Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo di Cesare Vecellio ; di nuouo accresciuti di molte figure ; vestitus antiquorum recentiorumque totius orbis per Sulstatium Gratilianum Senapolensis Latinè declarati.
Venice: Appresso Gio. Bernardo Sessa, 1598.
Price: $18,000.00
Octavo: 17.8 x 12.3 cm. [56], 507, [1] lvs. Collation: a-g8, A-Z8, Aa-Zz8, Aaa-Rrr8, Ss4 (leaf Ss4 blank).
SECOND EDITION, enlarged with a new section on the Americas.
A fine, large copy in contemporary limp vellum, re-cased (vellum soiled, a little rumpled, lacking ties.) Internally fresh with scattered minor finger-soiling and a few light stains. There is very subtle waviness to the text due to humidity. Title discreetly strengthened along leading blank edge and inner margin (not affecting the image), small tears in upper margin of opening leaves, light stain to gathering C, small tears in lower margin of lvs. Nn2 and Rrr8. Provenance: 1. Kupferstich-Sammlung der Königlichen Museen Berlin, small oval stamp (Lugt 1606) on title verso, last leaf of index, and final leaf: “Kupferstich Sammlung der Konigs Wessen”, with octagonal deaccession stamp. 2. Collector's stamp (“v.N.” inscribed in a circle) of Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler (Lugt 2529). 3. Renato Lombardi, woolens magnate (bookplate), by descent to Giancarlo and Ninetta Lombardi (bookplate).
The text of this second edition is illustrated with 505 full-page woodcuts, most by Christoph Krieger, on the verso of each leaf, depicting the costumes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; the illustrations of Native Americans in Book XII were added for this second edition. Title within elaborate cartouche, featuring an allegorical figure in each corner in native dress representing: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America; the Sessa cat-and-mouse device in small oval cartouche; a larger version of the device appears on verso of last leaf within an architectural woodcut border with Sessa's motto "Dissimilium in fida societas;" head-pieces; ornamental initials.
The author, Cesare Vecellio, who joined the workshop of his famous cousin Titian before 1548, was active as a publisher by 1570. The original 1590 edition included some 420 woodcuts by Christoph Krieger [Cristoforo Guerra], who died before completing the 450 cuts stipulated in his contract; this 2nd edition of 1598 contains 88 additional woodcuts (see Bayer, "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy"). It is believed that Inigo Jones used two of Vecellio’s images when designing costumes for plays by Ben Jonson.
“An ambitious anthology of dress from all over the globe: Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The title page [was] designed to advertise this global coverage. Presenting 503 woodcuts, Vecellio offers more information about nearby and faraway costume than any of the costume books published before his. Vecellio promises that the labor and art he has devoted to collecting the images will delight readers curious about the diversity of dress and culture, from Italy to the farthest reaches of the known world… He follows each woodcut in his book with a page or more of commentary, in which he typically explains the geography, agriculture, diet, and customs (especially marriage ceremonies) of the countries he covers; he always describes in detail the clothing represented in each woodcut.
A great number of the people depicted and described in Vecellio's book are women. For an analysis, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Fashioning Women in Cesare Vecellio's Costume Books" in "Re-framing Representations of Women: Figuring, Fashioning, Portraiting and Telling in the 'Picturing' of Women Project", p. 99-115.
“In contrast to the brief captions typical of costume books preceding Vecellio's, he adds comments full of precise terminology relating to textiles and trim. His vocabulary materializes the global history of cloth condensed into the fabrics worn by Cinquecento Venetians. A light silk, ormesino, was named after Hormuz, an island in the Persian Gulf where the fabric had been made for centuries before its production was taken up by the Venetian ormesini, for whom a Fondamenta in Canaregio is still named. Tabino or tabi, a rich, heavy silk often given a watered or moiré finish, was originally made in al-Attabiya, a district of Baghdad. The sbernia, a loose cape, probably took its name from the burnous, an Arab mantle. And damasco, damask, a figured silk, echoes the name of the city where it was first made, Damascus in southwest Syria. Venice had been importing the splendid textiles of the East for a long time before Venetian cloth makers began exporting their own damaschino, a textile patterned in arabesques of golden or silk flowers, sent especially to Constantinople.
“Textile terms also came from closer by, from the cities and nations of Europe. Rascia, a twill of silk or wool, originally came from Raskia, a city in Serbia. Cambrai or cambrada, a kind of very fine white linen, came from the Flemish city of Cambrai; another fine linen, renso, echoed the name of its city of origin, Reims. Scott, a rough wool tweed, took its name from Scotland, the country from which the best kinds came. And ferrandina, the term for a light fabric of mixed silk and wool, records the region in which it was first made: Fiandra, that is, Flanders. The textile economies of northern and eastern Europe made their way both into the shops where Venetians bought cloth and into the language they spoke.
After the opening section on ancient and medieval clothing, Vecellio moves on to contemporary dress, beginning with Venice (naturally). He prefaces this section on Venetian clothing with a brief description of the city, illustrated with four woodcut views and an image of gondoliers carrying well-dressed women in their gondolas through a canal. “The prints and commentaries are ordered from the highest social status to the lowest – the doge, his officials, and the noblemen down through the porters, galley slaves, and beggars; and in the case of the women, from the doge’s wife through noblewomen to housemaids and produce-sellers in the city’s markets…
“The ambitious scope of the rest of the book is evident in its divisions and subdivisions. Seventy-one prints cover the rest of Italy, from west to east and north to south, organized by region, city and era: medieval and later Lombardy (Parma, Ferrara, Mantua), Piedmont (Bologna, Ancona, Turin, Genoa), and the Venetian territories (Verona, Brescia, Vicenza, Padua and the smaller towns of the Veneto). The last thirty-six woodcuts of Italian costume present clothing worn in Tuscany (Florence, Siena and Perugia), Naples, Romagna, and the islands of the south, ending with Sicily.
“Book I then moves to France, opening with a discussion of its terrain, products and history and presenting fourteen prints. Spain is given eleven prints, Germany twenty-nine. Forty-four prints of northern dress conclude the first section of Book I, including Livonia (north of present-day Lithuania and south of Estonia), Silesia, Sweden, Bohemia, Switzerland, Prussia, the Low Countries, Hungary and Croatia, Schiavonia (Dalmatia), Slovenia, Poland, Muscovy, Brabant, England and Gothland. The final section of Book I moves east toward Asia. It contains thirty-three prints of clothing worn in Turkey, eleven of the dress worn by Greeks throughout Europe and Asia Minor, and six of costume from Macedonia, Thessaly and the islands of Crete, Mytilene, and Rhodes.
The title of Book II, ‘Degli habiti, costumi et usanze dell'Asia, at dell'Africa’ (The Clothing, Customs and Ways of Life of Asia and Africa), promises a more explicit ethnographic focus: social conventions and rituals will be described. Vecellio admits in his opening "Discorso" that this book is more conjectural than Book I, based on second-hand reports rather than the evidence of his own eyes or dependable testimony. Book II is considerably shorter than Book I, consisting of fifty-nine prints in all, but its geographical range is vast. The countries typified by costume include eastern and southern regions of Asia Minor (Caramania, Armenia, Georgia, Persia, Syria), then India, East Asia (China and Japan) and the region of Ethiopia considered to lie in Asia. Finally, Vecellio turns to Africa, from the old Mamluk Empire in Cairo to North Africa (Barbary, Tunisia, Morocco and then to sub-Saharan Africa and the island regions of Zanzibar and the Canaries.
“[The 1598 edition] includes twenty prints of the clothing of the New World. In addition to correcting some mislabeled prints from the first edition, Vecellio divided the book into twelve shorter books, each defined by a national identity; he added eight prints of rulers, beginning with the pope and ending with the King of Persia. He also included additional prints of merchants in Italy and other European countries, added figures from each of the European countries he described in the 159o volume (particularly from the north) and put in fifteen new figures from Persia, the Far East and Arabia. The twelfth of these books contains New World costume, as he promised in 159o: its title is "The Clothing of America" Another major difference in the 1598 book is that the Italian commentary from 159o is cut to fit on only half a page, so that a Latin translation could be printed on the lower half of each page.”(Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, “The Clothing of the Renaissance World”, Introduction, p. 8 ff.)
The Americas:
“The section on the New World in the 1598 edition ties Vecellio to the enormous interest in exploration and colonization shared by early modern Europeans in every region.”(Rosenthal and Jones). Vecellio has included images and descriptions of the inhabitants -both men and women- of Peru, Mexico, Virginia, and Florida. The author based his depictions of the Virginians and Floridians on engravings in Parts 1 and 2 of De Bry's "America Occidentalis". As in the rest of his book, the brief Italian commentaries describe the materials, colors, and manufacture of the Americans' clothing, as well as descriptions of various aspects of the American cultures.
The richness of the descriptions is best exemplified by that which accompanies the woodcut of a young man of Mexico: “In this province they use many delicate accessories of flowers and scents, and they adorn their heads with flowers and carry many of them in their hands, along with mirrors, which they think of as jewels (these are brought to them from Europe by the Spaniards.) They dress as follows: underneath they wear a garment of very thin cotton, with trousers that end above the knee. Their overgarments are patterned with beautiful designs of flowers, small animals, and bird feathers; otherwise, their arms and legs are naked. Others, from a nearby province called Chichen, go entirely naked because of the heat, covering only their private parts. They sleep in trees. In warfare they throw darts.”
There are numerous images of Virginian Native Americans: mothers and unmarried girls, a priest, warriors of various ranks, “the leading and oldest men of the Island”, and “princes… or rather minor kings”. There is also a depiction of an “idol”, one of their many gods, “decorated with chains of copper” with “a face that seems to be living flesh.” And a description of the Virginians’ religion and funeral practices: “It is a custom of the inhabitants that when their princes die, they take out their intestines and put them in the sun and dry them; then they wrap them in certain mats and set them on the highest level of their temples, and the priests care for them constantly.” One image, of a mother and child, illustrates the way Virginian women carry their toddlers. To this image Vecellio adds, “They delight in fishing. They have vases of a highly-perfected material for cooking. They mix fish with various fruits.. and they live in a sober fashion.”
The depictions include a nobleman of Cuzco, warriors from Peru, Mexico, Florida, and Virginia, with descriptions of their weapons; two Peruvian women, one of whom is spinning wool or fiber (a Mexican woman is also shown spinning), the “King of the Island of Florida”, richly and magnificently dressed, with added details on cosmetics and accessories: “they take great pleasure in painting themselves and they wear the nails of their fingers and toes long… and they wear fishbones in their ears.” The woodcut of the queen of Florida is accompanied by a description of her wedding and her bridal attire: “They set the queen upon a platform decorated with painted animal skins, and at the back of it they make an arrangement of leaves and flowers for her. Then four men carry the platform; some go ahead of them, sounding trumpets, and two pages hold fans of bird feathers; a great number of unmarried girls carrying baskets of fruit and flowers follow behind. The queen precedes them with her hair loose on her shoulders, wearing many necklaces on her neck, arms, and legs. They take great pleasure in painting their bodies…”
For more on the sources of Vecellio's American images, as well as a discussion of the ways in which Native Americans were interpreted by Vecellio and his 16th c. Italian audience, see Elizabeth Horodowich's "The Venetian discovery of America: geographic imagination in the age of encounters"(2018); and Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, “The Clothing of the Renaissance World”, p. 35 ff.
EDIT 16; CNCE 29586; BM STC Italian, 1465-1600, p. 713; Sabin, 98732; Alden, J.E. European Americana, 598/112; Hiler, H. Bibliography of costume (1. ed.), p. 873; Bayer, A.J. Art and love in Renaissance Italy, no. 64, p. 145; Lipperheide Aa 33