Federico Gonzaga Fashionista: Renaissance Men’s Fashion and Isabella’s Son
Renaissance men cut fashionable figures at court. Throughout the Italian peninsula, the display of decorously clothed male bodies remained fundamental to the operations of power, even if the extent to which ostentation was enthusiastically endorsed or subtly disavowed certainly varied. Indeed, Renaissance power depended on rulers being suitably dressed, and thus the political import of men’s adornment and attire can hardly be overstated. These men were assiduously admired, inspected, and evaluated. Their clothes must be thought of not as frivolous fashion, but rather as deadly serious and deeply significant material culture that embodied nobility and authority [1].
Clothing and adornment communicated and fashioned hierarchy and status, and they were regulated by sumptuary laws, decrees dictating, or at least recommending, who precisely could wear garments and accessories of particular colours, materials, and lengths [2]. Though trendsetting men abounded, we should avoid projecting twenty-first-century ideals about fashion choice and individual identity onto the past. Choices and styles were situated within corporate networks and shared display, even if fashion is conventionally conceptualised as driven by personal or individual desire and identity. When evaluating male dress and adornment, moreover, we must endeavour to think beyond the so-called ‘great masculine renunciation of fashion’, modernity’s general, though in some ways illusory, rejection of colour and ornamentation in men’s dress. For the Renaissance man, fashion never went out of fashion [3].
Fig. 1 Francesco Francia, Federico Gonzaga, 1510. Tempera on wood, 47.9 x 35.6cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.40.638.
These men were increasingly aware of the degree to which fashion changed over time, as one remarkable sixteenth-century German reveals. Matthäus Schwarz, an accountant in the Fugger firm of Augsburg, commissioned from a series of artists a Klaidungsbüchlein (Little Book of Clothes) that recorded the apparel worn throughout his life, as he progressed from youth to manhood. Schwarz was a discerning fashion critic who attended closely to his clothes’ materiality, distinguishing, for example, between fabrics’ cuts and weaves. His most audacious and flamboyant outfits were intended for audiences of other men. ‘All my days I enjoyed being with old people’, Matthäus confessed at the age of twenty-three, ‘and it was a great pleasure for me to hear their replies to my questions. And among other subjects we would also get to talk about clothing and styles of dress, as they change daily’. Images of decades-old clothing ‘greatly surprised’ Matthäus and ‘seemed a strange thing to me in our time’ [4]. Audiences in Isabella d’Este’s hometown of Ferrara were similarly astonished in 1559 by one of her younger (illegitimate) brothers – though by then Isabella had been deceased for two decades. The eighty-two-year-old Giulio d’Este was finally a free man, having been released from jail after fifty-three years of imprisonment for having conspired against his and Isabella’s brother, Duke Alfonso d’Este. The newly liberated Giulio astonished onlookers with his good health, but even more so, chroniclers tell us, with his French fashions now fifty years out of date [5].
From a young age, Isabella’s d’Este son and heir Federico Gonzaga (1500-1540) was exceedingly aware of his appearance. Federico, as we shall see, was assuredly his mother’s son. From the age of ten to twelve, Federico had resided at the court of Pope Julius II, as a hostage in his father’s stead. At the Vatican, Federico dined in one of the Stanze newly painted by Raphael, viewed Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in progress, and even tried to acquire for his mother the recently unearthed Laocoön sculpture. On his way to Rome, Federico sat in Bologna for a portrait with Francesco Francia. The painting was sent to Mantua, to console Isabella, and is now the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1) [6]. Francia’s picture beguiled no less a critic than Ernest Hemingway, who parsed the painting in an infamous New Yorker interview, disarmingly identifying in its trees the sort of thing ‘we always have…when we write’ [7].
When Isabella saw Francia’s portrait of Federico, however, she complained that the boy’s hair was too blond. (Princes had for decades been praised for and depicted with blond hair, but black hair was becoming intermittently fashionable at court. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Francia, trying to keep up with such trends). It is unclear if Francia tinted Federico’s hair once it was sent back to him, though he seems to have altered the boy’s clothing. Technical evidence confirms that both the lustrous black garment with delicate gold embroidery at the neck, and the collar of the vigorously pleated shirt, were lowered at some point. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, in fact, similarly low-cut, ornamented linen shirts were conspicuously displayed by courtly men, and in their portraits, on both sides of the Alps. They were much in fashion, and Gonzaga men appreciated these linen garments as key components of a stylish ensemble. In 1495, Federico’s father Francesco had written to his wife Isabella d’Este, in advance of a meeting with King Charles VIII of France, to request that she send him straight away his finest array: ‘our two beautiful tunics, and two beautiful caps, and the two doublets [brocaded with] drawn gold, and a few beautiful, worked linen shirts and a variety of perfumes’ [8].
In Francia’s portrait, the young Federico delicately holds a short sword or dagger. Courtly men throughout Europe bore similar arms – and were customarily depicted doing so. These were essential symbols and embodiments of normative masculinity (which was often both elegant and aggressive), but they were dashing fashion accessories for cocksure men [9]. Swords and other weapons threatened violence, of course. Both because their possession and display were assiduously regulated, and because they often visibly and conspicuously changed the way men walked, swords dynamically advertised noble status. In Titian’s portrait of Federico painted two decades later (Fig. 2, now in the Museo del Prado), the sitter is girded with a longer sword, perhaps an estoc, which he subtly grasps. In both images, the sumptuously attired lord is armed, ready to wield his weapon if need be. Indeed, connections between courtly status and military prowess were playfully visualised in some of the earliest depictions of this Gonzaga prince. As a three-year-old, Federico had been drawn by Francesco Bonsignori in the outfit of a Swiss soldier [10]. The sketches clearly amused his father, and they also tell us something about the impact of foreign fashions around the turn of the century, in the midst of the Wars of Italy.
Fig. 2 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Federico Gonzaga, Ist Duke of Mantua, 1529. Oil on panel, 125 x 99cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, P000408.
In the Prado portrait painted by Titian, the almost-thirty-year-old, bearded marquis of Mantua is decidedly a man, no longer a boy. Federico sports a scintillating blue velvet upper-body garment with stunning golden embroidery around its hems and edges. A crimson codpiece pokes out, and in the centre of Federico’s chest – below and above the blue ribbons which fasten his outer robe – we glimpse a sliver of his doublet. This garment may be silk velvet as well, though of a lighter blue with rather matte surface effects. Titian focuses painterly attention on the delicate cuffs at Federico’s wrists – his right hand strokes a small dog who dutifully and charmingly paws at her master, while the left braces his sword. Depicting Federico affectionately petting his dog provided Titian the opportunity to show off his rings and additionally the creature’s soft fur. Indeed, Federico’s fingers sink into her fluffy, silky coat. Sarah Cockram has suggested that this may be Viola, who died giving birth, or another of the Gonzaga dogs immortalised in tombs and epitaphs [11]. Yet, opposite Viola or one of her canine friends, the sword at the ready by Federico’s side reminds us that as disarming and elegant as he seems, he is no less virile, confident, or aggressive. Sumptuous textiles, intricate ornamentation, a menacing weapon, and a lap dog all fashion Federico Gonzaga’s courtly masculinity in Titian’s portrait.
As a teenager, in the years between his depictions by Francia and Titian, Federico joined the retinue of King François I of France, once again a political pawn. The fifteen-year-old Italian prince and the twenty-one-year-old French king delighted in each other’s company and in novel fashions. An ambassador reported that when the two passed time in Vigevano, near Milan, the king instructed Federico how to dress as a French nobleman, or more precisely, as one of the royal courtiers. François
‘put his beret on his head at an angle and said that he [Federico] must wear berets of this type and cut his hair shorter in the manner that his Majesty had cut over the forehead, and my Lord most graciously said that tomorrow he would do so; His Majesty dressed him as a Frenchman…and while they “dressed up”, they chatted thus’ [12].
As friendly and fun as this fashion show seems, it was in no way frivolous. The stakes were high when lords tried on clothes, donned hats and cut their hair in foreign styles – whether of their own accord, when directed or coerced to do so, or anywhere in between. Renaissance men’s dress and fashion communicated alliance, submission, and domination. They sent dynamic and politically charged messages loud and clear.
Timothy McCall, Villanova University
* This is essay is adapted from Timothy McCall, ‘Male Dress’, in Early Modern Court Culture, ed. Erin Griffey (London: Routledge, 2021), 376-389.
[1] ^ Ulinka Rublack, ‘The Making of Appearances at the 1530 Augsburg Imperial Diet’, in Arrayed in Splendour: Art, Fashion and Textiles in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christoph Brachmann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 135-161; Timothy McCall, Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Men in Early Renaissance Italy (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022).
[2] ^ Most recently, see Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack, eds, The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[3] ^ Timothy McCall, ‘Materials for Renaissance Fashion’, Renaissance Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 1449-1464.
[4] ^ Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, eds., The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthäus & Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 226.
[5] ^ Giovanni Ricci, Il principe e la morte: Corpo, cuore, effigie nel Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 44.
[6] ^ Andrea Bayer, ‘Francesco Francia’s Portrait of Federico Gonzaga and the Letters that Surround It’, Artibus et Historiae 40, no. 80 (2019): 95-104; McCall, Brilliant Bodies, 130-132.
[7] ^ Lilia Ross, ‘How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?’ New Yorker, May 13, 1950, 58.
[8] ^ Carolyn James, A Renaissance Marriage: The Political and Personal Alliance of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, 1490–1519 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 85-86.
[9] ^ Angus Patterson, Fashion and Armour in Renaissance Europe: Proud Lookes and Brave Attire (London: V&A Publishing, 2009).
[10] ^ Clifford Brown, ‘Francesco Bonsignori: Painter to the Gonzaga Court – New Documents’, Atti e memorie della Accademia Virgiliana di Mantova, 47 (1979): 85-87.
[11] ^ Sarah Cockram, ‘Sleeve Cat and Lap Dog: Affection, Aesthetics and Proximity to Companion Animals in Renaissance Mantua’, in Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity, ed. Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells (London: Routledge, 2017), 49-51.
[12] ^ Evelyn Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 254. I thank John Gagné for his perspective on this episode.
Jessica O’Leary