Velo e Velatio: Significato e rappresentazione nella cultura figurativa dei secoli XV–XVII ed. by Gabriella Zarri (review)

The last two decades have seen an increase of scholarly interest in the ways in which clothing both shaped and projected identity in early-modern Italy. Publications in English and Italian have addressed the economic, social, and cultural impact of the production, acquisition, material, style, and meanings of dress, generally focusing on laywomen. A fundamental source, Cesare Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi et moderni (Venice, 1590), capably translated into English by Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (New York, 2008), provides a deceptively neat taxonomy that ties dress to status. With Velo e Velatio, Gabriella Zarri presents a collection of essays that engage a range of textual and visual evidence to reveal the difficulty of deciphering the status indicated by various kinds of veils, including but not limited to those worn by religious women.

Zarri’s introduction analyzes the differences in appearance and significance of head coverings with regard to religious and gender identity. Establishing the head as a symbolic “place,” she provides an analytical framework for assessing the discursive qualities of veils and the state of being veiled. Zarri surveys the head coverings worn by religious men of various conditions and ranks, and by servants, novices, and professed choir nuns living in convents. She studies fabric, color, shape, the occasions when particular head coverings were to be worn, and the relationship of head coverings to the complete monastic habit. This introduction helps to establish the veil’s many meanings—betrothal to Christ, subjection, modesty, constancy, and communal (versus individual) identity, among others.

These associations are extended in both Valerio Guazzoni’s chapter on Moretto’s allegorical representations of faith and in Alessandro Martoni’s study of the iconography of veils in paintings of Saint Flavia Domitilla. Refining our understanding of the meanings the veil conveyed, Isabella Campagnol’s chapter provides important context for Vecellio’s representations of sixteenth-century Venetians. Campagnol examines the veils and veiledness of unmarried, married, and widowed laywomen; courtesans, and both second- and third-order religious women. Her conclusion—that veils could simultaneously communicate, obscure, and confuse identity—beautifully captures the volume’s unifying thesis. Angela Ghirardi’s survey of veiling conventions for widows, shown in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraits, reinforces this point. Gianni Nigrelli’s chapter focuses less on symbolism and more on how the veil connected the wearer with family and convent community in a unique cycle of portraits of nuns, now assembled at the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia. Sixteen of the original thirty-nine portraits of Chigi nuns survive, and all are illustrated here; they serve as pendants to a cycle of thirty-seven portraits of Chigi lay-women, known as the “Belle.” Nigrelli sets these paintings in the context of the nuns’ convents in Rome and Siena, all three of which were patronized by the Chigi. Much is unknown about the circumstances of their commission and even their intended location, but these portraits, which represent Chigi women of many different ages, in different monastic habits, and at different points in their monastic careers—some of them multiple times—demonstrate that the sitters’ accomplishments were valued at least as much as those of their kinswomen who established advantageous connections between the Chigi and other families through marriage.

Although the individual chapters are idiosyncratic, taken together they make a useful addition to the growing literature on the subject of dress and identity in early-modern Italy. Although more direct discussion of and engagement with these sources would have added greatly to the volume, Velo e Velatio fills a niche in the current scholarship by demonstrating the polysemous potential of a single article of clothing.