VITTORIA FARNESE
Next "cash flow" I will start working on the Roman styled dress I've planned to make for some 3 years. The cardboard linen for bodice stiffening has been sitting in my closet for two years, and every time I see it I am reminded of the project. But I want a nice black velvet or wool, and and I need a couple of meters, and for that I need money.
As mentioned before the Roman main dress wasn't very different from what was worn in Florence and elsewhere. But the style was subdued; with dark dress, little jewelry and a large, golden veil. Often mistaken for portraits of widows, it instead shows how women typically dressed in a city state dominated by the Holy Church:
1. "Portrait of Vittoria Farnese", 1540s, Jacobino del Conte (Villa Borghese).
2. "Portrait of Vittoria Farnese", ca. 1540, Workshop of Tiziano (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest).
3. "Portrait of a Lady", 1550s?, Roman school (Private collection, Paris).
4. "Portrait of Giulia de' Medici/Ortensia de' Bardi, 1559, Allori (Uffizi, Florence).
5. "Portrait of a Lady with dog", ca. 1570, Bartolomeo Passerotti (Cassa di Risparmio Cesena).
Looking for portraits of Vittoria Farnese was what put me on to this style to begin with. Both of them showed her in a black or dark dress, and with a large golden veil which seems to have folds. I discovered there were similar portraits showing women in black dresses and with these golden veils. They were attributed to "Roman school", or painted by Venetian and Florentine artists living in Rome. Then written sources started to turn up, for example that of Medici courtiers describing the vanities of Cosimo de' Medici's second wife:
And she adorns herself with finery and vanity more than ever, and even this morning decided to go to Mass all decked out and with a golden veil on her head in the Roman style... (Landini 2005: 39)
Today I went digging for more info on Vittoria Farnese in the Medici archives. The Medicis kept an eye on her, as she initially was considered a suitable wife for Cosimo de' Medici. He married Eleonora di Toledo instead, and Vittoria Farnese married into the Rovere family in Urbino. After that the Medicis seems to have lost interest in her, but up to that point the Florentine ambassadors in Rome reported on who she met, what she ate, how she dressed, and how close her relationship was to her grandfather, Pope Paul III.
One interesting tidbid was a dress worn at the wedding of Vittoria Farnese. The text is ambiguous on whether it was Vittoria who wore the described attire, or another. The translators has interpreted it as being someone else, but I read it as Vittoria herself, accompanied by Roman ladies in white, and bridesmaids in "pavonazzo". Anyhow (and pardon my sub-par 16th century Italian...):
At vesper, ladies came to the home of the lady Vittoria, all dressed in white (...) in a dress of silver-on-silver fabric adorned with gold bands and rich jewelry (?), with a hint of silver in the (overdress? veil?), wavy and transparent (...?...), accompanied by 36 or 38 chariots of these ladies of Rome. (Tells of how the wedding procession went from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo to Palazzo Farnese). The bridesmaids were all in purplish brown.
(A hora di vespro fu madama a casa de la signora Vittoria [Farnese] ^tutta vestita di bianco, con una sottana di teletta d'argento tutta trinciata con molto bei legami d'oro et di gioie richissimi, con una tocca d'argento di sopra sottilissima, onde traspariva el tutto^ et levolla a palazzo nel suo cocchio accompagnata da 36 o 38 cocchi di queste dame di Roma. (...) Le damigelle tutte di pavonazzo.)
http://documents.medici.org/document_details.cfm?entryid=23926&returnstr=orderby=SendName@is_search=1@result_id=10
Anyone who can translate the missing parts?