The Florence Files:  Florentine 1516: Lady with a basket of Spindles by Jacopo Pontormo
Recreated by La Signora Onorata Katerina da Brescia.

I am trying to organise my thoughts better these days, giving my research, thought processes and reasons for why I do what I do rather than keeping it all in my head...

Hopefully this will help others in constructing their garb (whether it serves to show what to do... or what not to do)!

Ah, the usual panic of 'what shall I wear', with only 4 weeks to go until Festival. Something cool, something easily washed (for camping and tourneys) from existing mateial stash:
While there are so many wonderful outfits on my wishlist, I am trying to concentrate of florentine garb these days.

Right is a sample of some cotton furniture material, I had managed to buy on sale at Spotlight, last year. It was easy to wash and should be cool, especially if I line it with linen. I had some lavender linen in my material stash.

From the many early 16thC Florentine portraits I had, Lady with a Basket of Spindles by Jacopo Pontormo (Left) was one of the few with patterned material. Many of the others have plain materials.

So, I had a portrait to model my gowne on, and materials.

The gown left has a fitted body with a high waist and voluminous 2 part sleeves with the lower half being above the elbow - all in the same colour. The shoulder straps sit on the very edge of the shoulder. The front neckline is square.

Though Spanish (and a little later in the 16thC), I have found this extant piece of 16thC material (Spain fragment 1575-1600 Silk & linen Brocatelle from LACMA) that shows a similar colour combination.

I have a few sources for 16thC patterns:

  • Milanese Tailor's Handbook (Italian)
  • Alcega's Tailor's Pattern Book. (Spanish)
  • Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion (English mainly)

Unfortunately these are from the middle to late 16th C. To date, I have not found pattern books or (wouldn't it be lovely) extant examples of early 16th C (esp. Florentine) gowns!

Also, I have a wonderful picture of Eleanor de Toledo's burial gown (from goldsword.com). Eleanor married Cosimo d'Medici in 1539 and resided in Florence. She died in 1562. This gives a time line of the early to middle 16thC.

This is the closest I have to any extant gown of the early 16thC in Florence. I have interpretted my pattern based on this. (above Right) showing the pattern lines (in blue).
Looking at other (non Florentine portraits) such as Bartolomeo Veneto's Portrait of a Young Lady, 1520-1530 (left) show seam lines that would appear to be similar to the front skirt pattern of Eleanor de Toledo. (below)

(A Diary for this dress can be found here)
Though not Florentine, it seems to suggest that a simlar pattern construction was possibly used, in Italy, 30 - 40 years earlier than Eleanor's burial dress. So I feel it is not impossible to think that a similar method could have been used for the gown in Portomo's portrait.

The other side of this theory is the very economical use of available material. Below is a sketch of the pattern layout I was to cut from the material I had (I folded the material in half to give a 58 cm 'loom width' represented in the pattern layout. It appears that narrower (than modern) loom widths were used in the 16th C.

I decided to cut the front skirt panels on the fold, to preserve the pattern (modern sensibilities?). The 2 side gores attatch to the front panels. I tried, as much as possible, to match bias seams (on gores) with straight edges and selvages of other skirt pieces. Alcega promotes this (see farthingale) as it will reduce the drop of the skirt and give less stretch on the seams.
I also cut the back panel on the fold, for the same reason. The small gore, cut from the top of the skirt, was flipped and sewn onto the bottom of the back skirt panel.

This gave a skirt with a wide hem width, less bulk to sew in at the waist and very economical use of material. I used 1.5 m less than I would have used on my 'standard' skirts of 2 panels of 140cm wide material sewn into a tube. Wahoo!


Far L: cutting the small gore from the back


L: Where the gore goes on the back panel
Above: the side front gore - how it attatches to the back pieces (the front panel would be on the far right)

Left: the skirt pattern pieces all pinned together (minus the front panels).

Below is a sketch of how the pattern pieces were sewn together.

The first is half of the pinned pattern (on the left) here. The second shows where the front panels attatch to this (it would not fit in the photo left).

 

Total amount of material required for the skirt: (2x 125cm of full width) = 2.5 m + 125 cm of half the width (for the front gores). The other half of this was used for cutting other pattern pieces from the lower half of the sleeves.

Attatching the skirt:
Firstly to make the bodice.

 


Gown Body:
Below are some examples of contemporary paintings (mostly Florentine) showing examples of gown 'body''. These show a rounded back, square fronted neckline. Waists could be waist level or higher. Most sleeves seem to be tied to the body at this time.

Bacchiacca Preaching of St John the Baptist , 1520

Fra Bartolomeo, The Deposition 1515

Palmo Vecchio The Three Sisters, 1515

Many contemporary portraits show the skirt pleated into the 'body'. This can be seen in the examples, right:
Raphael's Lady with a Unicorn and Giuliano Bugiardini's Portrait of a Young Woman, 1525. The front skirt of the extant gown of Eleanor de Toledo appears to have been pleated.
This is the method I was to use to attatch the skirt.
Again, these also show waistlines at the natural waistline or higher. The shoulder seam can be seen to be 'on the shoulder'.
Eleanor de Toledo's gown shows a side-back lacing. This is seen in many Italian portraits. There is no front opening in most of the portraits. The 2 options are side or side-back. I decided to use a side-back lacing.

With my dear hubby's help, I now have a dress dummy. This will make my life easier to make patterns. It has been many years since I have had an accurate one on which to make a toile. This is my first real attempt at fully toiling a gown and not using an existing pattern, or a calculated one as drafted in modern terms. With this gown, I tried to use methods that were more plausible for the time.

Toiling the back...

the front...

making the wider neckline back

and the wider neckline at front.

Janet Arnold's Pattern of Fashion (though later 16th C and English) show linings being often made of linen and are hand sewn (blind stitch) to the body. Thanks to some sage advice, it was suggested that this is a more likely method used at the time. (left).
Right is the knife pleating for the skirt being attatched to the body of the gown.

SLEEVES:

The original painting of Pontormo's shows what looks like pleating for the sleeve. For this gown, it was to be more practical for camping and tourney, so I used a less voluminous sleeve. I tried pleating, but there was insufficient material at the sleeve head to give decent pleats. Honestly, they just looked plain silly... and I must admit, I prefer cartridge pleating.
An example of contemporary (Venician) cartridge pleated sleeves can be seen to the left (Vecchio's The Three Sisters).
Right are the final sleeves (1: from back/ 2: from front.)

Some pictures of the almost finished gown: Left

Right: To finish, some more hand-sewn eyelets on the side-back openings, with a spiral lacing.

Finally... though I wore this dress at Festival, I did not get any pictures. I wore it to the Baronial Championship tourney.

 

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