Introduction

In the mid-sixteenth century, the Tuscan writer Giovanni della Casa in his courtesy book Galateo overo de’ costumi notes that ‘everyone must dress well according to his status and age’, and should avoid using inappropriate or extravagant styles, as it would ‘disdain’ others. Writing on men’s appearance, he also adds that ‘not only should clothing be of fine material but a man must also try to adapt himself as much as he can to the sartorial style of other citizens and let custom guide him’. He further adds that every man should follow these guidelines ‘even though it may seem to him to be less comfortable and attractive than previous fashions’.¹ Even if uncomfortable, adapting to new fashions and using suitable-quality materials seems to play an essential role in della Casa’s idea of good manners that every Renaissance man should possess. Della Casa’s prescriptions focus on appearance and social acceptability while disregarding the needs of those groups that needed comfortable and suitable clothing for their daily activities, such as artisans and the working classes. And yet, did the artisans of Florence, Siena and Venice dress in a manner appropriate to their status, as della Casa would have us believe? What kinds of objects, textiles and colours were favoured by the lower social classes? How did fashion vary between cities and what characterised the varying dress and consumption patterns?

This chapter addresses these questions, using a sample of post-mortem inventories of Florentine, Sienese and Venetian artisans and locally based shopkeepers between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collected in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database.² By looking into their wardrobes and establishing the types of textile materials, colours and clothing styles they had access to, it aims at giving a more coherent picture of the consumption habits of non-essential textile goods and fashion items at lower social levels of society in early modern Italy. First, the chapter looks at inventories as a source, assessing some of the factors that may influence the compilation and content of inventories. These include local institutions, social dynamics and regulations, and economic factors. Second, it analyses the data from the inventories, focusing on fabrics, the colours, the styles and the origins of the garments that belonged to this social class and were found in the household inventories.

The chapter argues that there are two main reasons why it is crucial to analyse the dress, fashion and consumption habits of the artisan classes. First, artisans formed a large segment of the urban population. For this reason, analysing their consumption of fashionable items provides insight into how consumerism emerged in Europe.³ Second, only recently has historiography focused on the social and cultural aspects of the life of these groups, such as their relationships, gender relations, living standards and everyday life.⁴ The lack of comprehensive research is linked to the difficulty of studying heterogeneous social groups such as the artisans.⁵ Differences in wealth and craft specialisations suggest a pronounced segmentation and stratification within the artisan order. ⁶

Fashion and institutions

The overall picture of artisans’ wardrobes that we obtain from post-mortem inventories is of relative richness and variety, despite being conditioned by exogenous factors, such as regulatory limitations. The increasing availability of luxury goods and new fashion manufactures that characterised dress and appearance in early modern Italian cities, as John Styles, Andrea Caracausi and Sophie Pitman have shown (Chapters 1, 2 and 3 above), such as new types of mixed fabrics, knitwear and ribbons, favoured consumption by the middle classes, challenging the ‘hierarchy of appearance’.⁷

Within this evolving framework, many elements could impact the consumption of fashion items. The first was related to the availability of certain goods on the market, often linked to local manufacturers and locations, concerning regional and international trade flows (Figure 7.1) The second was linked to institutions (such as governments, guilds and confraternities) that could play a role in the consumption of luxury goods and thus influence the use of certain types of clothing and fashion items. This section aims to contextualise the sample provided by the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database in terms of the procedures used to compile inventories, the role of the institutions that produced them and the social and institutional factors, such as sumptuary laws or guilds, that may have influenced the consumption of fashion items.

Post-mortem inventories of possessions provide a valuable source of information for investigating material wealth and consumption in pre-industrial societies.⁸ This is especially the case for the northern Italian states, where comprehensive collections are often preserved in family and children’s court records, such as the Venetian Giudici di Petizion, the Florentine Magistrato dei Pupilli or the Sienese Curia del Placito.⁹ However, the range of individuals represented in these inventory records is somewhat patchy. The records are dominated by individuals who were young enough to leave children under the age of majority, and who died intestate, without having appointed guardians. They therefore exclude whole sections of the population, such as the elderly, single women and the childless. Furthermore, the nature and interpretation of the information in these inventories needs to be considered in light of the differences in the local institutions that were responsible for drafting them.¹⁰ Despite these problems, these legal documents provide a unique insight into the dress and material culture of the lower orders of society, which, like all subaltern groups, presents significant difficulties for historical reconstruction.¹¹

Figure 7.1 Marketplace at the Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, Bologna. A tailor’s workshop and a tailor taking measures of a client can be seen in the lower part of the image. Matricula societatis draperiorum civitatis Bononiae, ms. 641, fol. 1r, No. 93 (1411). Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna.

Other elements, such as sumptuary laws and guild regulations, complement this composite institutional landscape. The significance of these elements for dress at the lower social levels is difficult to assess, as social constraints generally are in the past. Yet it is essential to be aware of their existence during the analysis. The wardrobes of artisans, for example, must be considered in the light of the owner’s social status and profession. It is not only the presence of clothing suitable for carrying out the typical tasks of each profession that is important, but also the presence of clothing indicating membership of a guild, a brotherhood, a particular social group, as well as age and social status (married, young, old, widow etc.). The rules of professional and religious institutions were part of a context in which status and appearance were closely linked, making clothing a public expression of membership. Sixteenth-century manuals and books, such as that of Cesare Vecellio, bear witness to these differences. In the pages of his treatise, Vecellio discusses the differences that characterised the clothing of nobles, foreigners, officials, merchants and shopkeepers. He highlights the role of clothing in the social representation of different social groups by comparing the clothing styles, noting their similarities and differences, and who usually wore one style rather than another. For merchants and shopkeepers, for example, while describing their headpieces, the author says:

Vecellio also adds that their usual elbow-length sleeves are the same as those of the aristocracy, showing how social distinction was marked by the use of certain styles or garments, and how the wardrobes and fashion choices of different social groups and the artisans within them were influenced by unwritten social constraints.¹³

Sumptuary laws could influence the content of artisan wardrobes and their post-mortem inventories by imposing limitations to the consumption of luxury goods. Public institutions sought to limit the consumerist tensions especially of the lower orders by enacting a range of sumptuary laws in an attempt to maintain the division between social classes.¹⁴ The actual impact of the sumptuary laws on the consumption of the lower orders, although present in all Renaissance Italian states, remains doubtful and to be determined. For example, in a city like Siena, those not part of the ruling class were not formally allowed to wear silk or velvet since medieval times.¹⁵ Yet post-mortem inventories show that even ordinary artisans possessed items of silk. In the Tuscan city between 1550 and 1650, altogether 926 garments or trimmings listed in 187 artisans’ home inventories were made of silk, making an average of about five items of silk per household.¹⁶ These included textile objects of different sizes and value, from small ribbons, scarves and caps that required just a little amount of silk to garments such as jackets and gowns that were made of or trimmed with silk. For example, of the sixty-nine dress items recorded in the inventory of Carlo Bertuzzi, a Sienese miller, four garments (cloaks, gowns) were decorated with silk or velvet, while eight of the dress accessories were made entirely of silk. These included a fine headscarf decorated with gold, two veils, three pairs of colourful tights, one made of regular silk and two others made of silk scraps (filaticcio), and two pairs of colourful cuffs made of silk, gold and silver. Although small accessories such as these that did not require lengths of silk, it is important to note that some of these were decorated with gold and silver thread.

As objects of value, such objects were considered valuable family treasures and given as wedding gifts or passed on in inheritances. This is probably why the miller’s wife Triburzia was keen to keep the accessories and clothes of silk at the time of Carlo’s death. When questioned by the Magistrati dei Pupilli, she explained that the silk items, along with some jewellery and silverware, had been given to her by her family on the occasion of her wedding.¹⁷ This information provides a fascinating glimpse not only into the fashion and material wealth of the artisans and the circulation of precious textiles within the lower class but also into the efforts of women in the line of succession to claim what was rightfully theirs.¹⁸

The unique path of each city’s economic, institutional and social development could produce distinct consumption patterns, especially concerning different colours, materials and styles and the extent of their dissemination among the lower orders. The patterns were influenced by non-standard commercial means, such as bartering, credits and second-hand commerce, allowing for the informal circulation of expensive fashion items among lower-income groups. The manufacturing world also began to offer cheaper new products and fabrics. As we will see below, these variations reflected cultural preferences and differences in trading networks and local manufactures, encouraging the desire of the middling classes to challenge the ‘hierarchy of appearances’.¹⁹

The colours of dress

Intense and spectacularly dyed textiles and clothing appear in many inventories of artisans and shopkeepers, suggesting that even families of modest means appreciated vibrant colours.²⁰ This was the case, for example, with the wife of the ordinary Venetian shoemaker Dal Paon, deceased in 1627. In the tiny two-room house, the estimators found several garments in mixed fabrics with fascinating workmanship and colouring. Besides a golden robe made of mixed fabric (ferrandina, a light cloth made of wool and silk) and two black gowns (one of coarse low-cost silk, terzanella, and the other of ferrandina), the inventory mentions three brightly coloured skirts. The first of these, in wool, was red; the second, also in wool, was red with a green satin edging; while the last, in buratto (a light woollen cloth with a silk warp), was in a whole rainbow of colours including black, golden yellow, green and white.²¹ Some of these colours, such as bright reds dyed with expensive insect dyes or imitated through using cheaper dyestuffs such as brazilwood, have been made physically and materially visible by the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ project through colour reconstruction (Experiment in focus VIII).

Garments’ colour vibrancy and sumptuous effects were often achieved through edgings, borders, ribbons and linings made of more expensive textiles. It is no coincidence that silk fabrics and furs are the materials that are most often described as multi-coloured (23 and 22 per cent of cases), followed by gold and silver objects – jewels, brooches or buttons – and wool (16 and 14 per cent, respectively). Detachable sleeves, too – a fundamental part to vary the styles of the clothes – are among the garments that were often made of or decorated with fine fabrics and dyed in bright colours (Figure 7.2). Tommaso Maridi, a Florentine fishmonger from San Frediano, had a collection of cuffs ranging from black wool to red and green mocaiardos (woollen velvet) and white and red drappo, a mixtures of wool or silk.²² The use of small quantities of colourful and more expensive fabrics to embellish outfits made primarily of cheaper textiles illustrates the ingenuity of artisan fashion.

With fashions and preferences changing over the decades, the use of monochrome colours was relatively common. Despite the fact that black was the colour of high fashion of the ruling classes since the sixteenth century, Italian artisans showed a fluctuating interest in black throughout the century.²³ This is confirmed by the archival evidence collected by the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ project. The ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database shows that in 1550s, about 43 per cent of the clothing items were black; it reached over 50 per cent in 1560s, with a gradual decrease over the next decades. Between 1550 and 1650, the percentage of colours such as white, red, brown and purple remained almost unchanged, but green gradually increased. The most common green-coloured items of clothing were gowns, petticoats and hose, such as zimarre or turche made of wool from Perpignan or Valencia, or skirts made of silk waste (filaticcio), which rose from an average of 6–7 per cent in the 1550s to almost 13 per cent in the 1610s. The colour combinations obtained by juxtaposing different elements (from linings to trimmings) also increased.²⁴

Figure 7.2 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Announcement of Death to St Fina (detail), 1475. The painting displays garments often found in artisans’ inventories, such as a gamurra and colourful sleeves. Chapel of Santa Fina, Collegiata, San Gimignano.

Yet the use of colours varied from city to city. The choice of high-contrast colours for combinations unites Florence, Siena and Venice, albeit with a different styles between the three cities.²⁵ Siena and Venice share a preference for the combination of red and yellow – the colours of the Serenissima’s coat of arms, in 18 per cent of all combinations – followed by red and white, and black and white – the last being the colours of the Sienese banner.²⁶

A different approach to colour between cities also applies to plain colours. In that respect, the Sienese artisans’ wardrobes are the most colourful. On average, only one out of three items of clothing was black.²⁷ The Sienese outfits differed greatly from those of the Florentines and Venetians also by their fancy combinations of bright colours. Multi-coloured, green and pink items were widespread in Siena. Of the city’s artisans’ clothing and other textile articles 73 per cent were in colours other than black (compared with 62 per cent in Venice and 58 per cent in Florence). Of all the colours, pink is the one that stands out: more than one out of ten items of clothing were in the spectrum between flesh colour and purple, unlike in Florence and Venice (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 The colours of artisans’ garments in Florence, Siena and Venice, 1550–1650. The statistics are based on all the inventories of the sample. Raw materials, metallic accessories, grooming items and garments recorded in workshops are excluded.

Some garments were more vivacious than others. The wife of the Venetian shoemaker Dal Paon and her colourful green and red skirts, referred to above, are not precisely an exception in the Italian panorama of the time. In fact, skirts seem to be one of the elements that gave liveliness to clothing. A detailed examination of the colours associated with different garments in the artisan’s wardrobes shows that skirts and petticoats, aprons, shirts and body linen were the focal points in terms of colours. For example, a colourful green skirt ornamented with golden flowers that belonged to Anzola, the wife of the Venetian weaver Andrea Padovani, stands out from the family’s inventory. Scrolling through the items recorded in the document, it is possible to imagine how Anzola’s outfits were to be composed. To begin, a pair of red stockings and a white shirt (perhaps a clean one, instead of the ‘sweated’ mentioned in the inventory), a black gown made of mixed fabric, terzanella, completed with a pair of orange sleeves and a white veil on the shoulders, and a round apron to protect the beautiful skirt.²⁸ The painted scene from a kitchen of an upper-middle-class household shows what such garments worn in everyday life at artisan levels may have looked like. The woman in the front, plucking a chicken, wears a veil on the shoulders; another is grating cheese wearing a rolled-up apron strapped twice on the waist on an orange gamurra with sleeves. Lastly, the woman in the background with a green dress has her pink sleeves pinned in the back to have them out of the way while working (Figure 7.4).

The colourful garments and accessories were often combined with overgarments such as capes, cloaks and tabards to protect the wearer from the cold or bad weather. These are rarely in any colour other than black and are usually made of wool or mixed materials (between 72 per cent and 76 per cent of cases). This was due to the nature of these garments. Cloaks, capes and coats were designed for public occasions rather than for domestic use. Indeed, overgarments provided not only protection from the cold and dust of the city streets of the day (which were often unpaved) but also from the prying eyes of neighbours, who might sneakily complain to the city authorities about artisans who broke sumptuary laws.²⁹

Figure 7.4 Vincenzo Campi, The Kitchen, 1580s. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

New textiles and international styles

Besides differences in colours and colour combinations, inventories of Tuscan and Venetian artisans and shopkeepers reveal some clear variations in the consumption patterns between each city also in terms of the textiles materials and styles present in artisans’ wardrobes. These reflect differences in both trading networks and local manufactures. Woollen textiles are proportionally more prevalent in Florence, a city renowned for wool production since the Middle Ages, whereas leather and furs, often imported from northern and eastern Europe, are more common in Venice, which had well-established trading connections with those regions (Figure 7.5).³⁰

Since the fifteenth century, the textile industries of several northern Italian regions had copied and adapted foreign production processes to manufacture fabrics that looked luxurious, using cheaper, locally available raw materials that imitated expensive foreign textiles such as the ‘Oriental’ silks worn by the nobility and upper classes. ³¹ Employing these foreign inspired imitative textiles allowed eager artisans to indulge their fashionable aspirations. One of such aspiring artisans was the Venetian feather dealer Antonio de Baratis. Antonio owned several items made of mixed textiles, such as a green and gold gown made from brocatel (a mixed fabric usually woven from silk and linen but, in this instance, from wool) or a white woollen velvet (mocaiardo) gown, enriched with decorated red velvet.³² In addition to local production, some foreign textiles were also imported. Clothes from the Serenissima’s Stato da mar, other Italian states, Spain, Flanders and the Ottoman Empire are on record. The mixture of foreign textiles and fashions that characterised the city’s cultural trends is illustrated by items such as the ‘two Spanish-style tabards of mixed fabric, one lined with velvet and the other with satin, both new’, which belonged to the cloth dealer Antonio Rossati.³³

Figure 7.5 Artisans’ garments materials in Florence, Siena and Venice, 1550–1650. The statistics are based on all the inventories of the sample. Raw materials, metallic accessories, grooming items and garments recorded in workshops are excluded.

Local and imported textiles were used to produce not only ‘newness’, but also ‘historic’ and foreign-inspired clothing, such as garments made in all’antica style. The all’antica style is the subject of much debate in the field of art, especially in works on art and architecture, but it is still ambiguous in the field of clothing.³⁴ The types of garments in all’antica style are varied, ranging from hats to breeches, from jewels to buttons. The only thing they seem to have in common is the fact that many of these, especially hats and sleeves, were often decorated with silk trimmings and ribbons. This was the case, for example, of the sleeves owned by the linen-seller Filippo Guerrieri, made of leather and embroidered with silk ribbons.³⁵ The French style (alla francese) is also mentioned in the inventories of artisans in all three cities, especially in connection with sleeves, gowns, bodices, doublets, breeches, hats and cuffs. Again, the precise definition of the ‘French style’ is unclear, although Elisabeth Currie explains that these garments might have ‘included substantial lengths of fabric to make the kind of voluminous silhouette’ shown in contemporary portraits, ‘or heavy surface decorations, including pearls or other jewels’.³⁶

The habit of owning voluminous clothing seems to concern especially Venetian artisans. Both artisan men and women owned gowns in the dogalina style. These ample gowns, usually lined, were characterised by wide sleeves that touched the ground at the bottom and puffed up and tied at the shoulders at the top. Although the taste for dogalina style gowns continued throughout the early modern period, it became increasingly rare at the end of the sixteenth century. Even Cesare Vecellio included it among the ‘old’ Venetian styles.

The Venetian artisan also owned garments and accessories in the maritime style, called da matelo in the inventories – another style that fell out of fashion in the Doge’s city. This style is more difficult to define, as it was not clearly assigned to any genre in the inventories and the colours varied from blue and red to yellow and green. On the other hand, ‘maritime’-style gowns (muda) were usually made of satin, velvet or damask.³⁷ All the garments associated with this style in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database are found in the house of the cloth dealer Antonio Rossati, probably waiting to be altered or shredded to reuse the fibres.³⁸

The strong relationship of Venice with the Middle Eastern world is testified by textiles and clothing styles from the territories of the Ottoman Empire (Morocco, Egypt, Syria and Turkey) that were also present in the artisans’ wardrobes. An example is an Ottoman-inspired jacket, the dolman, appearing in several Venice inventories. This short jacket, worn by both men and women and closed by frogs at the front, was normally made of wool or camlet (mixed fabric of wool and silk) and dyed black – at least in half of the cases. These come in many forms, more or less rich, and range from the old sleeveless dolman in black wool that belonged to Antonia Baldigara, widow of cap-maker Giovanni Marco, to the dolman in red damask, lined with red pine marten fur, found among the possession of the cloth dealer Antonio Rossati, mentioned above.³⁹ The ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database shows the fate of this garment very clearly. Often mentioned in the 1550s and 1560s, it gradually disappears from Venetian wardrobes so much so that it appears more and more rarely during the 1570s, with the last mention in 1578 in the inventory of the boat-builder Francesco Brazza.⁴⁰ Conversely, jackets, mantles and overcoats of different types, such as the overgarment known as ‘Turcha’, survive in the inventories.⁴¹ ‘Turche’ generally referred to long overgarments, either sleeveless or with narrow sleeves, which were open in the front. The garment seems to be in vogue especially in Siena during the sixteenth century, only to gradually disappear at the beginning of the next. For what concerns Florence, its economic and cultural interests decidedly oriented fashions towards western Europe, with most textiles coming from Flanders, Spain, England and France.

Discerning whether descriptions in inventories refer to the style of items, their place of origin or their counterfeiting is often difficult. In some cases, the preposition alla, accompanied by a feminine noun clearly defines the style of a garment (alla veneziana, alla fiorentina, alla turchescha etc.), while origin is usually attributed by a masculine adjective (veneziano, fiorentino, turchesco). However, the distinction is sometimes random since vernacular languages were not fully codified or grammatically fixed. Officials, estimators and notaries often expressed themselves idiosyncratically, and their ability to accurately categorise items depended on their expertise, experience and familiarity with the goods they were recording. Indeed, the distinction between the style and the origin was probably not especially crucial in the eyes of contemporaries when it came to establishing economic value, since only a very small number of items – less than 3 per cent – specify these details.

The post-mortem inventories of artisans from Venice, Florence and Siena show that what ordinary artisans chose to wear often defies simplistic assumptions. The presence of expensive garments and accessories that were made of silk next to the cheaper ones made from plain coarse woollens, linen or waste materials simultaneously highlights the stratification of the social group and the difficulty of determining from their clothes where individuals were located in the hierarchy of wealth and status. Moreover, the differences among cities in the choice of colours, materials and styles, including foreign and exotic styles, gives a clear idea of the local diversities that characterised the Italian territory, separated by political borders, different social institutions and economic development. Consideration of the influence of different cultures via the medium of international trade on the regional territories as well as on the entirety of the European society allows for a better understanding of the forces behind consumption and dissemination of fashions across social classes well before the Industrial Revolution and of the importance global connections already possessed by the sixteenth century.⁴²

Conclusion

‘Everyone must dress well according to his status’, prescribed Giovanni della Casa in 1558. While sumptuary laws imposed limits on the consumption of expensive textiles by the middling classes, it is clear that craftspeople and local shopkeepers could not only dress well for their status. They could go far beyond it. The picture of artisans’ wardrobes is of a relative richness and variety, but its composition was influenced by several factors, including the availability of textiles, local and foreign influences, and the position within local and international commercial circuits. The distinctive qualities that set apart the society, economy and institutions of Florence, Siena and Venice, and the unique path of each city’s economic development, could produce distinct consumption patterns. This concerned especially imported goods and the extent of their dissemination among the lower orders. The different textiles, colours and styles paint an extravagant and unique picture of Italian artisans’ wardrobes. In commercial hubs like Florence and Venice, the taste for the fashionable was fed by foreign cultural influences as materials, ideas and trends travelled along international trade routes to the cities so that the wearing of French, Spanish and even Ottoman styles soon became a familiar part of life for even the lower orders. This also fuelled the diversification of cloth manufacturing in these cities into imitation fabrics and mixed-fibre textiles that utilised locally available materials, waste fibres and new, cheaper dyestuffs. This, in turn, stimulated new consumption patterns by making a broader range of fabrics, colours and garments accessible to even the poorest artisans. While showing local peculiarities linked to local productions and trades, the different stylistic choices give us an insight not just into what artisans wore but also into the cultural background of the popular groups, showing an already established taste for the exotic and foreign fashion influences.

The ways in which ordinary Italians mixed expensive materials with cheaper ones and combined their costly garments with inexpensive trimmings highlights the creative and personal ways in which early modern Sienese, Florentine and Venetian artisans engaged with fashion.