The Ornamented Being

“See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!  O that I were a glove upon that hand,  that I might touch that cheek!” - William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2

Fear not! Your eyes do not deceive you, I am indeed posting a mans costume. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art - Costume Institute

ca. 1580, European

Medium
silk, metallic thread, brass

Dimensions
Length at CB: 22 3/4 in. (57.8 cm)

Credit Line
Catherine Breyer Van Bomel Foundation Fund, 1978

Accession Number
1978.128

Oh my good Lord! 

THE CRIMSON PISA DRESS, EARLY 1560s !

This dress also comes from the San Matteo monastery in Pisa, and was used to dress a statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s made of a crimson silk velvet, with guards decorated with metallic threads stitched down in a decorative looped pattern. The dress was after donation modified to fit a Madonna statue. The skirt was made shorter in the back ripping the seams in the back, move the back panels up and letting the extra fabric just hang loose inside the skirt. The front was lengthened by wool cloth, and the existing trims from hem and bodice back was used to cover the transition. The seams in front and back of the skirt was unpicked, so it had two openings. The sleeves seems to have been shortened, as the top is a bit uneven and with a different stitching than the rest of the sleeve. The back of the bodice was also removed - this basically required the shoulder straps to be unpicked, as the bodice was only laced together at the sides. A maroon cotton fabric was used for the back, with large ribbons to tie it together, and the sleeves was lined with this fabric as well. The trimmings of the back of the bodice was re-used on the skirt, which is why they are in pieces today. The bodice back was not preserved, but a new one has been made, and the original trims has been removed from the skirt and reattached to the bodice back. “

The second photo show how similar the Pisa dress is to the dress in “Portrait of a Lady”, 1560s, Workshop of Allori (location unknown).

 I don’t mind posting this but I do have some major issues with the manner in which the dress was recovered and the fact that it was never returned to it’s proper owner. It seems so inglorious and just wrong to leave her nude for the rest of eternity. 

The above photo is the Burial gown of Eleanor of Toledo.

   Here is what Joe A. Thomas had to say about the discovery of the gown: “The costume and fabric are given such importance that the painting almost becomes still life. The image of Eleanor in this dress became the equivalent of her state portrait and was repeated in various copies (one of them at the Wallace Collection, in London).

(Painting above is Portrait of Eleonora di Toledo. Vasari? Variant of Bronzino’s 1560 portrait of her (Museo Bardini, Florence).)

This elegant garment would not have been an everyday wear. Eleanor may have chosen her favourite, most elegant gown in which to be memorialized in her portrait. We know that this was a special gown to her not only because she was depicted in it in her portraits, but also because she was buried in it. When the Medici tombs were opened in the nineteenth century, Eleanor’s otherwise unidentified body was recognized because she was wearing this exact dress”.

“Just outside the time line of my preferred style, I still want to include this dress from Pisa. I found no exact dates on it. The first restoration team names it as “XVI sec., ultimo ventennio” (16th century, last two decades), but to my eye it looks more early 17th century. What’s interesting about it, apart from being an extant 400 years old dress, is that the construction in large correspond to the court dresses of the mid and late 16th century. The skirt flares towards the hem, the bodice has lacing in the side/back, and the shoulder straps are still short and wide. The biggest difference seems to be the front of the bodice, which by now has grown a lot longer and more dominant. This particular dress also comes from the San Matteo monastery, as the other Pisa dresses, and large chunks of the back is also missing here (though more of the skirt survives). Like the grey/blue day dress, the surviving pieces has been “filled in” with neutral fabric. ”

SOTTANA FOR A LITTLE GIRL, ca. 1550-55 

“The dress of a young girl, made of a dotted damask. It’s dated to ca. 1550-55. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar fabric used in a female dress from the 16th century before, but a crimson velvet with golden discs is can be seen in a fabric sample in a private collection, as well as a Simone Martini painting from ca. 1317 in Naples… . The English description in the museum calls it “Damask dress and petticoat”, so I guess the underskirt is original… . The dress reminds a lot in shape and probably colour of the one Bianca “Bia” de’ Medici is depicted wearing, in Bronzino’s portrait of her from the 1540s. The extant dress is in the care of San Domenico Maggiore (in Sala del Tesoro) in Naples, and seems to have followed a little girl dying of plague to the grave. A plaque next to the dress suggests the wearer was Mary of Aragon; I haven’t succeeded in finding a child with this name in the 1550s.”

A Pavane, 1897
A slow processional dance common in Europe (16th century)

I found this photo and a letter addressed to my lecturer in my folder: 

Dear Fashion Style Lecturer,

 How am I supposed to only do one page of costumes from the 16th century? To quote Urban Dictionary: Do you realize how unimpossible that is?  Even more impossible than impossible. Quite possibly the most impossiblest thing in the world.

THERE ARE TOO MANY! Flemish, Italian, English, Spanish, German, FRENCH! HOW??

Anna Meyer from the Holbein-Madonna painting