Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science) by Carole Collier Frick

Author:Carole Collier Frick [Frick, Carole Collier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2005-11-24T06:00:00+00:00

THE QUATTROCENTO

The first large-scale compilation of sumptuary law in the Quattrocento was included in the Statuta of 1415 and regulated all “ornamenta mulierum.”56 The earliest sumptuary law, in the Trecento, had concerned itself mainly with materials (yardage, fabric type, quality of dye, and ornamentation) and, as we have seen, women had often successfully evaded it by paying a tax on the prohibited feature.57 By the end of the fourteenth century and certainly into the early years of the Quattrocento, there was little letup in the desire to curb luxury ornamentation on women, but the focus changed to curbing the burgeoning fashion innovations. That there was a runaway problem is eloquently evident in the number of laws and official boards that were created to deal with it. But what began as very harsh in the first decades of the 1400s, seemed to ease at midcentury. Brides proved extraordinary sumptuary cases everywhere, but they seem to have been especially visible in Florence, which was given to less obvious flash in everyday dress than other Italian cities. The families of the ruling oligarchy splendidly dressed these primary players in their marriage alliance strategies, as has been discussed. While fourteenth-century weddings were controlled by sumptuary laws on every front, restrictions specifically concerning the dress of the bride were absent.58 In the fifteenth century, brides were even less regulated, being free to receive and wear multiple rings at their weddings and for fifteen days thereafter.59 It was critical for the elite of Florence to allow important weddings to proceed with little sartorial interference. In the Medici family, for example, as Dale Kent has shown, power was consolidated by some twenty-two marriages with families of their “parenti, amici e vicini” between 1400 and 1434 alone.60

After the deaths of Cosimo and his son Piero in the 1460s, sumptuary legislation does in fact, seem to have tightened up again, with a flurry of laws attempting to keep up with the fashion of the moment.61 Rainey has concluded that sumptuary laws do not seem to have been a viable political tool that was easily manipulated by the faction in power, and that overall, “there is no evidence in the legislative documents to suggest that the lawmakers of this period identified sumptuary legislation as either a pro-Medicean or anti-Medicean policy.”62 There was a profound ambivalence toward display among the Florentine elite, even as they all participated to a greater or lesser degree in wearing the products of their own luxury marketplace.

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