Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (review)

Carole Collier Frick has succeeded in a project that has baffled many historians: using objects of material culture to show the institutional structure of their manufacture, their social significance, and the political role they played in the community. Renaissance clothing has long attracted the attention of art historians intrigued with the puzzle of discovering how the style and manner of their presentation in paintings reveal the goals and values of their society. Following the lead of feminist historians such as Patricia Simon, Frick uses her deep knowledge of Florentine behavior to explain the importance of the wearing of elaborate and costly garb for wealthy families to celebrate weddings and promotions to civic posts. Her accomplishment in this book is to set out an original interpretation of the meaning of clothing in Renaissance Florence and to show, by meticulous reconstruction of personal and official records, the effects of this manufacture on the economic and institutional life of the city.

To accomplish this tour de force, Frick uses archival research to show the technology and manufacture of clothing, the preoccupation of wealthy families with clothing, and the political role of clothing as objects for display and municipal control. While many writers on the culture of the Renaissance tackle one or two of these aspects, Frick stands among a small group of historians, like Luca Molà, whose knowledge spans the technology, the cultural and political history, and the art historical elements of her subject. Moreover, like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, she organizes a difficult topic, composed of many details, into a compelling narrative.

Without a traditional ruling family that legitimated its control by royal blood, the Florentine republic depended on public displays of honor to justify its first citizens. Honor appeared in the gorgeous display of dress that wealthy families made at lifecycle events and initiation to civic office. So important were these festive clothes that the heads of big merchants' families themselves determined the fabric, the style, and the embellishments, and sometimes even designed the embroidery patterns. Buying the separate materials to make up the garments—silk, fine woolen cloth, fur—the merchant had the tailor come to the house, make the pattern directly on the wearer's form, taking it to his workshop to finish. The merchant himself also hired the embroiderers, who then attached pearls, beads, and gold trim to the garment.

But the Florentines were too practical to let extravagant clothing bankrupt them; after the day of show, the magnificent garments were dismantled and sold or pawned to used-clothes dealers, the jewels were removed and turned into cash, and the sartorial investment was converted back into family capital. Although the magnificent dresses portrayed in Renaissance paintings cost part of a woman's dowry, and even the counterdowry given her by her groom, they did not belong to the bride. Unless specifically given to her, the dress was hers only for the day, and it was reclaimed as her husband's property afterwards. Curiously, as important as it was to parade through the streets magnificently attired on the wedding day, establishing the "honor" of the families of bride and groom, there seemed to be no stigma against taking the dress to pieces afterwards. Painting the young women's finery caught the moment when she could appear in public on display, just before sumptuary laws and modest custom covered the new matron. Instead of signifying power for the bride, the representations of wedding dresses actually served to confirm the dominance of wealthy families in the city and their matrimonial alliances.

Moreover, the growing importance of clothing display skewed social and economic institutions. It favored male tailors who created outer garments at the expense of female seamstresses who made underwear and household linens. It caused households to put many daughters into convents so that one could be properly dowered. It confirmed...