Isabella’s undergarments
Fig. 1 Chemise, Italian, ca. late sixteenth century. Linen, silk and metal thread. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 41.64.
Peeking out from beneath Isabella’s sumptuous black sbernia (mantle) and the ornately embroidered sleeves of her camora (gown) a white garment is visible (see banner image, above) [1]. While the white linen garment covering the marchesa’s décolletage could be a partlet – a decorative or plain covering of linen or silk that covered the upper chest and neck – the ruffles coming from the cuffs of her sleeves are from one of Isabella’s most important and frequently worn garments, her camicia or chemise.
The camicia (plural camicie, and smock in English) was a voluminous undergarment made from linen that resembled an over-sized shirt and came to the knee (Fig.1). Chemises were worn underneath clothing next to the skin and could be elaborately decorated at the cuffs or neckline with embroidery or frills. Renaissance outer garments made from luxurious fabrics such as silks and velvets were rarely laundered so as not to damage their delicate weave or fibres. It was the chemise, then, that protected these expensive outer fabrics by absorbing sweat and other body excretions. The whiteness of chemises was also valued as these garments acted as intermediaries between the skin and cloth. Whiteness indicated that the clothes were regularly laundered, but also that the body underneath was clean too. In some cases, the whiteness of the chemise was also correlated to the physical and moral purity of the wearer [2].
Isabella’s camicie were made from the finest and most expensive linens. When in 1490 Isabella wed Francesco II Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua, and went to live with her husband, her dowry included garments including a black velvet gown covered in jewels, fifty gowns of cloth of gold and gold brocade, as well as a number of fine chemises worth over a hundred ducats each [3]. Her post-mortem inventory taken in 1539 shows that the marchesa continued to wear many fine and expensive examples of these garments throughout her life, as the chemises are described as being made from fabrics such as cambric or lawn [4]. Cambric was high-quality linen fabric of a plain even weave that was very white and soft, while lawn was a transparent linen woven of very fine thread [5]. In addition, some garments are described as being ‘wrought with black silk around the collar’, referring to blackwork, a style of intricate embroidery seen on this example of a men’s shirt from the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 2) [6]. Other entries in the inventory describe garments such as ‘a large cambric chemise, wrought with gold’, the embroidery here perhaps resembling the gold detail seen on the neckline of a chemise on another of Titian’s subjects (Fig. 3) [7]. There are several camicie in Isabella’s inventory that are also described as being finished along the collars and cuffs with silk threads of various colours such as white, turquoise, and various shades of red from ‘bright red’, to crimson, to ‘mulberry red’ [8].
Fig. 2 Shirt, English, ca. 1540. Linen, linen thread, silk thread. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, T.112-1972.
Fig. 3 Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), ca. 1510-15. Violante. Oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum ©KHM-Museumsverband.
In the sixteenth century smocks and shirts started to become visible, peeking out from the outer garments that covered them at the neck and cuffs. Evidence of Isabella’s elaborately embroidered camicie, some of which were probably sent to Titian to complete his work, are therefore visible in the portrait of the marchesa [9]. This garment, along with the others worn in the portrait, helped to materially and visually proclaim Isabella’s wealth and status, and her position as a connoisseur of renaissance fashion.
Sarah Bendall, Australian Catholic University
Notes
[1] ^ Sarah Cockram, “Isabella d’Este’s Sartorial Politics,” in Sartorial Politics in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning Women, ed. Erin Griffey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 35.
[2] ^ Georges Vigarello, Concepts of cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 60.
[3] ^ Christine Shaw, Isabella d’Este: A Renaissance Princess (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), 26.
[4] ^ The chemises are described as being of 'cambralia' (cambric) or 'di tela di renso' (fine Rheims linen, probably lawn). See: Odoardo Stivini, Le Collezioni Gonzaga: L’inventario dei beni del 1540–1542, ed. Daniela Ferrari (Milan: Silvana, 2003), 234, 240.
[5] ^ Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies, The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing sixteenth-century dress (London: Batsford, 2006), 36.
[6] ^ 'una camisa di tela batiza lavorada di seda negra, inzipado il colar' in Stivini, Le Collezioni Gonzaga, 234.
[7] ^ 'una camisa de cambraglia granda, lavorada de oro' in Stivini, Le Collezioni Gonzaga, 234.
[8] ^ 'una camisa de cambraglia granda, lavorada de oro' in Stivini, Le Collezioni Gonzaga, 240.
[9] ^ Sally Hickson, "To see ourselves as others see us’: Giovanni Francesco Zaninello of Ferrara and the portrait of Isabella d’Este by Francesco Francia", Renaissance Studies, 23, 3 (2009): 306.
