Spanish heels and golden brocade: Isabella visits Venice
In May of 1493 Isabella was en route to Venice. Invited by the city’s Doge to attend that year’s Sensa celebrations, she would also represent her husband before the Collegio (Venice’s main governing council). Centred around Ascension Day, the two-week-long Sensa was a significant Venetian civic and religious festival [1]. It celebrated the Doge’s symbolic marriage to the sea, and was marked also with a famous fair in Piazza San Marco, an opportunity both to see, and to be seen in, the latest fashions (Fig. 1) [2]. Stopped in Ferrara on 7 May, Isabella wrote to her agent Alberto da Bologna, requesting several items of furnishings and clothes:
Alberto, … because the cover for our sediale is not good enough for Venice we wish you to send one of … golden brocade … and we wish you to send three pairs of pianelle de Spagna, the highest that there are. The key for the chest where they are is next to the large mirror [3].
Isabella’s comment that the cover of her sediale was not ‘good enough’ to suffice for Venice neatly illustrates the significance of textiles and attire. Shoes, such as the pianelle referenced here, although partly hidden by women’s skirts, were a significant part of women’s public image. Their design, as well as the fact and extent of their visibility, could communicate much about their wearer’s status [4]. And despite that Titian’s portrait does not show Isabella’s footwear, her letter suggests that the golden brocade and all of the items requested were integral to projecting a suitable public image of the marchesa, and by extension of her husband and of Mantua.
Fig. 1 Jost Amman, Procession of the Doge to the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, with a View of Venice, ca. 1565 (detail). Woodcut, third state. 75.6 x 186.7 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art CC0 1.0.
Amman’s woodcut shows the Ducal procession and, in the background on the left, the fair stalls in Piazza San Marco.
Fig. 2 Pianelle, Venice ca. 1600. Wood and carved and stamped leather, 36.5cm (h). Stockholm, Livrustkammaren, 17550 (5787: 97) © Livrustkammaren (CC BY-SA).
The term pianelle refers to a type of heeled platform shoe highly fashionable in the Italian city-states, and in Spain, from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries (Figs. 2, 3, & 6). Called in English chopines, pianelle was a designation used throughout Italy, but the shoes were also known by regional terms such as cipre, zibre or solee in Milan, pantofole in Ferrara, and tapine in Naples [5]. In Venice the common terms were zoccoli or calcagnini, the latter referring specifically to a style of pianelle that was open at the back (Fig. 2) [6].
Pianelle were fashionable throughout the Italian peninsula, and Venetian women were famed for favouring shoes of extreme heights. Travelling in Venice in 1494, Milanese Canon Pietro Casola reported seeing Venetian women with heels of half a Milanese braccia (a little under 30 centimetres); a pair of Venetian pianelle dated to 1600 measure an unwieldy thirty-five centimetres in height (Fig. 2) [7]. The style maintained its fashionable status in Venice into the early seventeenth century, when the English traveller Thomas Coryat commented on the ‘great height’ and ornate decoration of these ‘ridiculous instruments’, many of which ‘[were] curiously painted; some also … fairley gilt’ [8]. At least one sixteenth-century Venetian, the physician Michelangelo Biondo, bemoaned the particular extravagance of pianelle worn by Venetian women ‘for festivals and special days’ that were ‘of velvet and satin of various colours and made in the strangest forms with slashes, stripes, and laces’ [9]. Another pair of Venetian-manufactured pianelle, dated to the early seventeenth century perhaps gives some idea of the kind of ornate decoration Coryat described (Fig. 3). Crafted from wood covered with green silk velvet, and ornamented with silver-gilt lace, the inner soles of the slippers are of gilded stamped leather.
This ornamentation was not a new fashion, nor one limited to Venice. As early as 1427 Franciscan preacher Bernardino da Siena had lamented the material cost of ‘beautifully painted’ pianelle [10]. Bernardino’s concerns were raised within broader contemporary discourses of appropriate and unfitting consumption and display that regularly critiqued pianelle as a site of female immodesty and excess. Beyond the problem of costliness, a woman’s hidden feet were considered a signal of her chastity, while exposed feet or shoes might reveal the opposite [11]. So, a woman’s shoes had a status somewhat analogous to that of her undergarments, and their display or concealment contributed to perceptions of her moral standing [12]. As well as being critiqued by clerics, pianelle were also the target of sumptuary legislation in many Italian city-states. These laws sought to codify and curb how wealth and consumption might be used to demonstrate status and honour. In Venice, legislation had regulated women’s footwear from at least 1430, when a law banned the use and the manufacture of shoes higher than half a quarto, or about nine centimetres [13].
Aged about nineteen in 1493, and already Marchesa of Mantua for three years, Isabella was already attentive to sourcing fashion-forward, luxurious items [14]. And although Isabella’s shoes are not visible, Titian’s portrait shows, anachronistically, an even younger Isabella evidently aware of the importance of carefully curating her clothing, and highly attentive to the fashions of the 1530s. Her perception of the need for high pianelle might have related simply to contemporary fashions. But her request acknowledged that other potentially publicly visible textiles weren’t fitting for Venice – nothing less than golden brocade would do. Isabella’s Spanish pianelle, like her other sartorial choices, were a significant element of how she wished to present and assert herself in Venice, and in Mantua.
Fig. 3 Pair of chopines. Venice, ca. 1600-1620. Wood, leather, silk velvet, silk ribbon, silver-gilt thread, gilt metal, bobbin lace. 20.5 cm x 10.7 x 9 cm. London, Victoria & Albert Museum, 929&A-1901.
Given her reputation and status, Isabella’s shoes would have been of the most fashion-forward and opulent variety. But a little curiously, given the pervasive presence of pianelle in the wardrobe inventories and wedding corredi of other elite women, the extant inventories of Isabella’s possessions do not reference shoes [15]. The gap probably results from the compilation of the Gonzaga inventories three years after Isabella’s death. Nevertheless, Isabella’s reference to her pianelle de Spagna suggests that her shoe collection was in keeping with trends of the day, and wardrobe inventories of Isabella’s contemporaries together with extant shoes shed some light on how Isabella’s pianelle probably looked.
Due to both stylistic preference and differences in manufacture and materials, Spanish heels were shaped differently to their Italian counterparts (Fig. 4). They tended to be highly ornamented and, especially by the sixteenth century, were very commonly made with tooled or gilded leather [16]. Isabella’s reference to pianelle de Spagna could indicate the provenance of the shoes or of their materials – the Spanish city of Valencia was regarded as producing the best leather at the time, and Isabella certainly requested Valencian leathergoods in other instances [17]. The guardaroba of her sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia (1480 – 1519) lists thirty-three pairs of pianelle (plus one partner-less shoe) of various colours [18]. Satin or velvet were used for six pairs. The remaining twenty-seven were described as coming from Valencia (venute da Valentia) and as being ‘of gilded and painted leathers’ (de Corame dorato e pintato) [19].
Fig. 4 Pair of chopines. Spain, ca. 1580-1620. Cork and silk damask, with stamped decoration on the insole. 16 cm x 10 cm x 12.5 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.419&A-1913. Given by Messrs Harrods Ltd.
Heel height is a little more difficult to assess. Isabella clearly owned shoes of varied heights, and her request for the three highest suggests that choice of height was a deliberate statement. It could also be problematic. Vianello has argued that by the late sixteenth century the use of extremely high pianelle was at least sometimes perceived in Italy as correlated with prostitution, so that heel height could communicate the apparent virtue (or lack thereof) of the wearer [20]. Lower heels remained a relatively acceptable form of footwear among elite women [21]. In fact, around 1490, Vittore Carpaccio painted a pair of low platform-heeled shoes beside the bed of a dreaming Saint Ursula (Figs. 5 & 6). Part of a narrative cycle depicting the legend of Saint Ursula in contemporary settings and fashions, and intended for a Venetian audience, the shoes reflect one type of footwear commonly worn by the city’s elites. Ursula was a paragon of virginal martyrdom, and these low platforms confirm that some height was not unequivocally indicative of disrepute. Likewise, sumptuary legislation limited heels to heights that civic leaders deemed appropriate. Florentine provisioni of 1477, for instance, limited heels to one palmo, or handbreadth (about ten centimetres), similar to an earlier, fourteenth-century law that had permitted roughly three and a half inches [22]. Likewise in Venice in 1430, half a quarta (about nine centimetres) was acceptable [23]. The Venetian slippers in Figure 3, although manufactured almost two centuries later, give some indication of how pianelle of these acceptable heights looked – these shoes are nine centimetres in height.
The widespread presence of pianelle in elite inventories shows that they had become a necessary part of the persona of an elite woman. Similar to Lucrezia Borgia’s guardaroba, the shoe collection listed in the 1491 trousseau of Bianca Maria Sforza (1472 – 1510) included twenty-four pairs of pianelle made from cloth of gold, or from variously coloured velvets, and decorated with silver ornaments [24]. For the period after Isabella’s death in 1539, the wardrobe accounts of Eleonora of Toledo (1519 – 1562), wife of Cosimo I de’Medici, record orders for sixty-three pairs of pianelle, again mostly in velvets of varied colours, especially red, and one pair in silver leather [25]. The place of pianelle as essential to noblewomen was defined in part in the way that sumptuary legislation frequently codified the acceptable ornamentation of pianelle on a status scale. From the mid-fourteenth century, Lucchese legislation prevented servant women from wearing heeled shoes with gold, silver or tinsel ornamentation such as the decorations visible in the pianelle in Figure 3, which are trimmed with silk ribbon and silver gilt lace; the laws were more lenient for women of other classes [26]. A Pisan law prevented servant women from wearing heeled shoes at all [27], while in Foligno in the first half of the sixteenth century, elite women were permitted to wear shoes of any colour and material, however the well-to-do were allowed to wear shoes with wool uppers, but not silk, and those further down the social scale were not permitted to use any textiles, only leather [28]. This sort of legislation sought to remove any ambiguity that could threaten social hierarchy by ensuring that all clothing items reflected and perpetuated status boundaries [29]. Moreover, as well as the opulent materials of the shoes themselves being significant, their height required extra length in women’s skirts in order to ensure that the shoes remained appropriately concealed. Longer skirts required greater quantities of sumptuous fabrics, and thereby provided a further opportunity to demonstrate the wealth of the wearer. This, too, was a consistent complaint of legislation that restricted the height of pianelle [30].
Fig. 5 Vittore Carpaccio, 1495. Dream of Saint Ursula. Tempera and oil on canvas, 274cm x 267cm. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Fig. 6 Ursula’s pianelle. Detail of Carpaccio, Dream of Saint Ursula.
Beyond a desire to make a statement, Isabella’s letter shows the significance of pianelle as a form of moveable wealth, for women especially. She instructed Alberto that he would find her pianelle in a locked chest, and where to find its key [31]. Other textiles, clothing and accessories would have been similarly protected. But the specific term used by Isabella – forzero – refers to lockable chests (sometimes also called cassone), that were often themselves elaborately decorated with paintings or wood inlay, and used for storing precious items including jewels and money, or sometimes documents. Isabella’s pianelle were apparently prized and guarded. Such careful storage of precious items was recommended in conduct literature on household management. One later treatise, Piccolomini’s Della institutione della felice vita dell’uomo nato nobile e in città libera, first printed in 1542, recommended that within the household, ‘the clothing of each [family member] has to have a different place … As to [the wife’s] ornaments, one place is appropriate for her dresses, another for a ring or jewel, or necklace, or bracelet, or similar expensive things which should be kept in the most secret place in the lady’s bedchamber’ [32].
The Gonzaga household inventories suggest similar attitudes. While no shoes are listed among Isabella’s belongings, over twenty pairs of ‘shoes and boots in various forms’ were included in the inventory of Isabella’s son Duke Federico II Gonzaga’s studio. One set stands out: ‘one pair of women’s pantofole [pianelle], tall, worked’. All were listed together in the inventory between ‘curiosities’: On one side, various marine animal skins, and on the other weaponry [33]. Most of the footwear is described as being Turkish or Moorish in style, most likely included for their provenance or opulent appearance: at least some extant pairs of later Middle Eastern and Turkish heeled shoes show use of opulent materials including mother-of-pearl [34]. Irrespective of the origins of the pantofole, their description as tall and worked implies ornament and expense [35]. These were curiosities and collectibles to be displayed as much as – if not more than – items to be worn.
The structure of some of the guardaroba inventories already mentioned hints at the same. Lucrezia Borgia’s guardaroba opened with descriptions of her clothing, then moved to bedroom and other household furnishings before addressing personal accessories and finally precious items of gold and silver. Her thirty-three pairs of pianelle (‘tapine’) and fifty pairs of shoes (‘scarpe’) are listed after belts (‘cinti’) – items that were often made of expensive materials including silk, silver and gold [36] – and directly before her gold, glass- and silverware (‘Taze d’oro’, ‘Coppe di vetro’, ‘Argenti’). This ordering isn’t true of all inventories. It does, though, highlight the elite household’s conceptualisation of elaborate, luxury footwear as items of display and personal wealth [37].
Isabella’s activities in Venice in 1493 included significant public outings, political and festive. She arrived on 14 May to be greeted at the convent of Santa Croce by the Doge who ‘led [her] to his bucentaur [ceremonial barge] which was loaded with gentlemen and ladies… all richly attired and glittering with jewels’ [38]. On the fifteenth, she represented her husband in Venice’s Collegio, before attending Vespers at San Marco. The following day she attended the festivities for Venice’s annual marriage to the sea [39]. Isabella was clearly highly conscious of her public role representing her husband and Mantua, writing to Francesco that: ‘the Doge and Signory are to give me an audience, and I will reply as you desired to the best of my ability’ [40]. Although Titian’s portrait shows Isabella only from the waist up, pianelle together with other accessories and clothing items were an important aspect of public image and self-assertion for women. Isabella’s request for her highest, Spanish pianelle among items necessary for Venice is another instance of her active curation of physical appearance in a political setting.
Jennifer McFarland, University of Melbourne
NOTES
[1] ^ Julia Mary Cartwright, Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539: a study of the Renaissance, Vol. 1 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1915), 97. On the ritual and festivities of the Sensa see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 119-34.
[2] ^ Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 177-84.
[3] ^ Letter 160 (Copialettera 3, 47v), 7 May 1493 Isabella to Alberto de Bononia.
[4] ^ Michelle A. Laughran and Andrea Vianello, “‘Grandissima Gratia’: The Power of Italian Renaissance Shoes as Intimate Wear,“ in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed. Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Andrea Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan? The Venetian chopine in the Renaissance,” in Shoes: A history from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006), 76-93.
[5] ^ Maria Giuseppina Muzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes: Making and wearing in medieval Italy,” in Shoes: A history from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006), 50.
[6] ^ Catherine Kovesi, “Brought to Heel? A Short History of Failed Attempts to Bring Down the High-Heeled Shoe in Venice and Beyond,” Vestoj 6 (2015), 66.
[7] ^ Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494, trans. M. Margaret Newett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1907), 144; Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan?,” 82.
[8] ^ Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), vol I:400.
[9] ^ Cited and translated in Laughran and Vianello, “‘Grandissima Gratia’,” 262.
[10] ^ Cited in Michelle O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes: Commission, Cost, and Meaning in Renaissance Footwear,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 48-960.
[11] ^ Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes,” 54.
[12] ^ Laughran and Vianello, “‘Grandissima Gratia’“; and see also Elizabeth Semmelhack, “Above the rest: chopines as trans-Mediterranean fashion,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 14, 2 (2013), 134.
[13] ^ Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200-1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 51-52.
[14] ^ On Isabella’s methods of sourcing fashions, see Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 245-73 and also Deanna Shemek’s forthcoming essay on this site.
[15] ^ The 1542 Gonzaga inventories are published in: Daniella Ferrari (ed.), Le collezioni Gonzaga: L’inventario dei beni del 1540-1542 (Milano: Silvana, 2003). The sections relevant to Isabella include the items that by 1542 were in the possession of her daughter-in-law Margarita Palaeologa, and the inventory of Isabella’s famous grotta.
[16] ^ On the distinctiveness of Italian and Spanish forms of pianelle, see Semmelhack, "A Trans-Mediterranean Fashion".
[17] ^ Michelle O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes,” 48-9'; Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 267-9.
[18] ^ Luca Beltrami (ed.), La guardaroba di Lucrezia Borgia: dall'Archivio di Stato di Modena (Milano : Tip. Umberto Allegretti, 1903), 84-5.
[19] ^ Ibid., 84. On Spanish leather see O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes,” 48-9.
[20] ^ Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan?,” 88.
[21] ^ Ibid., 82-4.
[22] ^ O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes,” 65, and n83; Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes,” 61.
[23] ^ Kovesi, “Brought to Heel?”, 65.
[24] ^ A. Cerruti, “Il corredo nuziale di Bianca M. Sforza-Visconti: Sposa dell’imperatore Massimiliano I,” Archivio storico lombardo, II (1875): 64.
[25] ^ Roberta Orsa Landini and Bruna Niccoli, Moda a Firenze, 1540-1580: lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza (Firenze: Pagliai Polistampa, 2005), 143.
[26] ^ Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law, 88.
[27] ^ Ibid.
[28] ^ Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes”, 59-60.
[29] ^ Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan?,” 81-2; Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes,” 54.
[30] ^ Semmelhack, “Above the rest,” 133-4 and 140-1, n.10.
[31] ^ Letter 160 (Copialettera 3, 47v), 7 May 1493 Isabella to Alberto de Bononia.
[32] ^ Cited and translated in Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004), 100.
[33] ^ Daniela Ferrari (ed.), Le collezioni Gonzaga: l'inventario dei beni del 1540-1542, 314.
[34] ^ See Semmelhack,”Above the rest,” 131-2, and 140n7.
[35] ^ For an excellent reconstruction of the costs of luxury footwear, see O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes,” 57-71.
[36] ^ Sandra Cavallo, ‘The Artisan’s Casa’ in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: V&A, 2006), 72.
[37] ^ O’Malley, “A Pair of Little Gilded Shoes”.
[38] ^ Isabella to Francesco, translated in Cartwritght, Isabella d’Este, vol. 1: 98.
[39] ^ Ibid., 99.
[40] ^ Ibid.
Patricia Lurati