Calvi

In the early modern period, costume books and albums

participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed
the diversity of the people of the known world on a variety
of media including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At
the crossroads of early anthropology, geography, and travel
literature, this textual and visual production blurred the lines The Renaissance
between art and science. Costume books and albums were not
a unique European production: in the Ottoman Empire and the
Far East, artists and geographers also pictured the dress of men
and women of their own and faraway lands, hybridizing the
Renaissance Western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation
of knowledge and people through migration, travel, and

The World

The World in Dress

missionary and diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes
to the expanding field of early modern cultural studies in a
global perspective.

in Dress
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 Elements in the Renaissance
edited by
John Henderson
Birkbeck, University of London, and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge
Jonathan K. Nelson
Syracuse University Florence, and Kennedy School, Harvard University

THE WORLD IN DRESS

Costume Books across Italy, Europe,

and the East

Giulia Calvi
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 The World in Dress

Costume Books across Italy, Europe, and the East

Elements in the Renaissance

DOI: 10.1017/9781108913829
First published online: August 2022

Giulia Calvi
University of Siena and European University Institute
Author for correspondence: Giulia Calvi, Giulia.calvi@eui.eu

Abstract: In the early modern period, costume books and albums

participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed the
diversity of the people of the known world on a variety of media
including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At the crossroads of early
anthropology, geography, and travel literature, this textual and visual
production blurred the lines between art and science. Costume books
and albums were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman
Empire and the Far East, artists and geographers also pictured the dress
of men and women of their own and faraway lands, hybridizing the
Renaissance Western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation of
knowledge and people through migration, travel, and missionary and
diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes to the expanding field
of early modern cultural studies in a global perspective.

Keywords: dress, knowledge, global, material culture, Renaissance

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

© Giulia Calvi 2022

ISBNs: 9781108823302 (PB), 9781108913829 (OC)
ISSNs: 2631-9101 (online), 2631-9098 (print)
 Contents

1 Staging the Clothing of the Early Modern World 1

2 The Ottoman Empire 27

3 Italy, Europe, and Japan 69

Bibliography 92
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 The World in Dress 1

1 Staging the Clothing of the Early Modern World

Preface
Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, printed collections of clothing circu-
lated in Europe, gaining a widespread success on the editorial market. They
contained engravings of various size, which quickly became objects of curios-
ity, amusement, and decoration. While more than 200 of these books circulated
in Europe between 1520 and 1610, production increased most perceptibly after
1550 in Paris, Venice, and Nurnberg, the most prominent centres for publishing
(Tuffal, 1955; Olian, 1977).1 The historiography that mostly focusses on
European costume books agrees on some basic assumptions that identify
dress as the category which in the early modern period structured a discourse
on social, cultural, and gender difference. Alongside portraits, costume books
were the new medium expressing individuality in a visual format, which
projected the author’s experience of the urban space in terms of habitat, work,
and commerce. Research has also highlighted the visual culture these editorial
productions shared with Renaissance chorography and cartography, as maps of
cities and continents were often decorated with the dress of local inhabitants,
reinforcing the connection between dress and place. Space became visible
through the images of men and women wearing local attire. Recent studies
have highlighted references to travel literature, botanical illustrations, and
emblem books, all of which also shaped the visual apparatus of costume
books (Ilg, 2004; Wilson, 2005; Mentges, 2007; Rublack, 2010).
In the early modern period, the equation of the gendered body with dress and
civic space is in tension with a widening notion of space in terms of exploration
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

and conquest and the construction of a non-Western, non-Christian other.

Costume books staged the bodies of men and women on an ordered theatre of
the world, displaying the most visibly evident components of otherness.
Abraham Ortelius with his atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), translated
into Dutch (1571), German and French (1572), and Spanish (1588), and in 1606
into English as The Theatre of the Whole World, disseminated the figure of the
world theatre across Europe. The title invited readers to comprehend the world
both as a whole and through its local representations by experiencing an
imaginary voyage displayed on the page. In a similar way, costume books
invited readers to delve into human diversity on a micro level through the
clothed bodies displayed on the theatre of the world and contained in a book
(Riello, 2019: 284).

1
One of the first books is Francois Deserps, The Various Styles of Clothing. A facsimile of the 1562
edition, Sarah Shannon, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: James Ford Bell Library, 2001).
 2 The Renaissance

In the context of growing curiosity and knowledge about non-Western

peoples and lands, costume books comprised multifaceted notions of dress.
An inclusive representation of dress as the bodily practice of combining nudity
and bodily manipulations – tattoos, foot bondage, sexual mutilation – was in
tension with the traditional meaning of costume, one that the Renaissance
imbued with ethical and gendered notions of moral conduct, and with fashion
as a sign of change and modernity in Western societies. Recent research
recommends looking at the body as a ‘strategy’ for thinking about the global.
In the context of world history, bodies are embedded in processes of circulation,
mobility, exchange, and trade, providing, as it were, the basic connection of
global interactions (Burton, 2012). In their fanciful attires, the people of the
world displayed in costume books embodied abstract notions of space, suggest-
ing to the readers ideas about distance and proximity, place, climate, ethnicity,
sexual identity, and age. At the crossroads of early anthropology, travel litera-
ture, and visual culture, costume books blurred the lines between art and
science. The clothed and naked bodies of men and women appearing on a
variety of media (chorographies, atlases, world maps, costume albums and
books, screens) partook in the early modern construction of a humanized global
space where gender, ethnic, language, and religious differences prevailed over
skin colour.
The early modern texts analysed in this Element communicate to readers
from the twenty-first century a gaze that is astonished and yet free of a consoli-
dated Western superiority. It is a gaze shaped by classical antiquity, travel
diaries and missionary accounts, and the often derivative and imaginary pictures
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

of clothing portrayed in drawings, engravings, and books that proliferated

throughout Europe.
Until recent years, historians rarely questioned the normative monopoly of
the Western gaze in defining and fixing the representation of world peoples via
images, literature, and geographical, anthropological, and clinical investigation.
However, global contacts and encounters offered other people the opportunity
to describe, represent, and hybridize the (European) foreigners arriving in the
lands they inhabited. Ethnographies therefore were not only a Western produc-
tion, though Europeans ‘enjoyed asymmetric advantages in that they were able
to compile a much more comprehensive body of global cultural knowledge than
any other people’ (Bentley, 2011: 8).

The Circulation of Knowledge in and beyond Europe

The three sections of this work show how compendiums, travelogues, visual
sources, missionary reports, and cartography were crucial to the elaboration of
 The World in Dress 3

images and texts in Italian, European, and non-Western costume albums and
books. All three sections acknowledge the circulation of books, prints, and
maps through agents (merchants, scientists, diplomats, missionaries, artists,
travellers) across Europe and between East and West. Information not only
travelled from the West to the Far East, but, as Sections 2 and 3 show, in the
other direction as well. My central argument focusses on the circulation and
translation of culture in costume books and albums across global connections.
Images were traced and texts were copied and at times translated into images,
spurred by an editorial market eager for plates that depicted people nobody had
ever seen (as, for example, the Arctic population in northern Scandinavia before
the 1550s, the Japanese in Europe before 1582, or the Portuguese in Japan
before the 1540s).
Costume books were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman
Empire and the Far East, artists and geographers pictured the dress of men
and women of their own and faraway lands in manuscript albums, scrolls, and
prints. Analysing these sources in non-Western contexts is another crucial
contribution this Element intends to make to the expanding field of early
modern global cultural studies. Addressing a growing readership in Japan or a
European audience in Turkey, costume albums produced in Istanbul and Tokyo
are also considered in tension with the Renaissance Western tradition.
Structured on synthesis, repetition, and accumulation, these tracts develop a
discursive model increasingly grounded on difference, in an expanding world
unknown to biblical and classical sources. Costume books represent others
through the lens of power, status, religion, trade, ethnicity, gender, and age.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

They address a readership attracted to exotica in a widening market of luxury

goods where foreigners are becoming part of the domestic landscape
(Bleichmar, 2011: 15–30; Bleichmar and Mancall, 2011). A startling desire
for information is perceivable in most of them, the desire to know about
foreigners and where they come from as well as a troubling anxiety about
otherness and others.
The following paragraphs focus on the Venetian artist Cesare Vecellio’s two
editions of his Habiti antichi e moderni (Ancient and Modern Clothing) in the
context of map-makers, geographers, and the printing trades in the cosmopol-
itan society of the late Renaissance.

The Ancient and Modern Clothing of the World

Cesare Vecellio (1521–1601) authored the largest and most important Italian
costume book representing the peoples of the world. It was printed in Venice in
two editions: Degli habiti antichi e moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590)
 4 The Renaissance

and Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo (1598). While the first edition
pictures the clothing of the three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa), the second
one includes the New World and represents the four continents. The two
editions are illustrated with 428 woodcuts (1590) and 503 woodcuts (1598)
provided by Christopher Chrieger, a German printmaker whose name was
Italianized as Cristoforo Guerra.
In recent years, much has been written on Cesare Vecellio, a versatile artist,
active as a painter, engraver, and printmaker living and working in Cadore,
Belluno, and Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Habiti are
the most extensively discussed costume books by Renaissance specialists
mainly in terms of a history of clothing, textile production, and dress which is
now expanding in the field of global fashion studies (Wilson, 2005; Jones and
Rosenthal, 2008; Paulicelli, 2008; Paulicelli and Clark, 2009; Riello and
McNeil, 2010; Riello, 2019). Sidestepping the analytical perspective of a
history of fashion, my methodological approach to Vecellio’s costume books
is that of viewing them as a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992) where a wealth of visual
and textual sources is creatively appropriated and reinterpreted. In this frame-
work, addressing the circulation of knowledge and cultural translation, the
Habiti appear to be a dynamic genre situated in a changing geopolitical context
shaped by Western and non-Western cross-cultural exchanges. This methodo-
logical approach informs the three sections of this Element, which focus on
three different contexts: the Scandinavian peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, and
Japan. Venice as a global city (Wilson, 2005) and a printing centre provides
connections between a situated local knowledge and cross-cultural exchanges
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

across Italy, Europe, and the East.

Born in Pieve di Cadore in 1523, Cesare was a distant cousin of Tiziano
Vecellio and was trained in his workshop in Venice, where the large Vecellio
household cooperated under the artistic direction of Tiziano himself. Owing to
a lack of sources concerning his life, Cesare was unacknowledged as an artist
in his own right, and it was only in 1817 that Stefano Ticozzi in his Vite dei
pittori Vecellij del Cadore mentioned Cesare as a close collaborator of
Tiziano’s (Ticozzi, 1817). Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, in his famous mono-
graph on Tiziano (1878), listed some works which he attributed to Cesare,
whose contribution could be distinguished from that of other family members
in the master’s workshop (bottega). However, subsequent studies did not shed
light on any documents concerning Cesare’s life and work or his relationship
to Tiziano. Only a few quotes in the 1590 Habiti mention a trip to Augsburg in
1548, where the artist and his collaborators were invited to paint a portrait of
Charles V and his court. After Tiziano’s death in the Venetian plague of 1576,
Cesare probably received part of the drawings, etchings, and sketches as well
 The World in Dress 5

as some of the precious textiles listed among his belongings. Carpets and
woven patterns appear in Cesare’s paintings in the 1580s and 1590s and recent
historiography from the Cadore has suggested a connection between these
new motifs and Tiziano’s legacy (Guérin Dalle Mese, 2002; Tagliaferro and
Aikema, 2009).
In the 1570s, Cesare painted a series of portraits of a family from the local
uprising nobility, the Piloni. Count Odorico, head of the household and
holding important political charges, became his patron and friend. In his
palace near Belluno, the count, Vecellio wrote, ‘has a study. In addition to
many kinds of books, this study is full of every ancient object one could desire,
including ancient medals, portraits of heroes, and marble and bronze sculp-
tures, as well as wondrous natural artifacts in substances of every noble kind.
Throughout the region it is called Noah’s Ark’ (Vecellio, 1590: 219; Rosenthal
and Jones, 2008: 271). The artist decorated the volumes of Piloni’s precious
collection of books with hand-coloured miniatures of exotic landscapes and
imaginary portraits on the edgings, to make it look like a gallery of paintings
rather than a library. Many of the Renaissance bestsellers that Cesare perused
and quoted in his Habiti came from Piloni’s library in Belluno. It is important
to acknowledge the tension between the local embeddedness of the count as a
jurist, politician, and major collector and the transnational update of his
library and Wunderkammer – a key feature of the intellectual world of
Venice and its mainland and of the transfer of knowledge and communication
across Europe.
Vecellio’s work was part of a well-connected world of engravers, printers,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

artists, and cartographers such as Giacomo Franco and Pietro and

Ferdinando Bertelli who engraved costume books as well as maps
(Woodward, 1996, 2007; Bury, 2001). Venice became a leading printing
centre because of its trade networks, its political autonomy, and its tradition
of freethinking. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, a growing entre-
preneurial class of government officials, artisans of the metal and paper
trades, merchants, and intellectuals provided a fertile ground for the spread-
ing of the new technology and connected lay and church intellectuals with a
wider readership for whom knowledge of the wider world was no longer a
luxury but a necessity. Vecellio had his own smaller printing business and
printed maps. Texts and images thus represent the clothed inhabitants of the
world through the prism of the artist’s contextualized reading of space. A
keen awareness of the changing space of the world shapes the Habiti: a
wealth of sources combines references to paintings, monuments, and tomb-
stones with a large body of geographical and historical knowledge circulat-
ing in Venice from the mid-sixteenth century.
 6 The Renaissance

Gendering Civic Culture and Global State Power

A systematic comparative reading of the two editions underlines some crucial
differences that are central to the argument presented in this Element. The first
Habiti (1590) mainly addresses a local Venetian readership, is entirely written
in Italian, and consists of two books, one dealing with the European dress of
men and women and the other dealing with the costumes of Asia and Africa in
the framework of the old three-continent partition of the world. Each illustration
is set in an elaborate frame and is flanked by a page providing a detailed
description of the image, from the top of the engraving down. Vecellio began
with the hairstyle or headdress, worked his way down over the shoulders to the
bust, arms, and hands, and ended with the feet. He detailed textiles, patterns,
colours, and accessories – gloves, fans, handkerchiefs, flowers. He then
explained how the individual costume was used, on what occasion and by
whom, and to what extent the fashion was popular. Shaped by the
Renaissance tradition of portraiture, the culture of self-fashioning and the use
of models, costume books have been compared to emblem books or to collec-
tions of botanical engravings in which each plant species is presented singly,
divided by genus on distinct plates set one next to the other (Wilson, 2005). This
iconographic approach oriented towards analogy was useful in presenting the
masculine and the feminine in both the natural and the human worlds.
Vecellio’s explicit intent was to delineate a history of clothing and thus to
provide a documented history of the images on the woodblock prints: he traced
their origins from paintings, tombstones, frescoes, or books, or from news
spread by travellers landing in Venice. Political and social power shape the
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

artist’s gaze that focusses on hybrid styles of clothing in colonial territories such
as Venice’s Stato da Mar. Religion is one of the key features distinguishing attire
among the Protestants, Christian Orthodox, Jewish, Armenian, and Islamic
people, and ritual – especially the bridal marriage dress – grants ethnic continu-
ity of customs and costumes for minorities. Most of the genealogy of ancient
and modern clothing in the first Habiti (1590) deals with women’s fashion, and
the female body played the greatest role in giving shape to the theatre of the
world. The first edition features a culture of civic urban virtues in which
noblewomen have a prominent visual position and female costumes embody
some European cities, regions, and kingdoms.
The second edition (1598) is written in Latin and Italian, addresses a cosmo-
politan readership, and is divided into twelve books comprising the peoples of
Europe and of the world (including North and South America) within the
modern four-continent division of the world. The prose loses all reference to
local scales of representation and knowledge as well as to individuals.
 The World in Dress 7

Adopting a rather generic descriptive quality acquired through a systematic

reduction of texts, the prose is mostly confined to a short description of the
costume, eschewing information about customs and contexts. Here the images
are set within a global history of costumes and customs. Princes with their royal
gowns and insignia systematically move in, substituting the female icons of
civic virtue in favour of a representation of state power embodied by men,
which develops into a male-centred visual construction of global space. Adding
America with twenty new prints was the crucial step in this direction (Van
Groesen, 2008). Information had to be updated as the earth was no longer
perceived to be made up of empty spaces surrounding familiar places and
faces but was recognized as fully and densely inhabited by unknown men and
women (Headley, 1997; Hodorowich, 2005).
As shown in Section 3, two new plates picturing the costumes of the Molucca
Islands and Japan embodied the space of the Pacific and were the key to the
global dimension of the second edition of the Habiti. It indeed staged the
costumes of the whole world connecting the four continents through the written
and visual sources that agents – diplomats, missionaries, travellers – brought
with them. Migrations, diasporas, and the transfer of people and material culture
provide the larger framework for the transcontinental circulation of images and
texts that this Element illustrates.
The leading Italian, French, and German costume books, as well as the
bestsellers that in the mid-sixteenth century appeared on the European book
market and their Italian editions, mostly printed in Venice, shaped Vecellio’s
Habiti: Ramusio’s collection Navigazioni e Viaggi, Olaus Magnus’ Historia de
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

gentibus septentrionalibus, Nicolas de Nicolay’s Navigationi et viaggi, Juan

Gonzales de Mendoza’s Historia de la China, and De Bry’s Collection of
Voyages.
Cesare Vecellio died in 1601. He was eighty years old and had survived the
devastating 1576 plague that hit Venice and northern Italy. He published the first
edition of the Habiti at sixty-seven and completed the second at seventy-five, a
very old artist leaving behind him the world in a book.

The ‘New World Within’

Passing from the first to the second edition, Vecellio modified the boundaries
of Northern Europe, introducing new peoples – the inhabitants of Scandia
(Scandinavia) – and calling it the ‘new world in Europe’. The definition
came from Giovanni Botero, a Jesuit scholar who between 1591 and 1597
was completing his encyclopedic Relazioni Universali (Botero, 2015),
a masterpiece of Western and Catholic universalism offering armchair travellers
 8 The Renaissance

a global tour around the four continents. Writing about the northern peninsula
bordering the ocean to the west and the north and the Baltic Sea to the south and the
east, Botero defined it as a new world because it was inhabited by so many
different peoples. Huge whales, monsters with human heads, and enormous
quantities of fish were part of a wondrous landscape that nevertheless suggested
commercial opportunities as herrings, salmon, and precious furs created trading
networks and attracted capital. Both Vecellio and Botero compared Stockholm to
Venice. The city where the king of Sweden resided was – like Venice – ‘built in the
marshes on wooden poles. The sea enters in two branches so deep and large that
ships loaded with merchandise arrive with full blown sails’ (Vecellio, 1590: 329;
Botero, 2015: 202). For Italian readers, the new and the unknown were framed in a
familiar context.
None of the European authors of costume books – Bertelli, De Bruyn,
Boissard, Grassi, Weiditz – from whom Vecellio had copied many images had
gone so far as to include the hyperborean regions or the inhabitants of the last
Thule. Only the Venetian Pietro Bertelli had designed a Finnish costume, but on
the whole Italian culture continued to depend on what it could glean from the
work of the auctores who, in medieval times, had dominated in the field of
geographical and encyclopedic studies (De Anna, 1988, 1994). In Venice,
Ramusio had printed the travelogues of Pietro Querini, who had been ship-
wrecked near the Lofoten Islands in 1432. The reports from the envoys from the
Holy See, at the forefront those of Antonio Possevino written between 1577 and
1580, remained inaccessible and locked within the Roman archives of the Curia
and then of the Jesuits. The Arctic was the totally unknown, the void, and what
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

was surprising to many Renaissance thinkers, it was missing from ancient

sources. In this sense it was a new world and another world within Europe.
Recent historiography has connected the invisibility of the Far North in
sixteenth-century sources to the ways in which Arctic exploration took place.
Early modern Arctic encounters were a largely Protestant phenomenon and
Dutch and English explorers shared their cultures’ anxiety about the theological
value of images – sculptures, paintings, handcrafted figures – as leading to
idolatry (Heuer, 2019). The Dutch Jan Huygen von Linschoten’s 1594–5 voy-
age to Lapland is a meaningful example of his identification of local sculptures
with threatening idols. Arctic works appeared in a time of violent iconoclasm
and religious wars when the traditional Christian conceptions of the image were
being challenged. The invisibility of the last Thule, wrapped in ice, fog,
darkness, and sorcery, suited the iconoclastic ideology of Northern European
explorers who assimilated this landscape to the Reformation’s attacks against
idols in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and France. The Far North
 The World in Dress 9

became a contact zone where religious zealots fought their culture wars verging
on the meaning of visuality.

Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus

In this context, it was not by chance that Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), the
Swedish archbishop of Uppsala, authored the most imaginative and densely
illustrated encyclopedic tract on the northern peoples, Historia de gentibus
septentrionalibus. He was concretely involved with the Reformation debate
over the moral and religious use of pictorial art at the Council of Trent, taking an
uncompromising stand against iconoclasm. It was in Trent, where he appeared
as a stranger from unknown lands, that he started planning his colossal history
of the Far North ‘numbed by the constant merciless cold’ (Olaus Magnus, 1565:
pp. 1–2; Heuer, 2019). In the foreword of his Historia, Olaus glorifies pictorial
art as ‘poetry without words [which] in its harmonious use of lines, colours,
proportions, and in its imitation of living objects’ preserves the memory of the
past, inspires honourable deeds, and is a magistra vitae full of delights
(Johannesson, 1991: 168). He wrote and reproduced in 480 woodcuts the first
detailed description of the people of Scandinavia in their wondrous natural
environment. Owing to Olaus’ militant opposition to the Protestants’ icono-
clasm, Scandinavia appeared to Renaissance readers in a wealth of images
(Gillgren, 1999).
Olaus Magnus is one of the great and, at the same time, perhaps one of the
least known figures of Renaissance cultural history. Born in Linkoping in 1490,
between 1519 and 1521, he wandered across Norway with his brother Johannes,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

who was made the archbishop of Uppsala in 1521. Because of his duties for the
church and the king, he travelled widely in Sweden, Norway, and northern
Finland. When Lutheran-friendly forces under Gustav Vasa conquered
Stockholm in 1523, both brothers went into exile, travelled incessantly through
Europe, and lived for long periods in world cities such as Danzic, Venice, and
Rome. In Venice in 1539, Olaus published a maritime map of Scandinavia under
the auspices of the Venetian patriarch Geronimo Quirini. The Carta marina
printed with two informative booklets in Italian and German was full of
wonderful illustrations of monsters, battles, and shipwrecks, of reindeers pull-
ing chariots over icy rivers and lakes, hunters, and missionaries. It had a wide
diffusion and its vignettes were repeated in the Historia de gentibus septen-
trionalibus. It was considered the most accurate map of Scandinavia
(Miekkavaara, 2008).2 However, the Carta and the Historia did not only offer

2
For a colour reproduction of the Carta marina, see http://hornorkesteret.wordpress.com/2010/01/
18/olaus-magnus-carta-marina-1539.
 10 The Renaissance

a wealth of illustrations: as we shall see, they were embedded in the conquering

ideology of the Catholic Counter-Reformation (Lestringant, 2005: 6).
The brothers settled in Rome in 1541 in the Swedish hospice of Saint Birgitta,
today in the piazza Farnese. Both died in Rome, Johannes in 1544 and Olaus in
1557. The latter was named archbishop in his brother’s place but never returned
to Sweden. He attended the first Council of Trent between December 1546 and
March 1547 and conceived of his monumental Historia de gentibus septentrio-
nalibus, where he depicted the north not just as a fragmented landscape of ice
and darkness, but as a potentially promising region in terms of natural resources
worthy of reconquest by the papal forces.
Upon his return to Rome in 1547, Olaus installed two printing presses in the
hospice of Saint Birgitta and employed an émigré from Parma to work them.
The encyclopedic Historia shaped by the classics (especially Pliny), northern
folklore, personal observation, and experience, generously illustrated with 480
woodcuts, was printed in Latin in Rome in 1555. Translations in French (1561),
Dutch (1562), Italian (1565), German (1567), and English (1658) followed. It
was not published in Swedish until 1909. In his own country, Olaus Magnus was
a controversial figure who embodied the last generation of Catholic bishops
opposing Gustav Vasa’s conversion to Protestantism, the requisition of monas-
tic property, and state-building – all of which Swedish historiography identified
with modernity. A vast and seemingly unmanageable encyclopedia, full of
fantasies with no scientific grounding, in Sweden the Historia was discredited
and forgotten. It was better known in abridged editions, called epitomes,
circulating among European scholars across confessional lines.3 Olaus’ sources
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

for the images included his brother’s History of the Gothic and Swedish Kings
that was published in 1554, Hans Holbein’s prints of the Old Testament, and
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Gabriele Giolito’s 1549 edition. It seems probable
that Olaus first produced sketches himself but left it to his Italian engraver to
complete his pictures (Johannesson, 1991: 163–70). These were the only
images of the Scandinavian peninsula and of the Arctic region circulating in
Renaissance Europe.

The Indigenous Populations of Lapland and Biarmia

To the Southern Europeans to whom the book was addressed, the icy new world
was upsetting because of the monstrosities it contained – whales, snakes, giants,

3
The Historia comprises twenty-two books The first books describe the climate and geography.
The author then moves on to describe warfare and peace in Scandinavia. In the second part of the
work, Olaus discusses at length the animal kingdom, beginning with mankind and ending with
insects. The twenty-two books supposedly mirror the structure of the Old Testament with its
twenty-two books and perhaps even Augustine’s City of God.
 The World in Dress 11

demons – and because of its spiritual depravities – paganism among the Lapps
and the Lutheran heresy. Olaus turned the Lapps, forced to pay rising taxes by
the Swedes and the Norwegians, into the good savages of the Far North. He
expressed his concern for ‘The Lapps who live in faraway wild spaces. They are
very little known and do not use money, but barter whatever they need. They
live together without conflicts, in peace, without envy nor fraud’ (Olaus
Magnus, 1565: 115). They speak a strange language, pay tributes to the king
of Norway and to the prince of Muscovy under whose rule they are obedient
subjects, and offer their ministers precious furs. They marry, baptize their
children, and bury their dead with rituals that hybridize Christian ceremonies
with the Indigenous devotion for fire. Olaus believed that the nomadic people of
the Far North would be fully converted to Christianity were it not for the
distance between their dwellings and the churches and the heavy taxes in
precious furs they were forced to pay to the Swedish king. In Italy, Botero, in
his Relazioni Universali, worded similar concerns about the religious situation
in Scandinavia and the conversion of the Indigenous populations of Lapland and
Biarmia still tied to their pagan heritage, to divination, sorcery, and shaman
culture. He probably read Olaus Magnus, but, as many authors at the time did,
avoided quoting his sources. Botero writes:

They are small but agile and dress in tight clothing. In winter they wear the
skins of sea cows or entire bearskins. They tie them to their heads leaving
only an opening for the eyes – this has given some writers a cause to report
that they are as hairy as animals. They have no homes but live in tents as the
Tatars. Instead of horses, they have reindeers. They also have huge bears and
very white ermines. Their furs attract foreign money. The Biarmi live like the
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Lapps: they adore fire, they revere magic, and they fill the air with spells.
They are subjects of the king of Sweden. (Botero, 2015: 202)

Olaus Magnus’ defense of the Lapps against the oppressive fiscal policy of
the Swedish kings intersects in new ways recent Swedish postcolonial histori-
ography that analyses the role of material culture in enforcing a colonial order in
the land of the Sami in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola
peninsula in north-western Russia – Lapps and Biarmi in the sixteenth century
(Nordin and Ojala, 2018). According to this recent research, the ‘othering’ of
the Indigenous population anticipated the destruction of its religion, language,
and material culture. Beginning in the seventeenth century, collections of Sami
material culture constructed a dominant Western view of the population and
served as a local variant of the colonial collections in the making of European
empires. Renaissance authors such as Damiao da Gois in his Deploratio
Lappianae Gentis (1540) and Olaus Magnus in his Historia (1555), albeit
within Catholic universalism, contributed to compare the Indigenous
 12 The Renaissance

populations of Scandinavia to those of America. Frank Lestringant underlines

the analogies between Olaus’ pleading for the Lapps and the Dominican
Bartolomé de Las Casas’ defence of the Indians (Lestringant, 2005: 3).

Dressing Northern Men and Women: Cesare Vecellio

and Olaus Magnus
Research has brought to light very limited connections between Olaus
Magnus’ monumental work and sixteenth-century Italian culture. Only the
poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95) mentioned the Historia in his tragedy Il Re
Torrismondo (1587). It opens with a reference to Biarmia, the region in the
north of Finland that inaugurates book I of the Historia. Tasso quotes whole
passages almost word for word, operating an esthetic integration of Olaus
within Italian literature (Wodianka, 2015: 33). But the Far North was made
visible also through the selection, appropriation, and reinterpretation of the
Historia’s impressive visual apparatus. To date the wealth of images – 480
woodcuts – that Olaus Magnus circulated in Italy and Europe has not attracted
the attention of scholars, yet they did not go unnoticed in sixteenth-century
Venice. Cesare Vecellio included twenty-four woodblock prints that embody
the new world of the Far North in his Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo
(1598): twelve are dedicated to women and twelve to men. Among these, the
most visually powerful represent the men and women from Biarmia, Scrifinia
(Finland), and Lapland. They derive from Olaus Magnus’ Historia delle genti
et della natura delle cose settentrionali (1565), which was indeed the only
sixteenth-century source on the inhabitants, the environment, and the customs
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

of the Scandinavians.
Translated from Latin and printed in Venice by Giunti, the Historia delle
genti et della natura delle cose settentrionali was the product of a network of
artists, engravers, and printers that included Vecellio’s workshop and small
printing business. The artist was acquainted with Olaus’ work and already in
the first Habiti (1590) he quoted passages from book XIV, chapter V, which
dwell on the marriage ritual among the simple folk in the Baltic islands south of
Sweden. He transcribed whole sentences but did not use the images.4 The layout
of the first Habiti, with its long descriptive texts detailing local history and
traditions, fitted well the ethnographic dimension of Olaus’ Historia, where
clothing was a minor part of the narrative and where contexts and environment
were a crucial aspect of the encyclopedic volume.

4
In the first edition, a couple of illustrations of the Swedish bride and matron and of the women
from the Baltic islands are scattered among others portraying German, Dutch, Polish, and Swiss
dress.
 The World in Dress 13

Eight years later, in Vecellio’s second Habiti, images overwhelmed the text,
reduced to a few sentences in Italian and Latin. The lengthy ethnography of
dress was eschewed from the narrative and the images acquired greater prom-
inence. The north gained a visual coherence and images migrated, as it were,
from Olaus to Cesare. In so doing, they changed drastically, moving from a
rather sober representation of couples and households to the individual portraits
that Vecellio drew in the Renaissance tradition. Lapps, Finns, and Biarmi were
isolated from their human and natural environment and set inside single frames
decorated with grotesques that domesticated their wild appearance into the
canons of classical and Italian visual traditions. Following the suggestions of
recent postcolonial critics, I argue that Vecellio put on display the peoples of the
Scandinavian Arctic, both othering them and Westernizing them. In so doing, he
introduced the costumes of the unknown inhabitants of Scandinavia to the
readership in Southern Europe.
It took Vecellio eight years to select, draw, engrave, and print the new images
that he derived from Olaus. He assembled them with the costumes from
Sweden, Muscovy, and the Baltic islands which he had already included in
the first edition. He also elaborated some of Olaus’ prints into imaginative and
appealing plates that the Venetian printer Giunti probably cherished (Del Puppo,
2011). Through these complex intellectual choices that shaped the new book VI,
the clothing of the new world within Europe was selected, reinterpreted, inte-
grated, and given visual continuity within the Habiti as a global project.

Material Culture and Everyday Life

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

In the following pages, the texts and images of the two works by Olaus Magnus
and Cesare Vecellio are compared for the first time, focussing on the latter’s
selection and transformation of the original source and on the new meanings the
images acquired, migrating, as it were, from an encyclopedic ethnography of
peoples and their physical environment to a costume book.
Material culture and everyday life figure prominently in the opening chapters
of the Historia. Olaus introduces the reader to northern Finland and its inhabit-
ants, who walk at great speed because they wear ‘flat long wooden shoes with
their points arched upwards’ made according to men and women’s heights
(Olaus Magnus, 1561, I, III: 4). Figure 1 shows three hunters on skis with a
dog in pursuit of a reindeer and a wolf. Two tents suggest the nomadic life of the
population and fur clothing is also enhanced.
Vecellio repeats the text, adding a synthetic description of men and women
‘used to hunting all sorts of wild animals across mountains and cliffs dressed in
the furs of bears, wolves and other animals. That’s what they mainly live off’
 14 The Renaissance

Figure 1 Olaus Magnus, Historia (1565) Man and woman from Finland5

(Vecellio, 1598: 295). In the Habiti, a woodblock print pictures a couple: the
man and the woman are dressed in fur and wear long skis (Figure 2). Vecellio
eliminated the third hunter, the dog, the wild animals, and the tents. As in the
original, the couple is shown hunting with bow and arrow in a simplified, barren
landscape of rocks and snow. All reference to nomadism is lost.
The Venetian artist added another plate on the clothing of the Finns (Figure 3)
with a short text emphasizing the great physical strength, simple dress, and the
equality between the genders. ‘These sorts of men and women are trained to
hunt in childhood and to face all sorts of strenuous endeavors. They dress in fur
and their arms are wrapped in deerskin. They carry a stick that helps them to go
into deep valleys and cliffs pursuing all sorts of animals’ (Vecellio, 1598: 296).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The text and image epitomize the long descriptions in the Historia and make
them easily accessible for readers.
Darkness was one of the key features of the Nordic climate that authors insisted
upon. The enduring night of the long winter months fills Olaus’ narrative and
communicates fright and loss to the reader. Olaus delves into dark forests, night
battles, and voyages. Chapter XIV in book II is dedicated to night travels. In it,
Olaus pictures a man travelling during the night and using the mushrooms
growing on the rotten bark of oak trees to produce light, just like fireflies – also
in the vignette – do in summer (Olaus Magnus, 1565, II, XIV: 46) (Figure 4).
Vecellio repeats the image under the heading Northern men travelling
(Figure 5). He separates the man from the lively landscape of trees, river, fireflies,
and houses, but reproduces objects, dress, and posture and adds a short description

5
I have translated all captions from Italian in Olaus Magnus, Historia delle genti et della natura
delle cose settentrionali (1565) and Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo
(1598).
 The World in Dress 15
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 2 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Man and woman from Scrifinia.
The Berenson Library, Villa I Tatti

of the traveller’s dress: ‘made of heavy cloth with deerskin trousers. He wears a fur
hat with a very long visor. During such travels, they carry an axe, a crossbow, and
arrows’ (Vecellio, 1598: 292). The visual narrative of the original source is lost.
The bark of trees was also used in domestic settings, to shed light on everyday
tasks. ‘At home they use candles of pine wood that are naturally full of resin,’
comments Olaus. ‘They keep a handful of such candles tied to the waist and, if their
hands are busy, they carry a lit one in their mouth’ (Olaus Magnus, 1561, II, XV: 47)
(Figure 6).
The plate shows a man and a woman at home with torches in their mouths so
as to keep their hands free. The room, possibly a kitchen, has a fireplace and
windows. The man seems to be coming in from outside, and he is carrying a jug
 16 The Renaissance
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 3 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) The clothing of Scrifinia. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti

and a basket. The woman holds a spindle and has pinewood candles tied to her
belt. A dog sleeping in the background highlights the cosy domestic setting.
Vecellio uses the image and the text in his print on Women from the north (Figure
7). He isolates the woman both from the domestic setting and from the man and
adds a commentary suggesting to Venetian readers that women who are busy with
the spindle and who carry their own wooden candles do not come from the élite:

In the North, women from the lower orders usually carry some wooden sticks
tied to their belts. They burn like candles as one can see in the portrait. Their dress
is long, of thick cloth, and they wear an apron from which hangs a small bag with
needles. On their heads they wear the linen that they spin outdoors. In their
mouths they carry a wooden candle that makes light. (Vecellio, 1598: 290)
 The World in Dress 17

Figure 4 Olaus Magnus, Historia (1565) Journeys in darkness

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 5 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Northern men travelling. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti
 18 The Renaissance

Figure 6 Olaus Magnus, Historia (1565) About lighting and torches

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 7 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Women from the north. Berenson
Library, Villa I Tatti
 The World in Dress 19

The print of the woman from the north shows how the artist selected the
image, isolating it from the original context and transforming it into a framed
portrait. The plate thus fitted the layout of the costume book, where attention to
dress both as a signifier and as a signified is the key. Vecellio assumes the
clothing from the original and then describes it in the accompanying text. His
gaze captures posture and gestures, as well as the texture and materiality of
leather, fur, and cloth that seem to be mostly colourless.
Two powerful imaginary portraits inspired by Olaus picture the man and
woman from Biarmia, in the north-east of Finland, close to the Arctic pole
(Figures 8 and 9). ‘The night is six months long and so is the day in summer,’
Vecellio comments, describing the man’s fur, skis, and heavy hat that covers his
ears. He carries a saber, crossbow, and lance. His figure is imposing in contrast
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 8 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Man from Biarmia. Berenson Library,
Villa I Tatti
 20 The Renaissance
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 9 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Woman from Biarmia. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti

to the descriptions found in other sixteenth-century tracts which mention the

short height of these people (Botero, 2015, 1: 202).
Dynamically placed on the edge of a cliff and ready to shoot, ‘women from
Biarmia’ – writes Vecellio – ‘just like their men, enjoy fishing and hunting.
They are monstruous and engage in sorcery and magic. They dress in fur and
leather, and they wear a pair of ornamental horns on their hat. They are skilled
archers. Their stockings and shoes are like those of their men’ (Vecellio, 1598:
294). In book III, Olaus dedicates a long description to divination and magic
among Finns, Laps, and Biarmi. Deep in trance, their shamans fall to the ground
and cast spells to fight faraway enemies whose strength is thus drained from
their bodies. Among these peoples, women practise sorcery and black magic
using their everyday pots and pans to prepare magic concoctions, boiling herbs,
 The World in Dress 21

mushrooms, worms, and guts. They thus attract who they want, but they also
make people sick and die. They look wild and go hunting and are often better
hunters than the men. They also catch many sorts of birds and use the most
tender feathers for their beds. The tougher feathers are used to construct
handlooms. With feathers, they also make hats, caps, and head ornaments
(Olaus Magnus, 1561, III, XIV: 96; IV, XII: 126–7).
Vecellio includes an imaginary portrait of a man from Lapland: his hat,
leggings, and coat down to his knees are made of precious furs; he holds a
bow and arrow in his hands (Figure 10). His feet are strangely naked. ‘Not all
wear precious furs and some dress in heavy cloth according to their status’
(Vecellio, 1598: 297).
In contrast to what Olaus writes about these Arctic nomads who wear
precious furs out of need and not vanity (Olaus Magnus, 1561, III, XIV:
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Figure 10 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) The clothing of Lapps. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti
 22 The Renaissance

114), the Venetian artist underlines the social differences highlighted by

clothing. Furs were a marker of status and a sign of luxury in Europe and
beyond, and sumptuary laws prohibited men and women, except for courtiers,
from wearing the furs mentioned in the book on northern clothing. The
appropriation and resignification of the image addressed Venetian readers
who were well aware of such regulations and identified fur with luxury and
not with the need to protect oneself from the harsh climate of the Scandinavian
peninsula.

Christianization and Marriage

Precious furs also decorated bridal costumes, and marriage is a central feature of
the Historia. In Olaus Magnus’ view, Catholic marriage – instituted by the
decrees of the Council of Trent – as a bulwark against Protestantism, Russian
Orthodox Christianity, and idolatry – was the key for the assimilation of
Scandinavia to civilization. In the first Habiti (1590), Vecellio had quoted
detailed passages from the Scandinavian wedding ceremonies among the
lower orders, repeating Olaus’ painstaking description of the careful choice of
a bride and bridegroom from Christian parents, the ritual performed in the
parish church with witnesses and the consensus of the young couple, the ring,
and the priest’s final blessing (Vecellio, 1598: 371–2). Outside the church, a
group of young men staged a charivari, a remnant of folk traditions. Olaus
described step by step the ceremonies of the wedding, leading to the priest
singing the hymn Veni creator spiritus before the marital bed. The following
day, the bride poured exquisite wine in silver goblets to signal she has ‘already
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

become a mother’ (Olaus Magnus, 1561, XIV, V: 341–3).

Vecellio added to this long passage a print picturing the Bride from
Livellandia derived from the Frenchman Jean Jacque Boissard’s costume
book (1581) as Olaus did not provide any suitable image and Vecellio had not
completed the northern costumes for his second edition. Eight years later, in
book VI of his global Habiti (1598) where Lapps and Biarmi play a prominent
role, the Venetian artist adds an imaginary portrait of a bride from Lapland
(Figure 11). ‘She wears the finest ermine and sable clothing and a leaf shaped
fur hat. The sleeves are large, and the shoes are long following the custom of the
country. Brides ride to their husband’s home on a reindeer and are in the
company of many people, depending on their noble status’ (Vecellio, 1598:
298). The text is brief and focusses on the dress. Only the reference to the bride
riding a reindeer comes from Olaus.
In contrast to Vecellio’s extremely synthetic text, Olaus provides a detailed
ethnography of the Lapps’ marriage customs, according to status and ethnicity.
 The World in Dress 23
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 11 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) The bride from Lapland. Berenson
Library, Villa I Tatti

Following the narrative pattern he used for Scandinavia, he dwells on the norms
regulating the selection of spouses, the marriage rituals, the payment of the
bride price, and the exchanges of gifts. The Christianization of Scandinavian
society was not uniform, and Olaus observed with great attention the syncretis-
tic practices, as well as the resistance to the adoption of the Catholic wedding.
The violent kidnapping of a virgin was still a wedding practice among the
peasant Muscovites, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, and Livonians, and, moving to
the north and the east, the areas in which Christianization – and therefore
civilization – did not occur became greater. The Lapps perform weddings
with fire produced by striking a stone with iron, because they believe that the
outward sign of the true union of man and wife is like that between fire and
stone, and ‘even the more civilized Christians in the north celebrate their
 24 The Renaissance

weddings with fire,’ he commented. After the celebration of the wedding with
the ritual of fire, the Lapps put the bride, dressed in ermine and sable furs, on
the back of a reindeer, and, in the company of many people according to the
nobility of her lineage, she rides to her husband’s home. The husband ‘wears
marten and lynx fur as if he dressed in the clothes of a Venetian gentleman, and
walks behind’ (Olaus Magnus, 1561, IV, VII: 119). The somewhat ironic
parallel between Laps and Venetians is quickly inverted as Olaus observes
that the value of Scandinavian furs is much higher than that of silk gowns and
golden chains, emphasizing the commercial opportunities offered by the
north’s natural resources. Fire is at the heart of Scandinavian ritual, and the
sacredness of light infuses Christian ceremonies: baptisms and funerals are
conducted by the light of torches brought into the church and blessed. After
giving birth, women also ‘go to Church with lit torches’ (Olaus Magnus, 1561,
IV, VII: 118–19).
Women play a dominant role in Olaus’ and Vecellio’ s representations of
northern peoples. Gender equality is a distinguishing feature of society in the
Arctic zone, where women are pictured hunting in the wilderness and living in
tents. Like the men, they fish, run on ice with their skis, and practise magic.
Beginning in late antiquity, this became a topos, as the devil supposedly resided
in the Far North and encouraged the spreading of sorcery, seducing women. In
opposition to the genderless pattern prevailing in the wild and its dehumanizing
effects, the Christian bride and mother pave the way to change, acting as
intermediaries in the civilizing process through the institution of Catholic
marriage and the formation of a Christian family.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Olaus insists on the difficulty of Christianizing people who live in forests far
away from churches and of baptizing their children.

[C]ompassionate [C]atholic priests preached the gospel to these wild people

and converted them to the Christian faith but it is impossible to convert all of
them because they are so isolated and far that they rarely can come to church.
However, those who become Christians obey their priests and their bishops
and manage to go to church once or twice a year to baptize their children.
They carry them in baskets that they tie to their backs where they also put the
precious furs they offer their priests in payment for their tithes.
(Olaus Magnus, 1565, IV, XVI: 131)

Figure 12 shows a couple from Lapland, both carrying two children on

their backs, distributed according to gender: the father brings two boys and
the mother two girls. The children are miniatures of their parents and wear
similar caps and hats. The couple has reached the end of the journey,
travelling on skis, and has arrived at the church. They are dressed in fur
and carry sticks.
 The World in Dress 25

Figure 12 Olaus Magnus, Historia (1565) On christening of children among

forest dwellers

Vecellio repeats from Olaus the text and woodcut, following the usual pattern
of isolating a single figure from the context and translating it into a portrait. He
eliminates the man and the church and focusses on the mother. The text also
describes only the mother carrying her children in a basket and points to the
‘extravagant’ hat shown in the image. The children in the basket are naked
(Vecellio, 1598: 299).
Both authors give ample space to women, stressing the tension between the
genderless social model prevailing in the Arctic wilderness and the gendered
Christian model of the wife and mother. Magnus viewed Christianization through
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Catholic marriage as the key to civilization in these largely unexplored lands and
Vecellio integrated this ideological approach into his costume book (Figure 13).
The choice of the Historia as the main source for picturing and integrating the
northern others was not a merely aesthetic one, nor was it neutral: Archbishop
Magnus provided hundreds of images because he was a Catholic and a militant
opponent of Protestant iconoclasm at the Council of Trent. His images were
therefore loaded with ideology, the same one Vecellio complied with as an artist.
As Sections 2 and 3 show, religion as a main component of difference and
identity on a global scale was crucial in shaping the representation of the costumes
and customs of the world, not only in Western albums, but also in the Turkish and
Japanese albums and books that are overviewed in the following pages.
 26 The Renaissance
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Figure 13 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Northern Christian woman. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti
 The World in Dress 27

2 The Ottoman Empire

An album with the drawings of costumes that Cristoforo Roncalli, Il
Pomarancio (1552–1626), made for his patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, at the
beginning of the seventeenth century is the starting point for Section 2. To date,
Pomarancio’s album has never been studied or published, and it is the point of
entry into the main questions this section addresses: the relation between
patrons and artists; and the sources, meaning, functions, and connections of
albums and costume books.
Expanding into a broader framework, the analysis turns to the circulation of
albums and books beyond Europe, across the Ottoman Empire and its multi-
ethnic and multireligious visual and textual traditions. Plates depicting the
clothing of men and women in two colonial contexts – the island of Chios and
the Stato da Mar, Venice’s eastern Mediterranean dominions – point to the
visual agency of Latin and Orthodox Christian minorities among Islamic
populations, outlining the importance of dress as a marker of ethnicity, lan-
guage, religion, and status.
The section then explores the making of costume albums in the Ottoman
Empire, mostly in Istanbul from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. It
outlines the changing art markets targeting a European and Ottoman clientele
and the hybrid visual juxtapositions that the format of costume albums dissem-
inated. The album with its experimental layout underlines cross-cultural inter-
action and connections among urban centres and new consumers. Its parallel
developments in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Far East point to a
changing consciousness of space and spatial relations in the early modern era,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

highlighting several questions that relate to early modern globalization.

A Painter, His Patron, and an Album of Drawings

Cristoforo Roncalli, whose nickname was Il Pomarancio – from Pomarance, a
town close to Pisa, where he was born – was an important proto-baroque painter
(Ambrosini Massari, 2017). He made a ‘book of clothes from different nations’
comprising 106 black-and-white watercolour drawings while travelling with his
patron, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637), across the north of
Europe in 1606. The manuscript frontispiece introduces the reader to the layout
of the drawings: ‘On each page he designed figures dressed in the different
clothes he saw in different countries with an incredible intelligence and ease’
(Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe [GDS], Roncalli Cristofano, Disegni di
Figura dal 2968 al 3062, Frontispiece).6 During the trip, the artist also made
6
The frontispiece bears the following title: Cristoforo Roncalli delle Pomarance, ‘Libro d’abiti di
diverse nazioni’. The album measures 36 x 25 cm.
 28 The Renaissance

other sketches, ‘to remember landscapes and various things’, but his drawings
of buildings and landscapes are lost – only the costume album survives
(Chiappini di Sorio, 1983).
Pomarancio was active in Rome, in the papal entourage, and in central Italy.
He was president and then rector of the important Accademia di San Luca de i
Pittori e Scultori di Roma (Saint Luke Academy of Painters and Sculptors in
Rome). His patron, Vincenzo Giustiniani, a wealthy banker, art theoretician,
and owner of one of the most remarkable collections of ancient and modern art –
in his Roman palazzo, he displayed thirteen Caravaggios – met Pomarancio in
Osimo (Feci, Bortolotti, and Bruni, 2001). The artist had signed a contract to
decorate the cupola of the local duomo and had started to work on the frescoes
(Haskell, 1980: 29–30; Chiappini di Sorio, 1983). Giustiniani was getting ready
to leave for a long trip across Northern Europe and invited Pomarancio to join
the convoy: he would make drawings of the most remarkable sites, architec-
tures, and landscapes, and discuss the private collections and pictures they
visited. Preparing to head to Venice and then across the Alps to the north,
Giustiniani offered the artist complete travelling equipment, including a horse
and suitable clothing. On his return from this long and rather unusual grand tour,
Giustiniani ‘had the broadest and most deeply experienced artistic culture of
any man in Rome and indeed Europe – with the single exception of Rubens’
(Haskell, 1980: 30).
Giustiniani’s secretary and friend Bernardo Bizoni was part of the convoy,
and he recorded in a diary the most distinguished and colourful events of the
voyage, which lasted five months (Bizoni, 1942). The trip – from Italy across
Germany and the Low Countries to London and back across France – took place
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during a crucial period with mounting religious tensions, dynastic rivalries, and
war. Leaving Italy, the caravan travelled across Bavaria, Franconia, Baden
Wurttemberg, and Rhineland Palatinate, stopping in cities and at courts, and
meeting with networks of Italian merchants, Jesuits, bishops, diplomats, local
rulers, and German nobles.
The first forty-nine watercolour drawings in Pomarancio’s costume album
offer an exclusively male representation of the German imperial political,
military, and social hierarchies, partly along the lines of Renaissance icono-
graphic conventions, starting with the emperor ‘of the Romans’, secular and
religious electors, nobles, and city burghers, all with their coat of arms. Each
page includes a figure set inside a simple frame with a caption in Italian; what is
unique is how Pomarancio used the German princes to demonstrate regional
fashions. Did his watercolour drawings portray some of the men the travellers
met in the imperial lands? They do not match any of the circulating images on
Germany in costume books, such as those by Weigel, Vecellio, De Bruyn, and
 The World in Dress 29

Boissard. In sharp contrast to the latter, which represent women, workers, and
peasants, Pomarancio’s sketches offer an unusual and original view of male
political power. Therefore, the drawings very likely mirror portraits from life
and are connected to the experience of travelling with his patron across German
lands.
Quite surprisingly, the second part of the album displays fifty-seven male and
female costumes figuring the political, social, and religious hierarchies of the
Ottoman Empire. Pomarancio had never travelled there, and the five-month
grand tour did not include the Balkan regions, the eastern Mediterranean, or
Istanbul. Indeed, these drawings and their captions are entirely copied from the
second edition – printed in Venice (1580) – of Nicolas de Nicolay’s (1517–83)
bestselling Les Quatre premiers livres de Navigations et Peregrinations. Printed
in Lyon in 1567–8, it includes text and images by the French geographer who
travelled to Istanbul on a diplomatic mission in 1551. Nicolay’s subject position
as a first-hand observer and direct witness of what he described and portrayed
explains the extraordinary success of Navigations, which offered one of the
earliest and most accurate depictions of the Ottoman world to be published in
Europe, with sixty engravings by Louis Danet, based on Nicolay’s original
drawings (Brafman, 2009: 153–60). The book was reissued and translated in
Italian, Dutch, English, and German (Mukerji, 2013: 151–69). It had a long-
lasting influence on European costume books and albums, shaping Western
views of the Levant up to the nineteenth century.7 Within this important
European circulation of images in albums and books, Pomarancio’s drawings
introduce us to an authored and dated manuscript for which we know the
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context of production and the dedicatee. This rare opportunity allows us to

ask a very precise question: why did Vincenzo Giustiniani ask Pomarancio to
make him a copy of the 1580 Venetian edition of Nicolay’s book, the most
complete edition? This edition, translated into Italian, added seven previously
unpublished illustrations and displayed some of the first information on ethnic
costumes of men and women in the Ottoman Empire.

7
Francois Desprez, in Recueil de la diversité des habits (1567), reproduced two similar engravings,
and Abraham de Bruyn, in Omnium pene Europae, Asiae, Aphricae atque Americae gentium
habitus (1581), traced all of Nicolay’s engravings. In Italy, Pietro Bertelli and Cesare Vecellio
borrowed extensively from Nicolay. The prints in Navigations appeared in private costume
albums, as in the anonymous one (1587) stored today in the L. A. Mayer Library in Jerusalem
and in the beautifully coloured album Théatre de tous le peuples et nations de la terre, avec leurs
habits et ornéments divers tant anciens que modernes by the Flemish painter Lucas de Heere
(1534–84).
 30 The Renaissance

Chios, a Genoese Colony

To answer these questions, we must take a step back into Vincenzo Giustiniani’s
‘somewhat marginal position in Roman society’, and into the origins of the
Giustiniani family and fortune in the Genoese colonies of the eastern
Mediterranean (Haskell, 1980: 95). This takes us to the Aegean island of Chios,
in the Greek archipelago, then under Ottoman rule, where the Giustinianis ruled
for two centuries. Vincenzo was born in Chios, where different Giustiniani
branches, beginning in 1362, united in a business partnership – a maona – for
the production, export, and sale of mastic throughout the Mediterranean and Asia,
in a regime of monopoly and of rigid regulation of the local Greek workforce
(agricultural labourers were sentenced to death if they were caught harvesting
mastic beyond the maona’s control). Chios under the Giustinianis’ rule was also a
safe harbour for fugitive Christian prisoners and slaves.
In 1566, when Vincenzo was only two years old, the Turks took over the island,
sacked and massacred the population, and turned the churches into mosques. One
of the most tragic events recorded was the capture of eighteen Giustiniani
children, who were taken to Istanbul and, refusing to convert to Islam, tortured
and put to death.8 The Giustinianis dispersed across the Mediterranean. Vincenzo
managed to reach his father, Giuseppe, and older brother, Benedetto, in Rome,
where the family took refuge owing to the protection of a maternal uncle who was
a cardinal. In a few years, Giuseppe Giustiniani became one of the wealthiest
bankers in Rome, and Benedetto was named cardinal.
Fifteen years before these tragic events – on 10 September 1551 – Nicolas de
Nicolay arrived in Chios with the retinue of the French ambassador Gabriel
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d’Aramon. Due to a gathering storm, the convoy could not sail immediately to
Istanbul and remained on the island for a few days. This allowed Nicolay to
observe, describe, and talk to the local inhabitants of different ethnic groups –
Greek, Genoese, and a large community of Jews. Nicolay provided a long and
detailed description of the island’s landscape and of the city of Chios, its
buildings, churches, streets, and harbour. Young and married women wearing
velvet, damask, and silk were ‘so naturally attractive both in looks, manner and
conversation that they are more like nymphs and goddesses than mortals’
(Nicolay, 1580: 38). He also included two prints of women from Chios, drawn
from real life – the young woman and the married one (Figures 14 and 15) – which
Pomarancio copied (Figures 16 and 17).

8
The memory of the Giustiniani massacre lingered in the public memory, and, in 1713, the
Neapolitan painter Francesco Solimena (1657–1747) prepared three large sketches of the
‘Massacro dei Giustiniani a Scio’ for the frescoes decorating the Sala del Minor Consiglio in
Genoa – destroyed in a fire in 1777.
 The World in Dress 31
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Figure 14 Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigazioni e viaggi (1580) Young woman from

Chios. Printed with the permission of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali/
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. No additional reproductions of this
image are permitted.

In his book, Nicolay dwells on the seasonal production of mastic from mastic
trees in the hands of local agricultural labourers under the supervision of four
Signori Giustiniani, each with his staff responsible for exporting mastic to one
of four different markets: Greece; Italy, Spain, France, and Germany; Turkey;
and Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. He talks to the locals and gives entertaining
information on plants and animals. He discusses the political government of the
republic, which belongs to the ‘Maona which assembles the first gentlemen of
the noble house of the Giustiniani of the Genoese nation’ (Nicolay, 1580: 37).
 32 The Renaissance
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Figure 15 Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigazioni e viaggi (1580) Woman from the

island of Chios Printed with the permission of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali/
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. No additional reproductions of this
image are permitted.

During the few days spent on the island, Nicolay met Giuseppe Giustiniani,
father of Vincenzo and consul of France, Venice, and Ragusa, who brought gifts
to the French ambassador and greeted the guests.
The French geographer visited Chios when Vincenzo Giustiniani was still
living on the island ruled by his family, fifteen years before its seizure in 1566,
and Navigations was printed one year after its fall.9 This first-hand account of

9
The French naturalist Pierre Belon also visited Chios when it was still a Genoese colony. His
Observations de plusieurs singularités & choses mémorables, trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée,
 The World in Dress 33

Figure 16 Pomarancio, Disegni di figura, Young woman from the island of

Chios. Courtesy of the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Uffizi, Florence

Chios before it was conquered by the Ottomans describes the land as a sort of
earthly paradise from which the Giustiniani family came and where Vincenzo
was born. The feeling of belonging to both the Aegean island and Genoa was
part of what Haskell defined as Vincenzo’s ‘somewhat marginal position in
Roman society’, his being perceived as a foreigner. In his palace in Bassano di
Sutri, renovated after he received the title of marchese from the pope in 1605,
the large entrance hall is decorated with a fresco depicting the island of Chios
and Genoa facing one another. Guests entering the palace were immediately
reminded that their host was born in the Ottoman Empire in a colony of the
Genoese republic (Strunck, 2003: 147–92).

Egypte, Arabie & autres pays étranges was printed in 1555. The description of Chios has no
images.
 34 The Renaissance

Figure 17 Pomarancio, Disegni di figura, Woman from the island of Chios.

Courtesy of the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi,
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Florence

At the request of his patron, Pomarancio made a copy of Nicolay’s illustra-

tions for what probably was a personal album of memories. This adds a more
intimate and emotional meaning to the wider European circulation of
Navigations and to the extensive copying of the engravings in Northern
European costume books and albums. It also adds Rome, with its artistic
patronage and its new élites migrating into the city from the Christian diaspora
across the Mediterranean, as a peculiar context enlarging the traditional view of
Venice as the main Italian porta d’Oriente, where engravings of exotic cos-
tumes were mostly printed and circulated. For Vincenzo Giustiniani,
Pomarancio’s drawings after Nicolay’s engravings probably revived memories
of family traditions and perhaps nostalgia for a historical past prior to 1566,
which still reverberated in the topography of the Bassano di Sutri frescoes.
The making of Pomarancio’s album of costumes highlights some distinguish-
ing features of this genre: it was a movable and flexible visual medium, partly
 The World in Dress 35

picturing first- hand direct experience, partly reproducing images that circulated
in a well-known printed book (Frazer, 2020). The agency of the patron was of
crucial importance for the artist, who assembled the materiality and content,
customizing it to the taste of the collector. Pomarancio juxtaposed his original
drawings of German nobles in regional costumes to those traced from Nicolay’s
Navigations and created Vincenzo Giustiniani’s unique album shaped by the
experience of travel and the memory of migration. Moving from Pomarancio’s
reproduction of Nicolas de Nicolay’s plates, the following pages expand into the
vast European circulation of Nicolay’s icons, paying special attention to the role
of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire.

Contact Zones and Christian Minorities

Nicolay’s work needs to be set within the dense intellectual, commercial, and
political exchanges between the Ottoman world and Europe that prepared the
production of the new geographies of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
(Manners, 2007). Probably sent by the king of France, Charles IX, to study
fortifications, Nicolay travelled to Constantinople between July 1551 and July
1552, and, after his return to France, he was named ‘géographe ordinaire du
Rois’. His figures became archetypes and were reproduced in at least eight costume
books published before 1601 (Wilson, 2007: 110). They provided the basis for most
of the Turkish costumes in Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi e moderni (1590),
discussed in the following paragraphs. With its important European diffusion,
Navigations originated an orientalizing process, which rapidly produced a selective
aesthetic, a peculiar taste for certain images, clothes, and gestures that spread and
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consolidated a Western European imagery of the multi-ethnic and multireligious

structure of the Ottoman Empire (Guérin Dalle Mese, 1998: 53–115; Wilson, 2007).
A handful of plates picturing Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire –
the slave élite of men and women from non-Muslim backgrounds, trained in the
military corps of the Janissaries and inside the harem as concubines – were
particularly meaningful for Venetian artists (Peirce, 1993; Pedani, 2010;
Masters, 2016). Nicolay relied on two contemporary authors claiming a direct
experience of the inner workings of the Ottoman court owing to their upbringing
as Christian slaves in the Serail. He copied text from these two Venetians,
Giuseppe Bassano and Antonio Menavino (Bassano, 1545; Menavino, 1548),
both of whom had been kidnapped and enslaved. Nicolay was assisted by a
eunuch from Ragusa, Zaferaga, who had been trained since his early youth in
the Serail. ‘As soon as he understood my desire to draw the costumes of the
women, Zaferaga had two Turkish prostitutes (femmes publiques) dress up for
me with very rich clothes that he sent for from the market, the bezestan, where
 36 The Renaissance
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Figure 18 Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigazioni e viaggi (1580) Turkish Lady at

home, i.e. in the Serail. Printed with the permission of the Ministero dei Beni
Culturali/Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze. No additional reproductions
of this image are permitted.

one can buy any kind of attire. They are the women I portrayed in the following
drawings’ (Nicolay, 1989: 129). Figures 18 and 19 portray such women.
The gaze of the Ragousan eunuch, his choice of women, and ornaments are
therefore a constitutive feature of Nicolay’s perception and representation of the
female slave élite in the sultan’s harem. Its inaccessibility produced a staging of
identities where camouflage and mimicry are the main components of the visual
experience. Nicolay’s attention, shaped by Zaferaga’s interpretation and cul-
tural mediation, focussed on appearances, language, and religion. The plates
had wide circulation with their two prints of the azamoglans, the Christian male
 The World in Dress 37
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Figure 19 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Turkish woman. Berenson Library,

Villa I Tatti

children sent as a tribute to the Sublime Porte – that is, the central government –
from the peasant households of the continental European parts of the empire,
mainly the Balkans (Figure 20).
Nicolay entertained readers with anecdotes that enriched his plates with first-
hand accounts. In Adrianople, when accompanying Ambassador d’Aramon to
the house of the local pasha, the first visir of the empire, Nicolay saw a delly – a
blustering warrior scorning wounds and death as an unpaid irregular troop of
Serbian origin in the Turkish army (Figure 21). Offering the delly some money,
Nicolay invited him to the ambassador’s lodgings, where he drew the delly’s
portrait featuring his strange costume. A few days later, as the army was moving
 38 The Renaissance
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Figure 20 Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigazioni e viaggi (1580) Azamoglan. Printed

with the permission of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali/Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, Firenze. No additional reproductions of this image are permitted.

to Transylvania, Nicolay saw the delly riding a handsome Turkish horse that
was ‘envelopped in the whole skin of a huge lion whose front paws were
attached to the horse’s neck and the other were hanging on the back’
(Nicolay, 1989: 227). Turning to an interpreter, Nicolay asked the delly about
his religion and origin: the delly answered he came from Serbia and was born a
Christian but dissimulated his faith behind Islamic practice. He then pro-
nounced in Greek and in ‘sclavonic’ language the Christian Sunday prayers.
When asked why he dressed so strangely with huge wings, he said it was to
 The World in Dress 39
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Figure 21 Nicolas de Nicolay, Navigazioni e viaggi 1580, Delly. Printed with

the permission of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali/Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, Firenze. No additional reproductions of this image are permitted.

appear more furious and terrifying when facing the enemy (Nicolay, 1989:
227).10 The delly became iconic in European costume books.

Gentlewomen and Dalmatine in Venetian Outposts

and Territories
Christian minorities mainly came from the European lands of the Ottoman
Empire. The following pages focus on the Balkans, a geopolitical region
10
Melchior Lorck, the Danish-German artist who served as a member of the imperial embassy
between 1555 and 1559 under the leadership of Ambassador Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, made a
fine engraving of the delly (Fischer, 2009; Busbecq, 2010).
 40 The Renaissance

under-researched in most studies of early modern Europe. These sections of

Nicolay’s work (books III and IV) were particularly important for Venetian
artists, given that some of the Balkan territories were part of the Venetian
overseas colonies where the Ottoman and European worlds overlapped. For a
more nuanced understanding of these contact zones, avoiding the traditional
clear-cut opposition between East and West, we can focus on the fluid identities
of Christians moving across languages and religions on the frontiers between
the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian Stato da Mar, and the Habsburg Empire
(Todorova, 1997; Greene, 2000; Woolf, 2002; Rothman, 2012a).
Tracing the representation of costumes and customs from the Balkan peninsula
in sixteenth-century Europe requires a constant crossing of borders between the
contested and changing territories of three empires of different dimensions.
Though Venice lost a considerable number of territories to the Ottomans, most
notably Cyprus in 1571, it retained control of the overseas lands comprising
Dalmatia, the Adriatic and Ionian islands, Morea (the Peloponnesus), and Candia
(Crete). Durazzo and Split became the main commercial ports of the eastern trade.
The Habsburg Empire controlled the northern part of the area, which included the
southern Austrian regions of Carinthia, Carniola, and Trieste, as well as the
kingdom of Hungary, comprising a part of Croatia and Zagreb. The Balkan
peninsula, largely under Ottoman rule, was the route from Venice to Istanbul,
which, from the Asian side, brought silk and spices to Venice, along with
immigrants from Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire.
The clothed bodies of men and women from these regions appear in scattered
images situated within the Hungarian kingdom, the Ottoman and Habsburg
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Empires, the independent city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and the Venetian
overseas colonies. A transcultural and trans-regional approach implies crossing
religious and ethnic borders in constant tension in the age of the Counter-
Reformation: Latin and Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Captives, fugi-
tives, slaves, and converts were part of broad networks of communication, informa-
tion, exchange, and trade across the Mediterranean. Representing Balkan dress
therefore means locating ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities inside large-
scale competing political entities where bodies and attire were often sites of
camouflaged and ambivalent identities and where minorities marked their traditions
mostly through ritual and the costumes of women (Born, 2011; Calvi, 2011).
In Italy, there probably was no other printed image of Balkan clothing before
Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi e moderni (1590).11 The Venetian artist broke the

11
Earlier costume books copied Nicolay’s prints. A few were published in 1568 by Ferdinando
Bertelli portraying Hungarians and ‘Sclavonians’.The first drawings of the costumes of the
inhabitants of Ragusa are in Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum Nationum Habitus (Padua, 1589). In
Northern Europe, the Flemish engraver De Bruyn, in the first edition of his Omnium pene
 The World in Dress 41

unchallenged visual monopoly surrounding Nicolay’s images. This decision

was especially significant in view of the artist’s subject position that situated his
gaze within the interests of the Venetian overseas colonies. Vecellio distributed
his illustrations of Balkan costumes differently in the two editions of Habiti
antichi e moderni. In the first, he included eight images of Hungarian, Croatian,
and Dalmatian clothing in the broad region of Helvetia, which comprised also
Prussia, the Low Countries, Poland, and Russia. In the 1598 edition, he grouped
them in book IX under the title Habiti d’Ungheria [Hungarian Clothing] and
added the prince of Transylvania. Book IX thus displays nine plates – six male
and three female figures. Habiti d’Ungheria belongs to territories not defined in
terms of a distinct geographic and cultural unit, but rather as a fragmented set of
lands divided between different political and religious systems, including both
Christian and Islamic lands. Contemporary maps printed in Venice, namely
those by the official geographer of the republic, Giacomo Gastaldi, represented
the area along the same coordinates. In line with the prevailing intellectual trend
in sixteenth-century Venetian political and historical writings (Valensi, 1987,
1990), Vecellio’s text does not draw a line which separates Catholicism from
Orthodox Christianity and Islam but insists on including these religious groups
within Europe and the colonial interests of Venice. Compared to other costume
books of the same period, such as those by Boissard, De Bruyn, and Bertelli,
where images from this area are scattered in a haphazard way or set within
Turkish, Armenian, Caramanic, and Greek costumes, Vecellio constructs a
coherent set of tables and texts on the Balkans. In 1598, he adds the prince of
Transylvania (presumably Sigismund Batory) in Western European armour.
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Introducing a clear hierarchical structure meant adjusting the Balkans to

Europe and the world, as religious and secular rulers (the doge, the pope, the
emperor, and all European and non-Western kings and princes) inaugurate
Vecellio’s representation of the peoples of the four known parts of the world.
Colour is a distinguishing feature of these costumes in all social milieux. In
contrast to the prevailing black fashion spreading from Spain throughout
Western Europe, Croats and Hungarians dress in colourful patterns with a
taste for red (Figure 22). ‘Hungarian men wear long garments especially in
red. All of them wear buttons fastened with braided trim, some of silk mixed
with gold and some of crystal’ (Vecellio, 1598: 410; Rosenthal and Jones, 2008:
245). They are warlike people and that’s why they wear high arched shoes with

Europae, Asiae, Aphricae, Americae gentium habitus (Antwerp, 1581), had already reproduced
two images from Nicolay’s Livres – the Tabellarius ragusanus and Mercator ragusanus – that,
with the Macedonian woman, became iconic throughout Europe. In France, Jean Jacques
Boissard, in his Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium (Paris, 1581), pictured an Albanian, a man
from Ragusa, and the woman from Macedonia
 42 The Renaissance
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Figure 22 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Man from Croatia. Berenson Library,
Villa I Tatti

soles of iron. The emphasis on natural warlike attitudes will be endlessly

repeated in travel journals up to the nineteenth century. A loose society of
aggressive men, which in the eighteenth century will be increasingly connected
to the lack of civilization (Woolf, 2002), is gradually essentialized in Vecellio’s
text through a set of predominantly male portraits. They are Catholic and pious,
bearing arms and hard-working.
Vecellio’s gaze and point of view is that of a Venetian describing and drawing
costumes that are part of the Stato da Mar. These are the lands that bred soldiers
for the army and the navy of the republic, and the approach is biased by the
rationale of colonial discourse: Dalmatians in the service of Venice are devout
 The World in Dress 43
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Figure 23 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Gentlewomen in Venetian outposts.

Berenson Library, Villa I Tatti

Christians fighting for the true faith in the Mediterranean. Venetian rule over
Dalmatia is pictured in the costumes of ‘Gentlewomen in Venetian outposts and
Territories’, as well as in the simpler garb of the Dalmatine (Figures 23, 24, and
25). Local and Venetian women of the élite embody networks of alliance,
hierarchy, and ethnicity. Dress appears first and foremost as a cultural technol-
ogy of rule within what Bernard Cohn defines as a ‘theatre for state experimen-
tation’ (Cohn, 1996: XI).
The magnificence of dress is a gendered function of title and rank, and the
Venetian women of the ruling élite are the arbiters of fashion.
 44 The Renaissance
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Figure 24 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Man from Dalmatia. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti

The wives of gentlemen sent to govern other cities take on their husbands
titles and are called Podestaresse, Capitane and so on. Certain elegant
fashions are also named after these unusual titles, following decorum. For
this reason, these women dress very magnificently and wear many ornaments.
Their gowns are of different colours of brocade, silk, gold, and silver. They
dress their hair always blonde (by nature or by art), very richly with pearls and
other jewels. (Rosenthal and Jones, 2008: 135)

The sumptuous clothes of the podestaresse and capitane as well as those of

the local gentlewomen imitating Venetian fashion transgress the sumptuary
laws of the metropole and are an essential element in the constitution of
 The World in Dress 45
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Figure 25 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Woman from Dalmatia. Berenson

Library, Villa I Tatti

authority. As Cohn forcefully observes, clothes cannot be understood only as

metaphors of power and authority. In many contexts, ‘authority is literally part
of the body of those who possess it’ (Cohn, 1996: 114). Venetian women in
Dalmatia embody a powerful identification between dress and colonial rule.
In striking contrast to the stiff bodies and precious dresses of the ruling élite,
Vecellio pictures the local woman from Dalmatia in her colourful, simple, and
loose clothing (she wears no bodice). The ‘tall healthy and active’ Dalmatina
looks very graceful in her ghellero, a short ‘open and roomy garment of fine
wool or satin or damasco with half-length sleeves’ (Rosenthal and Jones,
2008: 347).
 46 The Renaissance
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Figure 26 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) Young woman from Ragusa. Berenson
Library, Villa I Tatti

Like their men, these women are very pious. Those living on the island of
Cres come to Venice every year for the feast of the Ascension, wearing head
veils of thin silk, long coloured woollen gowns, linen aprons, and thin
camicie without ruffles (Vecellio, 1598: 412–13; Rosenthal and Jones,
2008: 347–8).
The last table of Vecellio’s book IX pictures the young woman of the republic
of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) (Figure 26). She is a bride of the local nobility,
wearing the Venetian-styled black mantle buratto (Vecellio, 1598: 415;
Rosenthal and Jones, 2008: 350).
Picturing the young woman of Ragusa in a black cloak emphasized
Venetian influence, visible in the fashions adopted by the local patriciate
 The World in Dress 47

and citizenry that had close ties to the Venetian republic (Krekic, 1997;
Bertelli, 2004). The giovanetta ragusea expressed the point of view of the
Venetian artist, which was not neutral. He portrayed southern Slavs who kept
a Christian identity even when subject to the Ottomans and were connected
to Venice through war, migration, or social and political networks within a
semi-colonial or colonial relationship to the power of the Dominante (Arbel,
1996, 2013; Todorova, 1997). They liked to dress in a colourful way. The
women disliked black and bodices. The men wore golden and crystal buttons
and small hats lined with fur, and often carried scimitars and daggers. Their
style and choice of garments was common to many of the Slavs stretching
from Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia to Poland and Russia. Vecellio chose to
include them in a separate book where he did not reproduce Nicolay’s
engravings, but probably drew his models from direct visual experience
(Newton, 1988).

Ottoman Costume Albums

Analytic perspectives that focus on circulation and connection, rather than
influence and imitation, are crucial in bringing to light processes of cultural
translation across the Mediterranean (Gerritsen and Riello, 2015; Gurkan, 2015;
Frazer, 2020a). Recent research has emphasized the collaborative dimension of
such cultural exchanges that concentrate on diplomacy as a ‘trans-imperial’
contact zone for the production and communication of information and know-
ledge (Rothman 2009, 2012a, 2021; Um and Clarke, 2016). The following
pages address the contacts and exchanges between Western diplomats, travel-
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lers, and European and Ottoman artists, all of whom helped to shape the making
and collecting of Ottoman costume albums. The analytical emphasis is once
more on the flexible and mobile configuration of the albums, their often
anonymous origin, the agency of artists and patrons, and their displacement
across long-distance networks.
In Istanbul, Nicolas de Nicolay and Melchior Lorck worked in the diplomatic
milieu of the Sublime Porte. Ambassadors travelled with their own artists, who
spent a few years in the Ottoman Empire, drawing, engraving, travelling, and
portraying high officials and members of the court, women in and out of the
harem, rituals, processions, punishments, and festivities. The diplomatic milieu
was a crucial filter mediating and constructing textual and visual information for
the European public, particularly through Western costume and portrait books
(Wilson, 2007: 101).
 48 The Renaissance

Figure 27 Taeschner Album. The Venetian bailo’s house (Wikimedia Commons)

Diplomats and Travellers

Venetian ambassadors, baili, and European diplomats also collected costume
albums drawn by Ottoman artists, which are now in many libraries in Europe.
One of them is the Taeschner album, in the collection of the German orientalist
Franz Taeschner, who first published it in 1924 (Alt-Stambuler Hof-Und
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Volksleben, 1925).12 This seventeenth-century Turkish miniature album of

European origin measures 30 x 20 cm; on the front side of the fifty-five folios,
a miniature is pasted on each page, probably by a Turkish hand (Figure 27).
Taeschner translated into German the original Italian captions and argued that
the album was produced in the Venetian diplomatic milieu owing to the style of
some images and costumes, picturing the residence and garden of the Venetian
bailo, a carnival street parade and the Venetian cannoning of Tenedos, among
the portrait of Sultan Ahmed I and the high-ranking officials and staff of his
palace.
Taeschner believed that the themes of the images corresponded to the inter-
ests of the Europeans coming to Turkey, and he therefore thought that they were
done by a Turk and commissioned by a European, such as the Venetian bailo of
the time, who may have been the first owner of the album. These manuscript

12
The album was exposed in the year 1910 at the Munich Exhibition of Muslim Art. The original
album is lost.
 The World in Dress 49

collections of costumes were often attached to travel or diplomatic reports from

Turkey and pictured interesting details of oriental life (Taeschner, 1925,
Vorbemerkung).
The Taeschner album shows important stylistic similarities with the Cicogna
Codex, dating to the early 1660s and now housed in the Museo Civico Correr in
Venice, which Natalie Rothman has recently studied. The Codex highlights the role
of Italian, especially Venetian dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) in mediating
objects and texts and in translating practices across Ottoman and European spaces.
The manuscript was probably ‘assembled in the house of the Venetian bailo in
Istanbul through collaboration between a Venetian diplomat and his dragomans,
Ottoman miniaturists, and Italian draftsmen as a guidebook to Ottoman society’
(Rothman, 2012b: 43). The production of such albums, whether by local artists
connected to the court or active in the bazaar milieu in Istanbul, or by European
artists, points to a continuing cooperation between Ottomans and Europeans.
Situated in the context of Mediterranean diplomacy, the Taeschner and Cicogna
Codex were probably part of the same manuscript (Rothman, 2012b: 62).
Venice was a repository for such albums, initially produced by Western
artists in Istanbul in the European tradition of costume books and, beginning
in the seventeenth century, by Ottoman artists who appropriated these models,
re-signifying them through local traditions that pictured in a stylized manner a
rather fixed set of images featuring the sultan, the imperial court, and the city.
In contrast to the global breadth of costume books such as Vecellio’s Habiti,
albums produced in Istanbul repeated similar icon setting on stage, in a sort of
paper theatre, the court, and the city. They portrayed the military and religious
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hierarchies as well as the urban trades and types: women going to the bath,
janissaries, the eunuch, the sultana, the butcher, the cook, the street barber
(Wilson, 2007). As the following paragraphs show, these collections of cloth-
ing commissioned by diplomats, scholars, and travellers were understood as
guidebooks to the city and portable cabinets of curiosities.
From the early seventeenth century onwards, costume albums appealed to a
widening urban market of collectors and travellers, beyond diplomatic circles.
Describing his stay in Istanbul, Peter Mundy wrote in his Book of Travels, ‘For
the several habits used att Constantinople, where most officers and Nationes are
distinguished by their habits, I have a little booke . . . painted by the Turks
themselves in Anno 1618, although no great art therein, yet enough to satisfie
concerning that Matter.’ Decorative paper cuttings embellish the pages where
Mundy often wrote his lengthy comments (Mundy, 1907: 26–7; Collaco, 2017:
257–8; Kynan-Wilson, 2017) (Figure 28).
Europeans collected costume albums in Istanbul, not only for personal use and
entertainment, but also for the enjoyment of curious people back at home (Cardini,
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Figure 28 Peter Mundy, Young woman of rank, in A briefe relation of the Turckes, their kings, Emperors or Grandsigneurs,
their conquest, religion, customes, habits etc. Istanbul 1618 (The Trustees of the British Museum)
 The World in Dress 51

2001: 248). The Italian merchant Pietro della Valle in a letter from Constantinople
(1614) mentions that he has commissioned more than sixty images of ‘coloured
figures . . . in which all the diverse clothes of every sort, both of the men and
women of this city will be drawn from life’ for a friend back in Italy (Della Valle,
1989: 14). He will bind them in a book and write two- or three-line captions under
each figure. Mundy’s and Della Valle’s albums highlight the curator’s agency in the
choice and outlay of the pages. This was a crucial feature of the costume album as
was the selection of images: whether such drawings were to be considered ‘art’, as
Mundy suggests, was another matter. As we shall see in the following pages,
European collectors and publishers, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, altered and embellished images by non-Western painters, considering
them primitive and technically unskilled.
The widespread repetition of genres, scenes, and figures in manuscript
collections of clothing has led scholars to suggest a mass production in
Istanbul, in ateliers specializing in such miniatures for a broad clientele for
whom they provided a stock of characters that could be inscribed, framed, and
personalized to suit individual buyers. Further examples of the proliferation of the
same technique and models appear as late as the 1650s in the album collected by
Claes Rålamb, the Swedish ambassador to Istanbul (Collaço, 2017: 261).

The Rålamb Book of Costumes

The Rålambska dräktboken (The Rålamb Book of Costumes) was purchased by
Claes Rålamb (1622‒98) in Constantinople in 1657‒8, where King Charles X
Gustaf of Sweden sent him as an envoy to Sultan Mehmed IV’s court. It was the
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first Swedish embassy to the Sublime Porte and, while in Istanbul, Rålamb
commissioned twenty large paintings in oil on canvas, depicting a remarkably
detailed imperial procession that took place in September 1657. It included the
sultan, the grand vizier, and high-ranking officers and courtiers, and it ended
with cooks, gardeners, and water carriers painted in a stylized manner by a local
unidentified artist who probably used a set of pre-existing stereotyped models.
Indeed, the costumes and uniforms of the men correspond closely to some of the
images of the small costume book that the Swedish diplomat acquired in
Istanbul and is now in the Nordic Library in Stockholm (Adahl, 2006: 35). It
is a muraqqa, a type of picture album popular among collectors and usually put
together from several different sources. (Kondak, 2009). The muraqqa closely
resembles the German Stammbuch and the album amicorum, where travellers
and students in Europe gathered coats of arms, portraits, genre scenes, images
copied from costume books, small texts, and signatures from friends and
mentors (Wilson, 2005: 104–20; Rosenthal, 2007; Rublack, 2010: 221–9).
 52 The Renaissance

Figure 29 Rålamb album. An egg seller. Courtesy of the National Library of

Sweden.

Rålamb’s album contains 121 colorful miniature drawings of Turkish officials,

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people of various trades, different ethnic groups, and women (Figures 29–34).
The drawings are in India ink with gouache and some gilding. Most of the folios
have notes in Swedish, French, Italian, or Latin describing the miniature in
question as well as notes made by Rålamb himself. Recent scholarship has
suggested that the images by an anonymous artist in Istanbul were completed
by a Polish painter and, after the diplomat’s return home, by an anonymous local
artist in Sweden (Adahl, 2006: 39). Western stylistic techniques such as realism
and depth were embedded in the Ottoman miniature drawings of the album,
which includes a wider variety of ethnic types (Armenians, Jews, Greeks),
professions (women musicians), and trades than the Taeschner and Cicogna
manuscript collections of clothing. The following images illustrate this variety.
Folios of different sizes are bound together and display on each front a single
water-coloured, dressed figure on an empty background with multilingual cap-
tions set in a simple frame, in the tradition of European costume books.
The images communicate a keen attention to gestures, details, and accessories.
 The World in Dress 53

Figure 30 Rålamb album. A woman musician. Courtesy of the National Library

of Sweden.

Because of the asymmetric binding and the different sizes of the folios, each
figure shows details (heads, legs, feet) of the following image. The cumulative
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process which underscores the album is thus visible suggesting a personal selec-
tion of characters probably chosen by Rålamb himself.

Frederick Stibbert’s Costume Collection

A further to-date-unexplored northern circulation of some thirty images,
traced from the Taeschner, Cicogna, and Rålamb albums, is today in
Florence, in the Library of Frederick Stibbert, originally collected and
arranged at the end of the eighteenth century by Richard Bull, an English
landowner, politician, and keen collector of prints, drawings, and books on the
Isle of Wight.13 This extraordinary collection brings together, in colour, 2,922
prints and 631 drawings of ancient and modern costumes from all parts of the

13
A Series of Prints and Drawings Serving to Illustrate the Modes and Fashions of Ancient and
Modern Dresses in Different Parts of the World, 1792, vol. 1. The plates were inlaid by
Staggemier. The collection of costumes is displayed in seven red morocco-bound, large-folio
volumes.
 Figure 31 Rålamb album. A carrier of food for the Serail. Courtesy of the
National Library of Sweden.
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Figure 32 Rålamb album. Armenian woman. Courtesy of the National Library

of Sweden.
 Figure 33 Rålamb album. A Greek woman. Courtesy of the National Library of
Sweden.
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Figure 34 Rålamb album. A Citizen of Constantinople. Courtesy of the National

Library of Sweden.
 56 The Renaissance
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Figure 35 Florence. Stibbert Library. A Series of Prints and Drawings, vol. 1,

Turkish Costumes. Street vendors and trades

world (Figure 35). The six images on the same folio display a set of hand-
coloured vendors and trades: (from upper left corner) a carrier of wood; a
woman and child taking merchandise to the market; a man with a dog carrying
a spit; a broom seller; a water carrier. Richard Bull proceeded to Westernize
 The World in Dress 57

Figure 36 Stibbert Library, A bride

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the images, which were embellished with vivid watercolours and enhanced in
gold, displayed in groups of six on each folio, and listed in a table of contents.
Grouping the images thematically altered the narrative sequence of the albums
that pictured individual figures on a single sheet. Furthermore, the table of
contents introduced a scholarly angle to the collection that inevitably
Europeanized its internal organization.
The Turkish costumes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries display
hand-coloured images of the military and religious hierarchies, of minor court
personnel, women musicians, street vendors, and workers. They have captions in
Turkish, Arabic, and French, pointing to a non-Italian audience. Four prints
portray different types of punishments and tortures with gruesome details repeat-
ing those in the Taeschner album and Cicogna Codex.
Figures 36–49 show visual analogies between the Stibbert, Rålamb, and
Taeschner albums.
 58 The Renaissance
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Figure 37 Rålamb album, A bride. Courtesy of the National Library of Sweden

These thirteen images lend themselves to a comparative analysis. Types,

functions, and trades display ethnicity, gender, and status connected to court
and social hierarchies. The Stibbert collection of Turkish costumes exhibits
 The World in Dress 59
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Figure 38 Stibbert Library, A Turkish woman

more vivid colours and some golden heightening. Similar images (Figures 44,
45, 48, and 49) show different colours and slightly dissimilar gestures. Some
characters are presented from a left or a right angle and some figures have more
depth (Figures 42 and 43). They probably came from a pre-existing stock of
images from which buyers could choose.
Istanbul, Venice, Munster, Stockholm, the Isle of Wight, Florence: to what
extent did this circulation and copying of images alter their meaning? The
layout and display of the icons in the pages of the nineteenth-century
morocco-bound volume in the Stibbert Library selected and embellished a
few exotic-looking characters and scenes that appealed to the well-trained
orientalizing gaze of a collector in the age of Britain’s imperial domination. A
comparative reading of the albums highlights common features: captions in
different languages that reflect changing ownership and readers disseminated,
 60 The Renaissance

Figure 39 Rålamb album, A Turkish woman. Courtesy of the National Library

of Sweden
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

as it were, across visual contact zones over a long time span. This circulation
points to the popularity of the genre embedded in processes of cultural transla-
tion and reinterpretation.
The concluding section concentrates on the experimental format and the
mobility of costume albums in the eighteenth century and on the expanding
art market catering to a growing urban clientele beyond the Ottoman Empire.

Experimental and Hybrid Styles

Ottoman costume albums have been contextualized within an evolving time
frame: Western and Ottoman artists produced the albums for a European
clientele in Istanbul in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while Ottoman
upper-middle-class patrons in the eighteenth century bought albums from local
Ottoman artists (Schick, 2004). Western figurative conventions appealing to
European travellers and buyers joined with local visual culture in albums
produced in Istanbul. Portraying their society through the taxonomy of dress
 The World in Dress 61
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Figure 40 Stibbert Library, Punishment for sellers cheating on weight

and using Western models, in the seventeenth century, Ottoman artists delved
into social types and trades travellers might meet in the streets and started selling
their single sheets in the market, broadening their social spectrum beyond the
court. Picking up on a combination of ethnography, curiosity and iconic figures,
clothing and gestures, these albums became very popular not only among for-
eigners, but also beyond Istanbul. By the late eighteenth century, a mix of
experimental scenes decorated with Persian miniatures, Western (often Italian)
images, and elaborate Turkish bindings were circulating among new Ottoman
urban élites who collected ‘bazaar paintings alongside more valued forms of art
like calligraphy, as well as specimens from foreign lands and the Ottoman past,
giving albums a status akin to portable Kunstkammers’ (Collaco, 2018: 3).
Recent Ottomanist scholarship has questioned the prevailing Eurocentric
attribution of agency to Western patrons, artists, and clientele, in the selection
 62 The Renaissance

Figure 41 Rålamb album, Punishment for dishonest tradesmen. Courtesy of the

National Library of Sweden

and layout of the images, in the captions and comments often found in the
albums, even when employing local artists. Ottoman manuscripts display a
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broad range of styles and subject matter from Persianate calligraphic specimens
to figure studies inspired by European costume books. These complex visual
interconnections shed light on a wide circulation of artistic production and on
the collection of extravagantly illustrated albums in the Islamic world, among
the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals from the sixteenth century to the nine-
teenth. Some albums contained European engravings, which may have started
to feature in Islamic albums in the first half of the sixteenth century (Roxburgh,
2001). One of the albums contains Florentine prints datable to between 1460
and 1480; these seem to have been acquired during the reign of Mehmed II,
when close political, mercantile, and cultural exchanges between Florence and
the Ottomans were established. In the Safavid Empire, especially in the city of
Isfahan, making albums was widely practised among the merchant and courtly
classes of the time (Roxburgh, 2001: 7; Fetvaci, 2011: 243).
In a recent book, Emine Fetvaci analyses the structure and composition of the
Album of the World Emperor made for Sultan Ahmed I (1603–17) by his
 The World in Dress 63
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Figure 42 Stibbert Library, Executioner carrying a severed head

courtier Kalender Pasa (d. 1616). It has thirty-two folios containing an eclectic
variety of styles and materials – painting, calligraphy, illumination – from
different contexts, including portraits, depictions of entertainments, gatherings,
and ethnic and social types from a variety of visual traditions – from Safavid
Iran, Ottoman imitations of Persian miniatures, and Ottoman works similar to
those produced in European costume books. This vast combination of models,
medias, and styles, writes Fetvaci, ‘points to the importance of viewing the
artistic landscape of the early modern world as connected’ (Fetvaci, 2019: 3).
The mobility of prints, costume books, drawings, and calligraphic samples
between Europe and the Islamic world and across imperial boundaries made
the eclecticism of the Album of the World Emperor possible (Burke, 2016;
Fetvaci, 2019). The trans-imperial networks that shape costume books and
 64 The Renaissance

Figure 43 Rålamb album, Executioner carrying a severed head. Courtesy of the

National Library of Sweden

albums, as recent scholarly work insists, shed light, not only on Western
perceptions, but also on the vogue for hybrid visual compilations among
the rising urban élites in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires
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(Alfonso, 2016). The album with its experimental format underlines cross-
cultural interaction and contacts among urban centres and new consumers
keen to collect artworks. In addition to their popularity across the Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal Empires, albums became popular in seventeenth-century
China and – as Section 3 shows – in Japan.
Scholars are now questioning the parallel developments of a genre which,
owing to its flexibility, encouraged the experimental compilations and far-
reaching visual connections that shaped and in turn were shaped by a new
consciousness of space and spatial relations (Campbell and Chong, 2005;
Fetvacy, 2019: 5). Mostly originated in diplomatic trans-imperial networks,
costume albums were characterized by cooperation among artists and patrons,
flexibility of content, and circulation through travel, migration, and exchange
across and beyond the Mediterranean. As a ‘phenomenon’, they are defined by
their mutability (Raby, 2017). They were offered as gifts, collected, sold, and
copied. Changing ownership altered the narrative sequence of the images and
 The World in Dress 65
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Figure 44 Stibbert Library, Executioner

the materiality of the album bound and reworked in Europe – as in the case of
Stibbert’s Prints and Drawings collection. Multilingual captions were often
added outlining the fundamental issue of cultural translation in multiethnic
and multi-religious geopolitical contexts and across far-reaching networks of
trade, collectionism, and diplomacy.
 Figure 45 Rålamb album, Executioner. Courtesy of the National Library of
Sweden
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Figure 46 Stibbert Library, A religious man playing the cymbals while praying
 The World in Dress 67

Figure 47 Rålamb album, A religious man. Courtesy of the National Library of

Sweden
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Figure 48 Rålamb album, A barber. Courtesy of the National Library of

Sweden
 68 The Renaissance
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Figure 49 Taeschner album, A barber. Berenson Library, Villa I Tatti

 The World in Dress 69

3 Italy, Europe, and Japan

This section addresses visual and textual interconnections across the Pacific,
focussing on agents, books, and diplomatic exchanges during the so-called
Christian century in Japan (1549–1650) (Boxer, 1951). The crucial role of
diplomatic exchanges and gifts and the role of Jesuit missionaries as negotiators
of European knowledge and artistic production shape the making of costume
books in Japan during the Edo period. As in the West, costume albums and
books were part of a new visual culture of space, emerging with Renaissance
geography, that displayed the representation of the people of the world on a
variety of media: screens, maps, scrolls, books, and popular encyclopedias. A
growing editorial production addressed an urban readership curious about the
foreigners arriving in Japan and attracted to geographical and anthropological
knowledge. Through the taxonomy of dress, the variety of the people of the
world appeared in Japanese maps, screens, costume books, and scroll pictures.
The images detail differences in bodily postures, skin colour, gestures, appear-
ances, ornament, and accessories connecting to visual practices, which spread
across Italy, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. The greater status attributed to
visual perception in the early modern period shaped the sartorial display and the
hierarchy of appearances in Edo Japan.
In 1582, the first Japanese diplomatic mission arrived in Europe. It consisted
of four Christianized samurai young men accompanied by Father Diogo de
Mesquita of the Jesuits, who travelled to Western Europe across Portugal,
Spain, and Italy (Brown, 1994; Cooper, 2005; Wilson, 2005; Boscaro, 2008).
They visited Pope Gregory XIII in Rome and then moved up to Florence,
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Bologna, Venice, and beyond Genoa. The mission attracted crowds of onlookers
and was accompanied by an important exchange of gifts. No Japanese had ever
been seen before and European costume books had never included Japanese
dress. This unique event encouraged Cesare Vecellio to update this visual
tradition by drawing a young Japanese man in fanciful clothes in Habiti antichi
e moderni di tutto il mondo.
In the following pages, a Japanese costume book picturing the inhabitants of
the world will be analysed. It was printed in two editions: Nishikawa Joken’s
Shijuni-koku-jinbutsu zusetsu (The People of a Myriad Countries) (1720) and a
revised edition by Yamamura Saisuke, Teisei shijunikoku jinbutsuzusetsu (The
People of the Forty-Two Countries) (1801). These books display ninety-five
images of men and women from Asia and Europe, dressed in different fashions,
from Africa, and from North and South America, sparsely covered with loin-
cloths and feathers. Common features of the European and Japanese costume
books are a combination of images and text as well as changes in the
 70 The Renaissance

iconography and narrative over time. The section addresses the circulation of
visual and textual culture between Italy, mainly Venice, and East Asia and
questions the parallel developments of a genre shaped by far-reaching networks
of communication and exchange.

Cross-Cultural Exchanges: Embassies and Books

Lorenzo Priuli, the Venetian ambassador in Rome, described the hybrid style of
the young Japanese in a letter to the Venetian Senate: ‘Their dress looks like a
sailor’s outfit, with large trousers down to the feet, with no turban or long robe
over them. They carry a scimitar around the waist and on the right shoulder a
cloak with an iron point. They wear a Spanish styled hat with feathers and
ruffles. Their complexion and skin colour are ugly’ (Berchet, 1877: 21).
An anonymous Relazione printed in Bologna in 1585 describes the solemn
entrance of the ambassadors in Rome. The Japanese rode on horseback among
high-ranking clergy, Swiss guards, and Roman nobles wearing their ceremonial
dress:

White tunics embroidered with foliage and birds in gold and very vivid colours,
cut open on the chest and with large sleeves; over this they wore a sort of wide-
bottomed jacket of the same fabric, but more exquisite pattern. The dress would
have had a long train, had they not lifted it with a rich scarf which hung
graciously from their hips, in the shape of a rose. They wore large and short silk
trousers, very fine white socks and leather soles tied to their feet with leather
straps passing between the big toe and the other toes. They wore no hat, and
their very black hair was tied in a ponytail folded back over their shaven
foreheads. This extraordinary hairstyle is a unique feature of these people.
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Around the waist they carried a magnificent sword and a very fine dagger, with
a golden handle encrusted with precious stones. (Berchet, 1877: 22)

The pope gave them three thousand scudi for their personal expenses and
‘three sorts of very distinguished Italian dresses: a short one and two long ones,
in black velvet embroidered with gold and in golden damask with golden lace.
He also gave them a long simar to be worn at home, of the same damask’
(Guarnieri, 1586: 49). To all four, the pope also gave a golden chain with a
medal. The four young lords (daimyos) were endowed with the status of citizens
and patricians and dressed in Roman clothes, presumably those Gregorio XIII
had offered. The Venetian ambassador Priuli wittily observed: ‘They are now
wearing long Roman clothes lined with gold and look like doctors from
Bologna’ (Berchet, 1877: 25). Later, the daimyos continued on to Venice,
where they were received in their Japanese costume by the ninety-five-year-
old Doge Niccolò da Ponte.
 The World in Dress 71

Alessandro Valignano, father general of the Jesuits in Japan, had planned and
organized the mission with two main purposes: to make Japan better known in
Europe and thus gain more financial support for the Jesuits in the Far East, and
to make Europe, its religion, and its culture better known and appreciated in
Japan. There can be little doubt that the envoys put Japan on the map for most
Europeans – the oldest map of Japan dating from the 1585 mission is today in
the Florence state archive. The samurai brought with them some gifts, among
which was the most precious for the pontiff: a pair of screens, or byobu
(hence the Portuguese or Spanish biombo), picturing Azuchi castle and city
incorporating features of European architecture, and a preciously ornate kimono
and swords offered to the doge in Venice (the Senate ordered that the gifts be
stored in the armory – sala delle armi – of the Council of Ten, where they were
kept until 1773) (Frago Garcia, 1997).
In exchange, the most significant gifts the legates brought back were illus-
trated books, which were to exert a considerable influence in Japan: Abraham
Ortelius’ World Atlas p – Theatrum Orbis Terrarum – and the first three
volumes of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, given to them
by the German botanist Melchior Guilandinus, director of the Botanical Garden
in Padua. Both works contained the images of cities and peoples around the
world (Sullivan, 1989; Mendes Pinto, 1993; Loh, 2013).
After eight years of travel, in March 1591, Valignano led the recently returned
envoys back in a lavish procession through the streets of Kyoto to the court of
Hideyoshi, the de facto ruler of Japan. In Italy and Europe, the mission of the
four Christianized samurai aroused such public interest that already by 1586
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some forty-five accounts had been published, mainly in Italy and Spain, but also
in France, Germany, and Prague, together with a handful of prints. Before the
end of the century, more than seventy publications appeared in various
European languages (Boscaro, 1973).

The Young Japanese

Addressing his readers in 1590, Cesare Vecellio expounds on the difficulties he
had encountered in obtaining information on the clothing of Asia:

It was easier for me to discuss the styles of dress of Europe, mostly because I
had seen them myself, and, if not, people I could trust had told me about them
and recounted what they had seen themselves. Accounts of Asia, in contrast
are so uncertain that it is often necessary, because of geographical distance, to
listen to people who speak of things they have not seen themselves but have
only heard second hand . . . Asia extends to the East Indian Sea and reaches
the Indian Ocean, including Japan and the infinite number of islands sur-
rounding it. Now, I have received accurate information about this third part of
 72 The Renaissance

the world from many people who have been there and from people who live in
its countries, having carried out careful research myself. So, I will speak of
these styles of dress. But I ask that the reader pardon me if I do not describe
them fully, as I did the earlier ones.
(Vecellio, 1590: 432 v–433 r; Rosenthal and Jones, 2008: 433)

The image of the young Japanese indeed appeared eight years later in the
second edition of the Habiti, together with twenty new prints picturing the
peoples of America, and, as Section 1 shows, the inhabitants of Scandinavia.
Before the highly popular 1585 visit, few images of the Japanese had circu-
lated in Italy. The literate public had vague notions about Japan, often still based
on Marco Polo’s descriptions, that were still reported in Benedetto Bordone’s
lavishly illustrated Isolario (Venice, 1534) and Giuseppe Rosaccio’s world
history Il Mondo e le sue parti, cioè Asia, Africa, America (Florence, 1595)
(Reichert, 1993; Proust, 1997; De Castro, 2013: 39–93). The earliest reports
printed in Italy with descriptions of the Japanese diplomatic delegation do not
provide cogent accounts. The Venetian ambassador Priuli pictured the daimyos
wearing clothes ‘alla marinaresca’, with Spanish-style feathered hats, large and
long trousers, scimitar, and a cloak with an iron point, or ‘alla romana’ with long
gowns and golden decorations. The contemporary chronicle from Bologna
offers some details of a ceremonial dress embroidered with foliage and birds
that Vecellio mentioned in his text describing the young daimyo. In the print, the
young man holds the train of his dress with one hand, as the Bolognese
chronicler observed. However, Vecellio’s image of the giovane giapponese is
puzzling, as it leaves out most of the features described in the short text and adds
to the discrepancy between narrative and image (Wilson, 2005: 217–21; Kato,
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2007: 227–53). It suggests that Vecellio did not see the Japanese noblemen of
the Jesuit delegation. He depicts his young Japanese Christian, probably mixing
a variety of written accounts of the visitors’ dress (Figure 50). He also says that
such men tie on scimitars and daggers, but he gives his figure a slim staff
instead. Some of these details may describe the gown and weapons that made
their way to the armory in the hall of the Consiglio de’ Dieci, but they do not
appear in his print. An acute witness of the contemporary chronicle of the city,
the artist could not ignore the event especially since – as he writes in the text
accompanying the print – the decorated kimono, sword, and dagger that the
Japanese had offered the doge were displayed in the sala of the Council of Ten
for all Venetians to admire and remember.
In addition to the Japanese youth, the 1598 Habiti includes another new East
Asian plate: the woman from the Molucca islands. With these two new images,
Vecellio changed the visual sequence of Asia, which, in the 1590 Habiti,
displayed costumes of Ethiopians in the court of the great Prester John, the
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Figure 50 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti (1598) The young Japanese. The Berenson Library, Villa I Tatti
 74 The Renaissance

legendary Christian king whose domain was imagined in innumerable lay and
religious chronicles to be somewhere between Africa and Asia. From one
edition to the next, the Venetian artist replaced these legendary references
with updated information about the recently conquered and partly
Christianized Pacific islands. The woman from the Moluccas and the
Japanese youth embody the space of the Pacific Ocean and are the key to the
global dimension of the Habiti in Vecellio’s panoptic view of the clothed bodies
of the people of the world, beginning with ancient Rome, progressing through
Christianity and modernity (which peaks in Venice), and culminating, as it
were, with twenty illustrations of men and women from the New World.
Though the first edition included four illustrations of men and women from
China directly after India Orientale, the revised 1598 edition has them following
the two new figures from the Moluccas and Japan. By this careful placement
within his own visual itinerary, Vecellio moved to the Far East from the Pacific,
reaching Japan first and then moving towards the Chinese mainland. This was
the Franciscan and Augustinian missionary route from the New World to Asia
across the Pacific, where Japan was the northern point of arrival after the so-
called Islands of India – that is, Moluccas, Philippines, and Sunda. Only in
Vecellio’s second edition does the new Hispanic route to the Far East become
visible, in both text and image, and thus the Pacific Ocean becomes a space in
and of itself.
Information about these newly discovered islands was circulating in Venice.
In 1554, Ramusio had published the first volume of his Navigazioni e viaggi,
printing Ludovico di Varthema’s travelogue to the spice islands in the Pacific,
which included the first published description of the isles of Maluch (Ramusio,
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1978: 863–5). New knowledge about China was also circulating in Venice,
where Juan Gonzales de Mendoza’s Historia della China was printed in 1586,
and in Rome, just as the Japanese mission was arriving in Italy, introducing the
young daimyos to those cities (Gonzales de Mendoza, 1586). The Historia della
China enjoyed such success on the book market that it warranted the publication
of two later Venetian editions in 1588 and 1590.
Gonzales de Mendoza was an Augustinian friar from Mexico who wrote
using missionary sources that describe Augustinian and Franciscan mission-
aries crossing the Pacific Ocean from Mexico, landing in the Philippines,
and from there travelling to Japan. He also used a wealth of original
Chinese sources translated into Spanish by Christianized Chinese in the
Philippines. His bestselling history of China is Vecellio’s main source on
China in the first (1590) Habiti, and on China and Japan in the second
(1598). Warning his readers that contemporary notions of the Far East were
hazy, the artist drew four Chinese costumes that appear in both editions of
 The World in Dress 75

his work: two for women (a noble matron and a noble woman) and two for
men (a noble man and a man of middle standing). Though it is difficult to
trace visual models for these images, the 1590 text repeats word for word
several quotes from Mendoza’s Historia. Vecellio transcribed extended
passages that detail marriage and sexual customs, food, clothing, bodily
manipulations – the binding of women’s feet – political practices, religious
beliefs, and the wealth of decorations (paintings, sculptures, carvings) on
Chinese furniture and bedsteads. Mendoza’s Historia was new on the
market and suggested ways of conceptualizing and constructing geograph-
ical space through European expansion, trade, and evangelization on a
global scale. Vecellio’s staging of the costumes of the non-Western world
acknowledged this global circulation of texts across transcontinental diplo-
matic and missionary connections. These passed through Italy, especially
Venice, which, as a centre of production and trade as well as an editorial
market, retained crucial interests in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East.
Books, maps, and clothing not only migrated towards Europe, but, as we
shall see in the following pages, moved east as well when the encounter and
violent rejection of Catholic European countries marked the so- called
Christian century (1540–1640) in Japan.

Nanban World Maps

Art historians have discussed the cross-cultural exchanges that influenced the
production of ‘Nanban’ art in Japan between the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The expression refers to a variety of artistic productions that arose
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from the interactions between Japan and the Iberian world during the ‘Christian
century’. In Japanese, the word Nanban – ‘Southern Barbarians’ – included
Portuguese merchants and missionaries arriving in Nagasaki in the 1540s as
well as Spaniards who came from the Philippines and Italian Jesuits from
Europe. Nanban art comprises three broad categories (Loh, 2013). The first
groups Christian works produced by Japanese artists under the supervision of
Jesuit missionaries. The second includes large folding screens depicting the
Arrival of the Southern Barbarians (Figure 51). The ninety-three known screens
include a large Portuguese trading ship downloading exotic merchandise in a
Japanese port town. European traders and mariners are depicted with large
noses and wearing colourful trousers in the middle of a bustling crowd of
black slaves, missionaries, and exotic animals under the eyes of Japanese
onlookers.
The third category comprises folding screens with painted European world
maps (Figure 52). The twenty-two known examples are painted in ink, colour,
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Figure 51 Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Japanese Screen picturing the arrival of the Southern Barbarians.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Figure 52 Map of the World. Japan, seventeenth century (Imperial Household Agency)
 78 The Renaissance

and gold leaf on paper and were created in pairs with six to eight parts that range
from 68 to 204 centimeters in height and from 226.5 to 447 centimeters in
width. These Nanban world map screens constitute the most nuanced and
complex of all objects epitomizing the initial encounter between Japan and
Europe during the 1540s through to 1640s (Loh, 2013: 243). They became
fashionable in Japan among wealthy merchants involved in maritime trade in
coastal port towns and in growing urban centres such as Osaka and Edo. This
emerging class commissioned the Nanban world maps for display in their
opulent households, as well as for gifts. The fashion was so widespread that
Francesco Neretti, a Tuscan merchant who had lived for thirty-eight years in
China and Japan, offered Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici two painted
bamboo screens from Macao, now lost or untraced, picturing the cities of
Beijing and Canton (ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5080, c.464, 8 January 1617).
In Japan, the Portuguese and Italian Jesuits began to encourage a local artistic
production aimed at proselytizing, teaching, and spreading European know-
ledge. Among the many hybrid religious and secular artifacts produced by
Jesuit and Japanese artists (the Niccolò and Kano schools), world maps framed
with the representation of world people have attracted scholarly attention (Toby,
1998, 2001b). Most surprisingly, however, the representations of peoples from
around the world have not been the subject of an extended analysis, whereas the
spatial setting on these maps has been mainly analysed in reference to European
cartography (Unno, 1994). I focus on these figures, drawing connections with
the production of world maps and books of costumes printed in Europe and
Japan.
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Studies have shown that a limited number of European prints influenced the
images on the Japanese world map screens. Some illustrated books imported
from Europe as diplomatic gifts including Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,
the first three volumes of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, and
Dutch maps decorated with frames representing world peoples in couples. The
Dutch cartographer Jodocus Hondius (1563–1611) seems to have been the first
map-maker to include a frame featuring the people of the world around a map
(Sullivan, 1989; Mendes Pinto, 1993; Loh 2013: 37). All Western maps,
whether of Jesuit or Dutch origin, presented a striking contrast to contemporary
Japanese beliefs that the earth consisted of only three great land masses: India,
China, and Japan. This reflects the framework of a Buddhist spiritual topog-
raphy that inspired the production of the Gyoki-zu maps in which Japan is
rendered through a series of rounded forms with indistinct coastlines. Maps
combining the traditional rounded land masses framed by images of world
peoples provide an interesting example of the hybridization processes taking
place.
 The World in Dress 79

In 1639, approximately fifty years following the return of the Japanese

delegation, the Jesuits and all missionary orders were expelled from Japan.
Christianity was banned and persecuted, and only the Dutch, in the enclosed
merchant community of Deshima in Nagasaki, were allowed to trade with the
shogunate. As recent research has confirmed, notwithstanding the official
isolationist policy and the formal ban on the import of foreign books, a clandes-
tine manuscript and book circulation continued from China into Japan. In the
Far East, the representation of the peoples of the world as largely monstrous and
imaginary had a long-standing tradition and derived from Chinese images,
known as Shan-hai ching, that first described the varieties of peoples inhabiting
the world. The illustrations included deformed animals, birds, fish, and human
beings. These were partly absorbed into the Pacific-centred map of the world
drawn by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and exported to Japan, where it was printed in
Nagasaki in 1645 (Sato, 1996: 44–63). Commonly known as the Bankoku
jinbutzu zu (Pictures of the Peoples of a Myriad Countries), it is the first
European-derived map published in Japan (Figure 53). Significantly, it repre-
sents how quickly Japanese artists had adapted European map imagery for
popular audiences by the middle of the seventeenth century. The Bankoku
bears a legend at the top, which reads as follows:

The world is broad; the variety of its peoples is without end. Just as its
countries differ, the peoples are likewise different in appearance: some are
tall, some are short; they appear in paired opposites: black and white; male
and female. If we represent their body types as specimens, this is what they
are generally like. One can distinguish at a glance their systems of clothing
and headgear, the manufacture of their bows, swords, and weapons. One can
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instantly distinguish the quality of each people in the regions of the world. We
have prepared this chart solely that it may serve as an aid to the investigation
of things and accomplishment of knowledge.

In a simple yet effective language, this legend provides us with the paradigm
that will shape all representations of the forty-two peoples of the world (Toby,
1998:19–44). The variety of the world is spelled out through the description of
body types based on height, colour, and gender as well as each people’s material
culture: clothing, headgear, and the manufacture of weapons. In the framework
of a civilizing discourse, the figures are arranged in couples according to the
hierarchy of values of a sixteenth-century European and to the amount and style
of clothes worn, skin colour, tattoos, animal products, and feathers. The
Japanese couple is situated in a dominant position on the top right-hand side
of the chart, and at its antipodal point, on the bottom right-hand side of the grid,
a roughly outlined Brazilian couple stands beside an open grated fire where
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Figure 53 Bankoku Sozu 1671. Courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

 The World in Dress 81

human limbs are roasting, epitomizing the opposite poles of civility and
barbarism.
The 1645 Bankoku offered on the small and handy format of a single sheet the
same Westernized representation of the world and its inhabitants pictured on the
large folding screens. It gained immediate popular success and circulated
among the urban reading public who had no access to the lavishly ornate folding
screens but shared the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in
Tokugawa Japan. The Bankoku was incessantly republished: five new editions
appeared between 1645 and 1652, smaller versions with illustrations of world
people were printed in encyclopedias and eight versions of the map appeared
between 1693 and 1713. It was intended as a work of entertainment and
decoration, not as a source for reliable cartographic information. Its reception
among a broad reading audience influenced changes in format, place names, and
colour. A conflation of European, Chinese, and Japanese sources contributed to
the making of the 1645 Bankoku and to its lasting success in the editorial market
(Shintaro Ayusawa, 1964: 275–94; Hung-kay-Luk, 1977: 58–84). Focussing
our attention on its display of world peoples, we have to keep in mind that these
replicated in a more rudimentary style the icons decorating the large
Momoyama (1573–1615) and Edo (1615–1868) folding screens that are today
in the Nanban Bunka-kan museum in Osaka, the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, and
the Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo. This migration of images from the
screens to the 1645 Bankoku sheds light on the already mentioned transfer into a
cheaper and popular format of images, which originated in and were accessible
to the milieu of the social and political élites. It also confirms the connection
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between the representation of bodies and geographical knowledge within a

circulation and transfer of books and maps from Europe to Japan. The
Bankoku translated visually a new emerging consciousness of the global dimen-
sion of the world as a consequence of the arrival of Europeans in Japan and
suggests ‘an anthropology of alterities evocative of the panoptic posture’ which
resonates with the display of identities on the theater of the modern world in
European costume books (Toby, 1998: 21). Scholarship unanimously points to
the impact of the Nanban world view as a turning point in the construction of
geographical space (Toby, 1998, 2001: 17; Nenzi, 2008).

Japanese Costume Books: Nishikawa Joken, The People of the

Forty-Two Countries
The following paragraphs will turn to a new text from a later period: The People
of the Forty-Two Countries, a Japanese costume book printed in 1720 and
revised in 1801, and to its two authors, Nishikawa Joken and Yamamura
 82 The Renaissance

Saisuke. The main source for the images is the 1645 Bankoku. Comparing the
prints of the two editions of the Japanese costume book will shed light on visual
and textual continuities and changes, as well as on the adoption and local
readaptation of European cultural traditions.
While large-scale maps were reproduced on hanging scrolls and tatami floors
and could be unrolled and spread out, images of world people also suggested a
more personal intimate enjoyment, and they were displayed in book form or on
a hand scroll. These two formats encouraged a different aesthetic and narrative
appreciation of the pictorial sequence, as the hand scroll revealed images
slowly, unrolling in gradual progression with images flowing into one another
(Unno, 1994: 346–477). The book format framed images in a rigid visual order,
separating one sheet from the next and clearly distinguishing each image from
the next one. When hand scrolls were turned into printed books, the flowing
representation of the hand scroll did not always fit the page format.
Nishikawa Joken, a merchant and astronomer from Nagasaki, was an eight-
eenth-century encyclopedist and one of the most renowned Japanese geograph-
ers of his time. He was also one of the most widely read and published popular
writers on morals among merchants in the Tokugawa era, drawing from Neo-
Confucianism the idea of a natural universal reason that gave all human beings a
common identity in humankind. Joken prompted values empowering human
activity in ordinary life and viewed merchants as those who could enhance the
nation’s well-being through the circulation of social wealth, which legitimized a
just profit (Tetsuo Najita, 1987: 25). In 1714, he wrote the People of the Forty-
Two Countries (Figures 54 and 55). Without quoting his sources because of the
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prohibition of importing foreign books into Japan, he borrowed extensively

from the Italian Jesuit tradition rooted in Ricci’s writings, using and paraphras-
ing Giulio Aleni’s world geography and testifying to the crucial importance of
the clandestine circulation of international scientific literature among the intel-
lectuals of the Edo period. He inaugurated the new book format, where a brief
text commented the images of the forty-two peoples of the world. Addressing
his readers, he anticipates what his book offers: pictures, information about
world peoples, and illustrations representing them. It offers useful knowledge to
those interested in trade, fashion, and learning. ‘The images you will see in this
book introduce the redhead barbarians (the Dutch). These illustrations may
serve commercial gains, fashion, or a serious desire for knowledge.’
Reflecting on these foreign customs will allow readers to distinguish between
good and evil, justice and injustice, in each of the forty-two countries. Joken
clearly distinguishes between ‘Qing’ and ‘Ming’ – that is, between Chinese who
had or had not adopted Manchu customs. He introduces this distinction, dating it
back to the dramatic revolution of 1644 in China when the Manchus prevailed
 The World in Dress 83

Figure 54 Nishikawa Joken, People of the Forty-Two Countries (1720) Man

and Woman from Italy. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library,
University of California at Berkeley
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Figure 55 Nishikawa Joken, People of the Forty-Two Countries (1720) A Dutch

Family. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California
at Berkeley
 84 The Renaissance

over the ancient Ming dynasty. Breaking away from the 1645 Bankoku, which
pictured only the Ming, Joken’s text and images offer an original contribution,
highlighting dynastic change and connecting it to a landmark historical event.
Insisting on China’s new dynasty and Manchu conquest underlined Japan’s
interest in acquiring a new centrality in East Asia after the Mongol dynasty
conquered the Chinese, who had therefore lost their leading position.
Other new elements in Joken’s volume are the inclusion of the people from
Ryukyu, distinct from Chinese and Japanese, the exclusion of Ezo (nowadays
Hokkaido), and the division of the world into five continents. Magellanica, the
fifth continent, is at times identified with the land of the giants, as in the
Bankoku, or with the Patagon, a tribe in the extreme southern region of
the American continent (Toby, 2001: 31). No image of Japanese people or of
Japanese clothing appears in this book, which only pictures others from near
and far away. The table of contents lists twenty-one countries in Asia, four in
Africa, ten in Europe (including Russia and Ukraine), and five in America.
Dwarfs from Siberia and giants from Magellanica appear at the end. The first
volume on the East acknowledges local costumes and customs as part of a
dynastic history with a keen attention to the origin, antiquity, and transformation
of place names in Chinese, Japanese, local, and, at times, European languages.
The text mentions the Mughal, Chinese, and Persian Empires. Macao, with a
man and woman dressed in the Portuguese fashion, concludes the first volume.
Joken’s second volume opens with Turkey and proceeds to islands in
Indonesia. It then moves to Africa, described as a region inside ‘Limia’ –
probably ‘Libya’, from classical sources circulating in European cartography
and costume books – and Russia, described as a very cold country with an
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imposing military might. Notions about Western Europe are vague: Denmark is
described as bordering the Mediterranean in its southern part, while its northern
boundaries touch the North Pole. Next come Hungary, Poland, Italy, Germany,
France, the Netherlands, and England.
Comparing these images with those of the 1645 Bankoku, both continuities
and discontinuities appear. While icons of the ten European couples in Europe
largely replicate the fancy clothes, headgear, and gestures in the earlier volume,
Joken’s narrative acknowledges the global presence of Europeans outside of
Europe. He mentions Dutch traders in Taiwan (originally Takasago), Java, and
some Indonesian islands; the Portuguese in India, China, and Brazil; and the
Spaniards in the Philippines and Peru. He calls attention to the military strength
of Turks and Russians (Jardine and Brotton, 2000: 78; Screech, 2011: 304–9).
Joken also points to the global spread of religion – the ‘false doctrine’ of
Catholicism – as a consequence of Spanish and Portuguese expansion in the
Far East. The word for ‘false doctrine’ is jaho and it refers to a doctrine or law
 The World in Dress 85

Figure 56 Nishikawa Joken, People of the Forty-Two Countries (1720), Man

and Woman from Macao. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library,
University of California at Berkeley

contrary to Buddhist precepts. Joken describes Luzon, the main island of the
Philippines, as a place which ‘has recently been assimilated to those countries
under the influence of the false doctrines and a high number of its dwellers have
converted’. In Macao and Goa, they are adopting the same false beliefs ‘and
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even though Macao is in the middle of the seas south of China, Goa in the
southern region of India and Portugal is a kingdom in Europe, we can say that
their customs and habits are very similar’ he concludes. Though Spaniards and
Portuguese are mentioned, they are visually excluded, emphasizing a Japanese
perspective, which suppresses the presence of Iberians, who were still portrayed
in the Bankoku. Significantly, Joken portrays a woman and man from Macao
wearing Portuguese clothing (Figure 56).
Joken draws a transcontinental Catholic connection between Macao, Goa,
and Portugal. Christianity as a globalizing and threatening set of values, beliefs,
and practices is a cultural feature that intersects the production of knowledge
about the people of the world in the 1720 Japanese text.
A host of anti-Christian writings circulating in Japan from the middle of the
seventeenth century until well into the eighteenth provide a meaningful
context for the perception of the spreading of Christianity as a preparation
for a European invasion. Printed and handwritten, these texts were popular
 86 The Renaissance

anti-Christian tales and horror stories picturing Christianity as a dangerous

foreign religion spread by wicked magicians. They were not aimed at the
literate public but, with the political encouragement of the Tokugawa shogun-
ate, this narrative reached deep into society and the furthest corners of the
country. More effective than anti-Christian persecution, this literature was
effective in shaping popular attitudes in a period when the Japanese were cut
off from all contacts with the outside world (Ross, 1994: 110–11; Proust,
1997: 93–5; Elisonas, 2007) .

Yamamura Saisuke, People of the Forty-Two Countries,

Revised (1801)
Yamamura Saisuke, a professional geographer who had translated into Japanese
Dutch works on world geography replicated Joken’s book on scroll in 1801. In
his revision of Joken’s book, entitled Teisei shijunikoku Jinbutsuzusetsu (People
of the Forty-Two Countries, Revised) he consulted some thirty-two different
kinds of Western sources, completing the largest and most complete study on
world geography to appear during the Edo period (Shintaro Ayusawa, 1964:
282–3). In the introduction, he brings to light the workings of an informal
network of friends, reading and circulating scrolls which were carefully studied
and discussed in domestic settings. While books were mainly borrowed from
libraries and indicate a more formal organization of knowledge, scrolls were
hand copied and exchanged among a literate society of readers and local
scholars that became acquainted with printed works mainly through borrowing,
exchange, and the hand drawing of books into scrolls for their own use. Some of
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these scrolls were passed to publishers who assembled designers, woodcarvers

and a printer and produced wood block images for the final prints, in scroll and/
or book format. In this way, official cartography and images of world people
gradually filtered through to a broader public (Wigen, 2010: 26).
Saisuke insists on the hybrid nature of his revised edition, influenced by Chinese
and Western models. The official interpreter of the Dutch community had written
parts of the preface, which the Chinese interpreter then translated into Chinese.
The best linguistic skills were indeed found among the five families of hereditary
translators retained in Nagasaki by the East India Dutch Company (VOC), and a
similar number were employed to negotiate with the Chinese community
(Screech, 2002: 15). The Teisei is thus situated within the merchant international
community of Nagasaki and is a text of commercial geography. It includes the
same woodblock prints as the previous seventeenth-century edition, with a revised
and enlarged written commentary. In 1801, the ban on the import of foreign books
had just been lifted, and that is probably accountable for the richer information
 The World in Dress 87

circulating in the Teisei, compared to the 1720 edition (Wigen, 2010: 89). In the
opening paragraphs, Saisuke indeed acknowledges this: ‘In the past, as we could
not visit all the lands we describe, we have integrated information from western
geographies.’ The Dutch influenced the illustrations, while the place names come
from Ming sources, which include and translate Jesuit knowledge. The text also
uses ‘current news’ and is part of a common trend as ‘all countries nowadays
certainly have their own works describing foreigners and therefore the one we are
now editing is just one of many’.
The scroll opens with three colorful images: two Japanese functionaries,
dressed in a black and a blue kimono and a woman wearing the twelve-layered
Heian court costume. They reproduce the portraits from Thirty-Six Poetic
Immortals, a hanging scroll from the mid-thirteenth century picturing Heian
court scenes from the Kamakura period (1185–1333) (Liddell, 1989). A unique
feature of the Teisei is the visual inclusion of the Japanese among the peoples of
the world, stressing the centrality of Japan, which opens the visual display on the
scroll. The three figures trace images from a 600-year-old source and artistic
tradition, in order to legitimize the centrality of Japan in East Asia based on its
ancient dynastic culture. The precious textiles, headgear, and multilayered court
dress of the woman set them apart from contemporary attire and the dangers of
ethnic, religious, and aesthetic contamination. The image constructs the Japanese
as structurally linked to their past in splendid isolation and dynastic superiority.
This ahistorical condition places them outside of contemporary history – that is,
the encounter with Western colonizers – that threatens their very survival, as the
text underlines.
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The Tesei introduces the reader to an overwhelmingly peaceful landscape that

depicts the uniqueness of Japan: ‘Our country, Japan, is situated in the remote
Eastern regions of the globe but has a pleasant climate and a fertile soil. Our
clothing, literature and artistic styles are unique and extraordinary. Our gener-
ation lives happily and peacefully’ (Saisuke, 1802: par. 2).
Reminiscences of the 1645 Bankoku resonate in the narrative describing
world people as body types, customs, and clothing:

The continents differ from one another. There are people with black skin,
others with curly hair, people who eat men and brand their bodies with fire,
other who go about naked because of the heat and drink a lot. Some during the
winter produce no cereals and eat the flesh of fish and birds. On the contrary
there are those who have all grains and fruits, prepare sake, dress with
clothing made with birds’ plumage, and protect the skin of their faces.
They are bandy legged and do not use bows and arrows.
 88 The Renaissance

Moving westwards, the text lists, describes, and illustrates continents, countries,
and islands with the clothed and naked bodies of men, women, and children,
repeating the pattern found in Joken’s 1720 text. Asia is the most highly represented
with twenty-two regions, mostly corresponding to the different stages of the
expansion of the Chinese Empire; Europe has ten woodcuts, Africa and South
America – including Patagonia – four each and North America (i.e., Canada) just
one. Continents, regions, and lands appear as parts of past or existing empires
(Tracy, 1990; Adshead, 1993; Ropp, 2010). Gone are all references to Christianity
and Catholicism, and no image of the Portuguese and Spaniards is included in the
section on Europe. The narrative insists on European trade and military expansion
from the sixteenth century onwards. Repeating the 1720 text, Spaniards and
Portuguese are extensively quoted for their territorial conquests in the Pacific,
South America, and Southeast Asia, where Japanese commercial interests and
exchanges had been a long-standing tradition since the sixteenth century. The
Danes and especially the Dutch are mentioned, with emphasis on their military
and commercial bases in South Africa and Southeast Asia. A notion of civilization
is introduced in connection with European influence over non-Asian people:
Africans and Brazilians are described as having become more civilized in contact
with Europeans and the images picture fair-skinned couples or nuclear families
instead of cannibals (as Brazilians in the 1645 Bankoku). Jesuit sources are
explicitly quoted in the text, using Chinese names. Ricci and Aleni are respectively
Li and Gai, and their work helps the author to situate and identify Canada,
correcting the wrong place name used in the 1720 edition: ‘I have read carefully
the works of Li and Gai from the Ming period and the term Kanarin does not appear.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Kanaada is the word, and it is a large country in the Eastern part of North America,
also known as New France.’ Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian Jesuit writing in
Chinese, is also quoted for the description of the Terra Magellanica and its giants.
Owing to the lifting of the ban on foreign books, the 1801 edition fully acknow-
ledges Western Jesuit sources, and quotations from Jesuit texts increased and
became explicit (Verbiest was not mentioned in 1720).
Repeating the 1720 edition in book format, the 1801 scroll records in detail
bodily images of men, women, children, and old people often in couples, but at
times in groups of three or more. Their dress is more detailed in the sections on
Asia, where material culture provides a livelier setting to the icons. Bizarre clothes,
plumes, animal skins characterize non-Asian people pictured mainly as heterosex-
ual couples, as in the long-standing North European tradition that influenced
Japanese world maps on folding screens and the bankoku. The woodcuts illustrate
everyday practices and gestures, and include a variety of objects: baskets, boxes,
vases, hats, handkerchiefs, gloves, fans, parasols, jewels, bottles, cups, and weap-
ons (mostly shields and arrows but no firearms) (Schmidt, 2011: 31–57). Clothed
 The World in Dress 89

and semi naked bodies, objects, and gestures function as metonyms for place,
embodying the often ill-defined and highly imaginative geographical space
described in the texts. Format constructs sequences: the rigid structure of the
page confines bodies in a narrow, separated space, while the scroll opens a larger
iconic flexibility and gestures are not cut off by the borders of the book.
A complex, dense, and fascinating intertextuality connects the two Japanese
editions (Brosius and Wenzlhuemer, 2011: 3–24). These works from the Edo
period have to be situated in an expanding editorial market addressing a wide
literate readership. The images of world people also appeared in illustrated
encyclopedias and popular handbooks of civilized knowledge, which, amidst a
wealth of historical and geographical data, often included a rudimentary world
map with illustrations of various actual and imagined peoples. This suggests a
high level of literacy, and, as of the middle of the seventeenth century, a lively
printing industry as well as a ‘transformation in spatial consciousness’
(Yonemoto, 2003: 648) that sets the stage for a reflection on parallel develop-
ments in European societies (Ikegami, 2005; Berry, 2006).

The Threats of Early Globalization

Analysing Vecellio’ s image of a young Japanese man in his 1598 Habiti
brought to light the far-reaching connections between costume books and
albums as a genre stretching beyond Europe and the West. Within this frame-
work, a transcontinental circulation of visual and textual knowledge between
Europe and Edo Japan mediated by missionaries, diplomats, scientists, and
scholars was revealed. The Pacific Ocean is one of the focal points of these
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

interconnections.
A global transmission and circulation of knowledge is visible in both the
Italian and the Japanese books where cartography, ethnography, history, trade,
and art converge. A growing consciousness of the world’s connectivity is
perceivable in all three authors: their texts and images express curiosity, self-
awareness, fear, nostalgia, superiority, and what Roger Chartier defined as
‘métissages des imaginaires’ (Chartier, 2001).
Inacio Moreira, a Portuguese cartographer in the retinue of the Jesuit
Valignano visiting the emperor of Japan in 1585, produced a map of the world
in 1590 that represented Christian kingdoms coloured in gold and Christian
peoples in pagan kingdoms (Headley, 2000: 1149–50). Churches and crosses
chart the progression of Christianity worldwide. Intended to accelerate the
conversion of the Japanese, the map portrayed a global vision of contemporary
Christianity in the shape of an advancing Empire of the Cross in non-Western
territories. It anticipated the fears of a Western invasion of the Far East that
 90 The Renaissance

Joken and Yamamura’s image of the Portuguese couple in Canton epitomized in

their costume books.

Concluding Remarks
Sidestepping a history of fashion, this book analyses the rich source material
that costume books and albums provide from the standpoint of the global
circulation and transfer of textual and visual knowledge. In so doing, the
mobility of people and things – travel, migration, commerce, colonization,
Christianization – takes centre stage. All three sections shed light on the
contacts, exchanges, and cultural translations that hybridize the Renaissance
genre of costume books with local visual traditions in multiethnic and multi-
religious contexts. This introduces a new perspective that decenters the Italian
and European Renaissances from unexpected entry points and margins – the
island of Chios, Finland, the Balkans, Japan – giving pride of place to the gaze
of less-known and extra European authors, geographers, and printers whose
work broke the monopoly of the Western discourse. I argue that these sources
question change, transformation, and hybridity. Costume books and albums are
not a static medium: they are shaped by processes of accumulation, repetition,
visual and textual inclusion and exclusion, as well as by the social and cultural
practices that define their contexts of production, acquisition, and reception.
Many underwent substantial transformations through changing ownership and
taste: the multiple uses and meanings they acquired in the hands of collectors
such as Vincenzo Giustiniani, Franz Taeschner, Richard Bull, and Frederick
Stibbert are of crucial importance.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Agency and choice shape the narrative of this Element, which focusses on
individual profiles across far-reaching contacts: diplomats bringing gifts from
Venice to Istanbul and from Japan to Europe, missionaries translating geograph-
ical and scientific knowledge, collectors, artists, and travellers negotiating
visual and textual traditions across linguistic, religious, political, and ethnic
borders. Within these networks, we need to acknowledge relations between
artists and patrons. Vecellio gathered his main sources in Count Piloni’s library,
whose volumes he decorated and perused. The costume album that Pomarancio
made for Vincenzo Giustiniani traced widely circulating images, yet resignified
them through the subject position and experience of his patron. Albums suited
these flexible practices of juxtaposition, which gave a new meaning to stereo-
typical icons available in printed books.
Cesare Vecellio and the two editions of his Habiti antichi e moderni (Venice,
1590 and 1598) are the fil rouge of the narrative. The Habiti functioned as a
‘contact zone’ that selectively appropriated and translated, in the tradition of the
 The World in Dress 91

costume book, several European bestsellers published in late Renaissance

Venice. An extraordinary capacity to adapt to the new culture of space circulat-
ing in Venice marks the major changes introduced in the second edition that
provided links to a transcontinental production of texts and images across the
Pacific and into the Far East. These cross-cultural borrowings and visual
adaptations from Western sources – Olaus Magnus, Nicolas de Nicolay –
Ottoman costume albums, and Japanese maps, scrolls, and books were not
neutral. Dress epitomized the assimilation of native populations, strategies of
colonization and resistance, and refusal to convert to Islam or Christianity.
In a wider historiographical framework, costume albums and books are
analysed as flexible, movable, and versatile media. Defined by their mutability,
they corresponded to a new consciousness of space and spatial relations, shaped
by early modern geography, and addressed processes of cultural globalization in
geopolitical areas increasingly subject to the pressure of European imperialisms
and Roman universalism. They thus appear as both products of global connec-
tions and as themselves shaping new consciousness of connections. Staging the
clothing of the world revealed the global tensions that shaped the early modern
world. Dress was the micro-historical format that embodied them.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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 Acknowledgements
In the course of my research, I presented parts of this work at a number of talks
and seminars and I would like to thank all participants for their questions, input,
and attention: colleagues and doctoral students in the Department of History and
Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Ulinka Rublack in
Cambridge, Albert R. Ascoli and Barbara Spackman in the Department of Italian
Studies at the University of California (Berkeley); Paula Findlen and our graduate
students in the Department of History at Stanford; Susanna Burghartz at the
University of Basel; and Cornelia Aust, Thomas Weller, and Denise Klein in
Mainz. Anthony Molho, Catherine Bond, Tommaso Munari, and Martin Kohli
read parts of this Element. Martin’s collection of ancient travelogues and costume
books in Berlin offered me unending suggestions and fun.
A special mention goes to Constanta Vintila and the research team of the
ERC-funded project Luxury, Fashion and Social Status in Early Modern
Southeastern Europe, Grant agreement ID: 646489 at New Europe College in
Bucharest that hosted talks and seminars for five intense years of collective
work, and where parts of this research were presented and discussed. Dr Mario
Talamo translated all texts from Chinese and Japanese. Dr Simona Di Marco
guided me through the wealth of the Stibbert Library and Museum.
I thank the editors of the series: John Henderson who invited me to join and
Jonathan Nelson for his careful reading of the entire Element and for his acute
insights.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

I dedicate this Element to Martin.

 The Renaissance

John Henderson
Birkbeck, University of London, and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge
John Henderson is Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Birkbeck, University of
London, and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. His recent
publications include Florence under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (2019)
and Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, and
Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and
Jonathan K. Nelson (2021). He is also the author of Piety and Charity in Late Medieval
Florence (1994), The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, with Jon
Arrizabalaga and Roger French (1997), and The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and
Healing the Soul (2006).

Jonathan K. Nelson
Syracuse University Florence, and Kennedy School, Harvard University
Jonathan K. Nelson teaches Italian Renaissance art at Syracuse University Florence and is
a research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School. His books include Filippino Lippi (2004,
with Patrizia Zambrano), Leonardo e la reinvenzione della figura femminile (2007), and The
Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art (2008, with Richard
J. Zeckhauser). He co-edited Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance
Italy (2021). He co-curated museum exhibitions dedicated to Michelangelo (2002), Botticelli
and Filippino (2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (2009), and Marcello Guasti (2019), and two
online exhibitions about Bernard Berenson (2012, 2015). Forthcoming publications include
a monograph on Filippino (Reaktion Books, 2022) and an Element, The Risky Business of
Renaissance Art.

Assistant Editor
Sarah McBryde, Birkbeck, University of London
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Editorial Board
Jane Tylus, Yale University
Kate van Orden, Harvard University

About the Series

Timely, concise, and authoritative, Elements in the Renaissance showcases cutting-edge
scholarship by both new and established academics. Designed to introduce students,
researchers, and general readers to key questions in current research, the volumes take
multi-disciplinary and transnational approaches to explore the conceptual, material, and
cultural frameworks that structured Renaissance experience.
 The Renaissance

Elements in the Series

Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr
The World in Dress: Costume Books across Italy, Europe, and the East
Giulia Calvi

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EREN

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913829 Published online by Cambridge University Press