Guazzo, La civil conversazione, 204. 73 See Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance

Studies 23, no. 3 (June 2009): 241–42 on the cultural meanings of long hair on men.

74 Translated in Bridgeman, “Dates, Dress and Dosso,” 26–27. 75 See Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy, 181–206. 76 Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze, 113. 77 Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy, 190–92. 78 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book I, Ch. 19, 27. 79 Giambattista Della Porta, Della Fisonomia dell’Huomo (Naples: Carlino & Vitale,

1610), 241–42.

80 For Thomas Aquinas’ definition of mollities in opposition to the masculine virtue of

perseverance, see Anthony Ross and P. G. Walsh, eds, St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiæ: Courage, vol. 42 (London: Blackfriars, 1966), 220–23.

81 See Bonnie J. Blackburn, “The Lascivious Career of B-Flat,” in Eroticism in Early Modern

Music, eds Bonnie J. Blackburn and Laurie Stras (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 19–42.

82 Cited in Bushnell, “Tyranny and Effeminacy in Early Modern England,” 341. 83 Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England, 103–18. 84 Lehfeldt, “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain,”

463–94.

85 Milligan, “The Politics of Effeminacy in Il Cortegiano,” 356. 86 Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni (1590), 160–62 This expression was used to

described men aged about twenty, see Taddei, “Perizia, adolescenza and giovinezza,” 18.

87 See Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” 84–128. 88 Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni (Venice: Sessa, 1598), 125. 89 For a discussion of this typology used on maiolica plates, see Marta Ajmar-Wollheim

and Dora Thornton, “When is a Portrait not a Portrait? Belle Donne on Maiolica and the Renaissance Praise of Local Beauties,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, eds Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 138–53.

Notes

175

90 Bette Talvacchia, “Erotica: The Sexualised Body in Renaissance Art,” in A Cultural

History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London: Bloomsbury, 2012a), 180–81.

91 On courtiers and Neoplatonic love, see Moulton, “Castiglione: Love, Power and

Masculinity,” 134–40. They could also be viewed as representing melancholy, see Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 130.

92 Translated by Laura Croci, “Rinaldo and his Arms in the Gerusalemme Liberata,”

Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18, no. (1987): 30. For further discussion of the emasculation of Rinaldo, see Marc David Schachter, “‘Quanto concede la Guerra’: Epic Masculinity and the Education of Desire in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata,” in The Poetics of Masculinity, eds Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010) 213–40.

93 Shepard, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen?,” 293. 94 Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity, 27. 95 Kuchta, “Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England,” 237.

Chapter 7 1 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 27, 89. 2 Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 7–26.

3 Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2001), 191. See, too, the 1519 masque at Henry VIII’s court described as “after the manner of Italy,” Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII, 235.

4 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 15. 5 Ian Fenlon, “Maria Magdalena of Austria and the Uses of Danced Spectacle,”

in Seventeenth-century Ballet: A Multi-Art Spectacle, ed. Barbara Grammeniati (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011), 33–34.

6 See, for example, Strong, Art and Power, 126–52 and Saslow, The Medici Wedding

of 1589.

7 Van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation, 151. 8 Ibid., 149–50. 9 Jennifer Nevile, “Dance in Europe, 1250-1750,” in Dance, Spectacle and the Body

Politick 1250-1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 43–44.

10 Referenced in Finucci, The Prince’s Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance

Medicine, 61.

11 Giulio Ferroni, ed., Poesia Italiana. Il Cinquecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), 313. 12 Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval

Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 212.

176

Notes

13 Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere, 61. 14 Giovanni de’ Bardi, Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del calcio fiorentino (Florence: Giunti,

1580), 11.

15 Quoted in Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 162. 16 Cees de Bondt, Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 115–29. 17 ASF, Capponi 176. 18 ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 143, 1328r. 19 Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto

Blanis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 97–98.

20 Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, 64–65 and Anna Maria Testaverde, “Gli abiti

per le feste fiorentine del 1589,” Il Costume nell’età del Rinascimento, ed. Dora Liscia Bemporad (Florence: Edifir, 1988b), 175–87.

21 Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII, 235. 22 Molini, Vita di Cellini, 294. 23 Susan Gaylard, Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 128–39.

24 Van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation, 43. 25 Quoted in Semenza, Sports, Politics and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark:

University of Delaware Press, 2003), 56.

26 Ibid., 13–14. 27 Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy (Paris: V. du Moutier, 1670), 212. 28 Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity, 53. 29 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 398–99. 30 Quoted in George McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in

Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 70.

31 Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance, 11–13. 32 Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 18–19. 33 Quoted in Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 28. 34 Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess, 64–65. 35 Pietro Bini, Memorie del calcio fiorentino (Florence, 1688), 91. 36 Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere, 56. Descrizione delle Pompe e delle

Feste Fatte nella venuta alla Città di Firenze del Sereniss. Don Vincenzio Gonzaga (Florence: Sermartelli, 1584), 5r.

37 Bette Talvacchia, “Introduction: The Look and Sound of Sexuality in the Renaissance,”

in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London: Bloomsbury, 2012b), 25.

38 Patterson, Fashion and Armour in Renaissance Europe, 32. 39 L’abito per il corpo e il corpo per l’abito, 72, 74–77. 40 Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy, 104–05. See also Orsi Landini,

Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 82–83.

41 Patterson, Fashion and Armour in Renaissance Europe, 41–49.

Notes

177

42 Hale, “The soldier in Germanic graphic art of the Renaissance,” 84–114. 43 Paret, Imagined Battles, 27. 44 Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life. Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2009), 60. Thomas also notes bravery’s dual meaning of courage and fine clothing.

45 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 27, 89: cosi’ divisati (i soldati)

portan seco una certa vivezza ed alacrita’ che invero ben s’accompagna con l’arme.

46 ASF, Manoscritti 128, 1555–74, Vol. III, 450v. 47 Descrizione delle Pompe e delle Feste Fatte nella venuta alla Città di Firenze del Sereniss.

Don Vincenzio Gonzaga, 4v–5r.

48 Tobias Capwell, ed., The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance

Europe 1520-1630 (London: The Wallace Collection, 2013), 72.

49 Fabrizio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance, ed. and trans. Julia Sutton

(New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 135.

50 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 11, 75 and Ch. 40, 101. Referenced

in Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580, 66.

51 Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier, 64–75. 52 Bardi, Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 11. 53 Giulio Dati, Disfida di Caccia tra i piacevoli e piattelli, ed. Domenico Moreni (Florence,

1824), 30.

54 Francesco Bocchi, Le Bellezze della città di Firenze (Florence, 1591), 308. 55 Bini, Memorie del calcio fiorentino, 89. 56 Quoted in J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, King of England (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1971), 30.

57 Bardi, Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 36. 58 Nicole Carew-Reid, Le fêtes Florentines au temps du Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence:

Olschki, 1995), 6. Translation from Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 82–83.

59 Nicholas Scott Baker, “Medicean Metamorphoses, Carnival in Florence, 1513,”

Renaissance Studies 25, no. 4 (2011): 491–510.

60 Michel Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici: Public Celebrations, Politics, and

Literature in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. and trans. Nicole Carew-Reid (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press: 2008), 111.

61 George W. McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2004), 40–51.

62 Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 48. European interest in Turkish dress is discussed in

Wilson, “Foggie diverse di vestire de’ Turchi,” 97–139.

63 Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere, 59. See also Testaverde, “Gli abiti

per le feste fiorentine del 1589,” 184–85.

64 Poole, “Christian Crusade as Spectacle,” 400–01. 65 Joseph Roach, “Kinship, Intelligence and Memory as Improvisation: Culture and

Performance in New Orleans,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 223.

178

Notes

66 Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman

Ethnicity,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750, ed. James G. Harper (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 41–67.

67 Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere, 59. 68 Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, 180. 69 Bini, Memorie del Calcio Fiorentino, 116. Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 89. 70 Torquato Tasso, Opere di Torquato Tasso colle controversie sulla Gerusalemme, vol. 9

(Pisa: Capurro, 1824), 104.

71 Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6.

72 Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento. Il Potere e lo spazio: La

scena del principe (Milan: Electa, 1980), 334, catalogue no. 2.36.

73 Coppi, Cronaca Fiorentina, 97. 74 Translated in Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici, 112. 75 Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia, 254–55. 76 Martelli, Dal primo e dal secondo libro delle lettere, 58. 77 Coppi, Cronaca Fiorentina, 97. 78 Domenico di Guido Mellini, Descrizione dell’entrata della Serenissima Regina Giovanna

d’Austria (Florence: Giunti, 1566), 17.

79 Bonner Mitchell, Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance (Florence: Olschki,

1979), 114–15. Sydney Anglo, “Humanism and the Court Arts,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, eds Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay (London: Longman, 1990), 84.

80 ASF, Manoscritti 130, 155r. 81 ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 398, 142r. 82 Ibid. 83 Armor for a horse’s head, the shaffron was usually designed to provide extra

protection at vulnerable points such as the eyes and ears. Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 65 (Metropolitan Museum Accession Number 04.03.253). See also Tobias Capwell, Masterpieces of European Arms and Armour in the Wallace Collection (London: Wallace Collection, 2011), 104–05.

84 Dolce, Dialogo dei colori, 36. 85 See Lionello Sozzi, “Il crotesque: bruttezza e bizzarria,” in Disarmonia, bruttezza e

bizzarria nel Rinascimento, ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 1998), 9–17.

86 Tiziana Giuliani, “Francesco Salviat e gli Spettacoli di Corte,” in Francesco Salviati e

la Bella Maniera, eds Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Philippe Costamagna, and Michel Hochmann (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2001), 173.

87 Benedetto Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, Book 9, 228. 88 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 3137, fol. 522. Available on the “Medici Archive Project”

documentary sources website (accessed June 7, 2015).

89 Susan Miller, “Disegni bizarres per tessuti di seta, 1680-1710,” in Seta. Potere e

glamour, ed. Roberta Orsi Landini (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 83–109.

Notes

179

90 Cipolla, “The Decline of Italy: The Case of a Fully Matured Economy,” 183, fn. 4. 91 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 11, 75. 92 Inge Werner, “The Heritage of the Umidi: Performative Poetry in the Early

Accademia Fiorentina,” in The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch, vol. II (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 270.

93 Guido Guerzoni, “Playing Great Games: The Giuoco in Sixteenth-Century Italian

Courts,” Italian History and Culture (Florence: Ville Le Balze, 1995), 58–61.

94 Girolamo Bargagli, Il Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare

(Siena, 1572), 241. Quoted in Guerzoni, “Playing Great Games,” 58.

95 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Book II, Ch. 11, 75. 96 See, for example, the steps called continenze, Fabrizio Caroso, Courtly Dance of the

Renaissance, 101–02.

97 Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa, 100. 98 John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750 (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1999), 91.

99 Benedetto Magnoli, known as il Magnolino, was supposed to have gone out in

winter in the rain in a cloak, hood, and clogs, to walk the very muddy road from Florence to Pisa. When asked why he did it, he replied “per piacere.” The origins of the anecdote are unclear but it was referred to by Florentine poets in the sixteenth century, see the related entry in the Vocabolario della Crusca.

100 Francesco Berni, Opere Burlesche, vol. II (Usecht: J. Broedelet, 1726), 127–31. Volsi dire un piacer non conosciuto, Un passatempo assai piu’ che divino. Quest’e’ uno sfogamento di cervello, Questa e’ la vera trasfigurazione, E d’ogni fantasia vero modello

Conclusion 1 From The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, quoted

in Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy, 143.

2 Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary

Consumption (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).

3 Buonarroti, Descrizione delle felicissime nozze, 10r. 4 On the importance of uncovering “gendered logics” to explain male behavior in the

past see John Tosh, “The History of Masculinity: an Outdated Concept?,” in What Is Masculinity? eds J. H. Arnold and S. Brady (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 22.

5 Rebhorn, Courtly Performances, 14. 6 Van Orden, Music, Discipline and Arms in Early Modern France, 7.

180

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Archival documents ARCHIVIO DI STATO DI FIRENZE (ASF): Capponi: 68, 146, 147, 173, 176. Carte Galletti: 36. Carte Sebregondi: 3181. Decima Granducale: 3784. Diari di Etichetta della Guardaroba: 4. Guardaroba Medicea: 143, 391, 398. Libri di Commercio e di Famiglia: 747. Manoscritti: 128, 130. Magalotti: 11, 151, 165. Mediceo del Principato (MDP): 3137, 4622, 4624a, 5079, 5925. Miscellanea Medicea: 14 Insert 3, 18 Insert 4. Pratica Segreta: 11, 13. Riccardi: 21, 27, 55, 56, 76, 80, 81, 99, 224, 258. Venturi Ginori Lisci: 341, 342. Università dei Linaioli: 3.

ARCHIVIO CAPPONI: File III, Sen. Gio.Battista Capponi, n. 4, Fasci di Ricevute attenenti alla casa del Senatore Auditore Ferrante Capponi dal 1561 al 1603 and Libro A, 1567–71.

ARCHIVIO DI STATO DI MILANO (ASM): Notarile: 14356.

ARCHIVIO STORICO CIVICO DI MILANO (ASCM): Materie: 869/39.

ARCHIVIO DI STATO DI VENEZIA (ASV): Arte della Seta, busta 578, Processi. Provveditori di Comun, busta 14, reg. 21.

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Index

academic dress  49–51 Alberti, Leon Battista  9, 76, 120 Alfonso of Naples (king)  75 Allori, Alessandro  103, 112 Allori, Cristofano  108 Altoviti, Antonio  129 Ammirato, Scipione  49, 85, 106 Anguillara, Giacomo  61 Antwerp  68, 84 Appian 42 Arditi, Bastiano  71 Aretino, Pietro  105 Ariosto, Lodovico  6 Aristotle  7, 76, 120, 121, 122 armour  135, 143 Arrigo Valesio of Poland  139 artisans  60, 68–70, 73, 131 auctions  80–1, 89, 130 Badoer, Francesco  118 Baldini, Baccio  96 Baldini, Vittorio  30 Banco, Nanni di  40–1 Barberini, Carlo  112–13 Bargagli, Girolamo  144 beards  6, 105, 121, 146 Beccaruzzi, Francesco  137–8 Beham, Sebald  52 Belmonte, Pietro  59 Bene, Caterina del  61 Bisticci, Vespasiano del  75 bizarre 143–4 black in clothing  93–108 Borghini, Vincenzo  43 Bosse, Abraham  59

Botti family  84 Matteo  28, 30, 53, 64, 71, 84–9, 129, 142 Boullay, Le Sieur  71 Bragaccia, Gaspare  64, 87 breeches  33, 34, 52, 69, 70, 71, 73, 81, 83, 87, 88, 97, 104, 115 baggy  49, 134 martingale  71–2, 98 tight  9, 49, 63, 114 Bronzino, Agnolo  73, 94–5, 102–4 Buonarroti, Michelangelo the Younger  31, 34, 146–7 Buonomini di San Martino 47–8 Buontalenti, Bernardo  73, 143 Callot, Jacques  134–5, 143 Campanella, Tommaso  110 Cappello, Bianca  103–4 Capponi family Alessando  82, 95–6, 108 Giovanbattista  52, 54, 65 Luigi 95–8 Niccolò di Luigi  65, 69–70, 88, 95–8, 104–5 Orazio 132 carnival  128, 130, 131, 133, 139–45 costumes for horses  143 Caroso, Fabrizio  136–7 Castello, Bernardo  125 Castiglione, Baldassare  1, 7, 10, 74, 77, 88, 107, 118, 119, 123, 128, 136, 144–5, 147 Castiglione, Sabba da  120 Cellini, Benvenuto  52, 131

Cenami, Bartolomeo  75 Cesalpino, Andrea  52 Charles V  94, 133, 144 children’s clothes  109–11 Chimenti, Jacopo  31, 32, 41, 111 Christine of Lorraine  23, 29, 45, 56, 65, 80, 85, 87, 88, 128, 131 Cicero 107 citizenship  21, 38, 42, 46, 52, 106 civility  8, 76, 115, 121, 133 Clement VII  49 cloaks  6, 10, 17, 19, 32–4, 73, 75, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 97, 98, 105, 112, 114, 115, 130, 131, 144 ferraiolo  46, 48, 54 lucco 36–56 removal of  136–7, 139 codpieces  5, 49, 52, 71–2, 135, 137, 146 colors  46, 67, 128 children’s clothes  110–12 clothing for sport  131, 135–6 fashionable 114 gendered 102–4 liveries  29, 32 symbolism  54, 93 theory  100, 120 Conte, Gian Giacomo del  73 convent trousseau  80 Cosimo I de’ Medici  3, 4, 8, 36–7, 41, 52, 54, 64, 93, 96, 103, 131, 140 clothing  17, 45, 48–9, 69, 71–2, 76, 97 illness 71 on marriage  21 as successor to republican era  36–7 sumptuary laws  18–19, 20–2, 45 Cosimo II de’ Medici  25, 28, 69, 84, 87, 89 court, Florentine aristocratization, process of  20, 42–3 bureaucracy 43–4 as magnificent  1, 23–4, 28–31, 129 as modest  3 courtiers competitive  11, 25, 129 crisis of masculinity  7 as merchants  42–3, 46, 65, 96 military skills  8, 96, 134 socializing  75, 85

Courtois, Jean  106 Cupid 119 Dallington, Robert  105 dance  7, 10, 31, 32, 113, 129, 134, 136, 137, 145 Dante Alighieri  37–8 Della Casa, Giovanni  4, 18, 21, 76, 119 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista  121 diplomatic dress  64, 75, 85–7 Dolce, Lodovico  100, 105, 143 doublets  33, 52, 63, 68, 70, 72, 73, 87, 94, 97, 113, 114, 115, 119, 131, 135, 136–9 dyes  4, 67, 93, 96, 100–1 effeminacy 116–27 Eleonora di Toledo  17, 65, 94–6 Elyot, Thomas  132 embroidery  31, 32, 66, 79, 80, 87, 88, 113, 115, 119, 120, 130, 140, 141, 142 Este, Isabella d’ 64, 101 feast days  23, 27, 46, 129 religious processions  24–5 Ferdinand of Spain  136 Ferdinando I de’ Medici  17, 23, 24, 27, 32, 78–80, 85, 131, see also marriage celebrations clothing  31, 45, 49, 73 sumptuary legislation  45–8, 54–5 festival books  24, 27, 129 Fioravanti, Leonardo  60, 70, 73, 116 Florence academies Accademia degli Alterati 88 Accademia degli Umidi 144 Accademia delle arti del Disegno 36 Accademia Fiorentina 36 churches San Marco  25, 47 San Pietro Maggiore  129 palaces Palazzo Medici  38, 45 Palazzo Pitti  24 Palazzo Vecchio  31, 36, 44 Villa Valfonda  31–5

Index

199

squares Piazza di Santa Croce  88, 133–5 Piazza Duomo  44 Florio, John  7, 52, 143 football 131–9 liveried 134 foreign textiles and dress  63–9 Foscari, Mario  42 Francesco I de’ Medici  8, 17, 22, 26, 52, 76, 94–5, 103, 106–7, 129, 139 Franzesi, Matteo  145 French fashions  3, 49,63, 69, 88, 113, 114, 120 funerals  74, 82–3 Galilei, Galileo  50–1 Ganymede 119 Giambologna 19 Giannotti, Donato  117 gifts  10, 28, 31, 61, 75, 79, 80, 94, 131 Gigli, Giacinto  116 gloves  1, 18, 19, 72, 79, 83, 85, 97, 113, 146 Gondi family  47, 65, 69 Gonzaga family  64, 129, 134, 136 Gozzadini family  61 Grazzini, Anton Francesco (Il Lasca)  129, 130, 141–2 Gualterotti, Raffaello  131 Guardi, Francesco  137–8 Guazzo, Stefano  107, 121 guilds  4, 29, 39, 41, 68, 70, 71, 101 hair, long  5, 6, 7, 111, 120–1, 125 hangings, textile  80, 81, 82, 108 Harrison, William  63, 106 headwear 83 berets  6, 9, 32, 33, 52, 69, 72, 115, 122, 136, 139 cappucci  6, 39, 46, 47, 52 turbans  131, 141 Henri IV  7, 12, 29, 31, 32 Henry VIII  28, 63, 77, 86, 87, 128, 131, 139 Holmes, Randall  70 homosexuality 118–19 honor 75–89 Hopfer, Daniel  52 hose, see breeches

200

Index

jerkins  9, 48–9, 73, 87, 88, 94, 5, 102, 111, 135, 97–8 Joanna of Austria  67, 75, 142 John the Fearless  106 Jonson, Ben  70 Knights of Malta  54 Knights of Saint Stephen  10, 21, 22, 46, 52, 54, 84, 113, 140 Landsknechts  52, 134 Lapini, Agostino  75 Lassels, Richard  132–3 Leo XI  113 Lepanto, Battle of  8 liveries  28–35, 55, 81 logwood 101 London 63 Loreto, Holy House of  75, 80, 112 lucco, see cloaks Machiavelli, Niccolò  5, 8 Maffei, Francesco  125 Magalotti family  66–7, 71, 74, 109–16, 127 Magistrato dei Pupilli 89 magnificence 76–7 manhood at court  7–8 failure of  116–26 multiform 6 and nationhood  63 and physical strength  8, 132–4, 136–9 in youths  117–18 Manuzio, Aldo  52 Maria Maddalena of Austria  25, 28, 56, 141 Marinella, Lucrezia  146 marriage celebrations  23, 78–80 Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena of Austria  25, 28, 141 Ferdinando de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria  23, 24, 27, 28, 30–1, 65, 73, 86, 128, 131, 132 Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV  31–4 Vincenzo Gonzaga and Eleonora de’ Medici  134, 136

Martelli, Niccolò  4, 130 masques  28, 45, 85, 128, 128–31, 139–45 Medici family Alessandro I  1, 3, 4, 49 Bernadetto d’Ottaviano  142 Cosimo il Vecchio  5 Eleonora 134 Filippo 26 Francesco di Ferdinando I  144 Giovanni delle Bande Nere  48 Isabella 45 Lorenzo il Magnifico  23, 38, 73, 140 Maria  31–4, 147 Pietro  24, 85, 142 Mellini, Domenico  45, 48, 97 merchants  4, 43, 60, 63, 65, 67–9 clothing 106–7 Michelino, Domenico di  38 Milan  42, 54, 61, 63, 64,67, 69, 70, 73, 83, 143 Mini, Paolo  43 Montaigne, Michel de  23, 115 Monte, Orazio del  65 moresca dance 145 embroidery 141 Moryson, Fynes  63 mourning dress  74, 82–3, 99, 106, 109 Muslim dress  141 mutande  72, 115, 142 nationhood and the body  63 and dress  63 Neoplatonic love  124 Neroni, Carlo  95 Orsini, Paolo Giordano  134 Orsini di Pitigliano family  73, 74, 78–83 Otto di Guardia  52, 97 Ottomans  8, 140, 141 Palmieri, Matteo  119, 121 Panciatichi, Bartolomeo  101 Panciatichi, Lucrezia  101 Parenti, Marco  120 perfume  1, 18, 60, 69, 79, 84–5, 113, 140 Petrucci, Antonio Maria  21 Petrucci, Battista  117

Philip the Good of Burgundy  106 Piccolomini, Alessandro  100 Piombo, Sebastiano del  105 poems about dress  52, 71–2 Pontano, Giovanni  120 Prata, Gian Giacomo  70 Priuli, Lorenzo  118 purl  17, 67, 88 Rabelais, François  72 republican dress  18 republican myth  36–7 Riccardi, Francesco and Riccardo  28, 31–5, 52–3, 65–6, 74, 81, 83, 121, 137 Ricci, Giuliano de’  3, 46, 75, 85 Riccio, Pier Francesco  94 Rome  82, 115 Rosello, Lucio Paolo  76 Rosetti, Giovanni Ventura  101 Salviati family  25, 65, 69, 82, 85, 142 Salviati, Francesco (artist)  144 Sanuti, Nicolosa  117 Sassetti, Franceso  38 second-hand dealers  131 servants’ clothing  31, 79, 83, 84, 86, 97 Settimanni, Giuseppe  47, 85, 136, 142 Shakespeare, William  119, 127 shoes and shoemakers  33, 34, 41, 46, 111, 136, 139, 140 shopping 59–69 as a gendered activity  59–61, 103 moral concerns  4, 74 by proxy  66–7 siege of Florence  133 Siena, war with  36, 79, 97, 133 slashing  33, 52, 73, 81, 97, 98, 102, 104, 114, 120, 122, 135, 136 Soderini family  22 softness 121–2 soldiers’ clothing  28, 52–3, 98, 130, 134–7, 146 Spanish fashions  3, 4, 7, 28, 48, 54, 63, 69, 106, 112, 114, 125 Speroni, Sperone  64 Spinola, Stefano  65 sporting clothing  136–9 sprezzatura 107

Index

201

Stradano, Giovanni  26, 44, 95, 96, 98 stripes 128 Strozzi, family  47, 65, 84, 129 Stuart, Mary  42 sumptuary legislation  10, 12, 17, 18–23, 45, 46, 55, 104, 106, 117 exemption from  20–2 Suttermans, Justus  56 tailors and tailoring  34, 39, 43, 62, 68–74, 83, 100, 112, 114–16 Tarabotti, Arcangela  121 Tasso, Torquato  60, 125–6, 141 tennis  130, 139 textiles  4, 62–9 cotton  68, 100 damask  39, 62, 64, 66, 98, 105, 109, 112 English wool  63 muslin 139 perpignan  66, 68, 112 rash  53, 65–6, 68 sarcenet  33, 39, 43, 64, 65, 97, 103, 105, 115 velvet  33, 39, 43, 46, 50, 66, 73, 75, 81, 82, 85, 97, 98, 103, 105, 112, 114, 136, 144 Thomas, William  60 Titi, Tiberio  108, 109–10 toga  36–56, 105 Tornabuoni, Cosimo di Donato  61, 73 Tosini, Michele  105 Trissino, Giovan Giorgio  99 Turkish dress  63, 131, 140, 141, 145 Tyndale, William  122

202

Index

undergarments  52, 64, 72, 81, 95, 113, 115, 120, 139, 142 university 49–50 Urban VIII  112–13, 116 Valoriani, Luca  52 Van Dyck, Anthony  102 Varchi, Benedetto  39, 144 Vasari, Giorgio  38, 84, 105, 144 Vecellio, Cesare  4, 27, 39, 49, 51, 102, 106, 110, 122–4, 135 Velluti, Paolo  75 Venice  23, 42, 51, 59, 60, 64, 66–8, 122 Venier, Sebastiano  52 Verdi, Antonio di Ubertino  65 vices  4, 118–21, 125 Viggiani da Montone, Angelo  136 Villani, Giovanni  40–1 Vinta, Francesco  18, 19, 21 Vinta, Belissario  86 virtues  7–8, 10, 13, 26, 43, 76, 88, 100, 106, 107, 119, 120, 122, 127, 136 Visconti, Giovanni Pietro  61 women as consumers  59–60 participants at court festivities  25–8 in portraiture  103–4 relationship with fashion  101–2, 117, 121 youth  117–18, 122–4 zanni  130 Zayas y Sotomayor, Maria de  61

203

204

205

206

207

208