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| Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Isabelle de Borchgrave (after a painting by an unknown artist). Photo: Andreas von Einseidel. |
Clothing as a metaphor for the dream (or nightmare) of
transformation was central to the society of Renaissance Florence from
Boccaccio to Machiavelli. Its citizens wrestled daily with self-identity,
appearance, and display [in this] socioeconomic milieu in which Botticelli,
Brunelleschi, and Masaccio worked and the Medici ruled, where rich customers
publicly demonstrated their social prestige by patronising recognised artists.
– Carole Collier Frick, Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and
Fine Clothing
He will be the original Medici man,
he will be called Il Vecchio (the Elder), he will be named pater patriae (Father of the Nation) but at this particular Saturday,
on September 7, 1433, when Cosimo de’ Medici is making his way through the
Piazza della Signoria in Florence, he is just simply the richest man in the
world.
For all his florins – and the new learning
from the ancient human spirit, the great beauty, and the corrupt power that all
this wealth was generating during early Renaissance – Cosimo never really
reckoned on the historical ambush which awaited him that morning at the Palazzo
Vecchio. For all he knew he had been called to appear before the City Council,
to encounter a multiple of his worst political enemies. Instead, he was told to
follow a guard up the narrow steps of the building’s ninety-four metres tall
Arnolfo Tower. Somewhere between the one-handed clock and the topmost point a
door was opened and Cosimo was pushed into the infamous prison cell the
Alberghettino.
Through the window slit Cosimo
overlooked his fantastic city – as described by Christopher Hibbert in The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici
– “of squares and towers, of busy, narrow, twisting streets, of fortress-like
palaces with massive stone walls and overhanging balconies, of old churches
whose façades were covered with geometrical patterns in black and white and
green and pink, of abbeys and convents, nunneries, hospitals and crowded
tenements, all enclosed by a high brick and stone crenelated wall behind which
the countryside stretched to the green surrounding hills. Inside that long wall
there were well over 50,000 inhabitants, less than there were in Paris, Naples,
Venice and Milan, but more than in most other European cities, including London
– though it was impossible to be sure of the exact number, births being
recorded by the haphazard method of dropping beans into a box, a black bean for
a boy, a white one for a girl.”
Brunelleschi’s cap for Santa Maria
del Flore was under way a few minutes’ walk from where Cosimo was held captive.
Charged with treason, Cosimo feared that the guards would hurl him out of the
window or that his food would be poisoned or that the Florentines would agree
on having him executed. But the people of the city liked their Renaissance man
with the woodpecker nose and the simple clothes he wore, they liked the stark modesty
of his person and the sumptuousness of his patronage of the arts and the
Church, and the city-state relied on the Medici cloth industry and the Medici bank,
the largest in the world with branches across Europe. In addition to that, the
guards enjoyed his bribes that were shed around in plentiful amounts. After
twenty days in prison Cosimo was free to leave the “Little Inn” for a life in
exile. He made his return to Florence in 1434. The year marks the beginning of the
grandiosity of the Medici principate.
After a thousand years in a lustless
darkness of heavenly issues and shapeless smocks came the Renaissance with its
interest in the achievements and capabilities of human beings, and likewise its
focus on the uniqueness of the personal self and how it was to be presented.
“Outward life, indeed, in the 15th
and the early part of the 16th centuries was polished and ennobled
as among no other people in the world,” explains Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
from 1878, the first account of its kind about quattrocento and cinquecento
Italy. “The costumes of the time, as given us by the Italian painters, are the
most convenient and the most pleasing to the eye which were then to be found in
Europe; but we cannot be sure if they represent the prevalent fashion, or if
they are faithfully reproduced by the artists. It is nevertheless beyond a
doubt that nowhere was so much importance attached to dress as in Italy.”
The costumes of the time, taken
from Renaissance paintings of the Medicis and interpreted, exaggerated and reborn
as full-size paper dresses and full-life sculptures, is what the Belgian artist
Isabelle de Borchgrave (b 1946) presents through her staggering trompe-l’oeil
techniques in Renaissance Fashion in
Paper: The Medici Family Outside the Frame, to be seen and so much enjoyed in
the vaults of the Royal Palace in Stockholm this winter. “My inspiration comes
from period dresses, but they are subject to my poetic license. I’m really an
artist; I sew with paint.” She really does.
Alberti talks about a divine force
that operates in great portraits (“which not only makes men present [but] the
face of a man who is already dead certainly lives a long life through painting”)
in his treatise On Painting (1435). Madame
de Borchrave brings that very power to life through painted paper. “I am very
pleased to be here at the Royal Armoury with the old stones and the mysterious
lighting. And it is like the Medicis are here – as if they have travelled from
five hundred years ago, and stopped here,” she muses.
“I love fashion, because in fashion
you can go into history. I always come back to the Medicis because I look at
that family as an artist, and we know that the Renaissance had the best
artists. I would like to give back what I receive when I am in front of a
fresco or a painting. I spend time and time and time in museums and love so much of the colours and the
trompe-l’oeil illusion of the paintings. My intention is to keep the spirit of
the elegant fibres.”
Italian dress was made of silk,
wool, cotton and linen, with linen closest to the body as the material for the
full-length camicia (a shift-like
garment), followed by layers of custom-made clothing in opulent, contrasting
fabrics which produced a fluid, graceful and dignified whole that was richly
decorated.
“Renaissance painters depict many
of these luxurious fabrics so realistically that one can identify them as
satins, cut velvets, or brocades, simply by looking at the pictures. These
fabrics were especially suited to the almost sculptural lines of fashions of
the Renaissance in Italy,” writes Phyllis Tortura in her Survey of Historic Costume. “Many of those fabrics utilised patterns
and decorative motifs that were Chinese, Indian, or Persian in origin, a
reflection of the close trading contacts between Italy and the Far East. Some
Renaissance painters are thought to have designed textiles; others sketched
textile designs to incorporate into their paintings.”
Museum Director Malin Grundberg,
who is also the producer of the show, says that they found Isabelle de
Borchgrave when they did research for another exhibition at the Hallwyl Museum
(a sister museum to the Royal Armoury) with the multi-talented artist Mariano
Fortuny’s legendary dresses from the first half of the 20th century,
the lusciously pleated Delphos gown and his and his wife Henriette’s other interpretations
of the fashions of ancient times. “Renaissance
Fashion in Paper: The Medici Family Outside the Frame is the story of some
of the members of the Medici family, in a chronological narrative that begins
with Il Vecchio, the Elder, and ends somewhere in the mid-1700s in the last
room,” Grundberg explains. “Not even the Armoury’s costume collection which, it
must be said, is otherwise one of the best in the world, comprises these types
of costumes from the Renaissance.”
Around 1490 Leonardo penned that “A
good painter has two chief objects to paint: man and the intention of his soul.
The former is easy, the latter hard.” In her book Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity, Paola
Tinagli describes how the nature of man was filtered through notions of an
ancient ideal by the Renaissance man: “The painters of Greece and Rome had
knowledge of these ‘secrets’ which Renaissance artists were trying to
rediscover. The search for the ideal is evident through this period, and is
manifested in the study for the proportions to be used in the representation of
the human body, in the design of buildings, in the plans for ideal cities.
Idealisation and selection of what is best in nature were necessary for the
painter in order to eliminate the imperfections of reality.”
“I have to dream a lot to make
others dream,” says de Borchgrave. Her Brussels studio is a huge space filled
with as many gifted specialists as a Parisian haute couture atelier. Each of
her sculptures takes four to eight weeks to bring out in considerable detail.
It is the elaborate elements together with the unspoken stuff of the trompe-l’oeil
magic that conveys us to the intention of the costumes in the Renaissance portraits.
She has created a minuscule “studio” for the show, and everything is in paper
of course (which you are allowed to touch, but only here), with rolls of
fabrics, and oversized Pritt glue sticks, scissors, brushes, pencils and a
sharpener. It looks like a charming scene from Jean de Brunhoff’s stories about
Babar the Elephant.
Oh well then, what’s a Medici ball
at the Royal Palace? Cosimo il Vecchio greets us in a simple costume (with a
row of ball buttons and a raised collar) that actually looks like a crinkly
paper costume. It goes from this to the highly bedecked paper Medicis, all
dressed to the nines.
Four kilometres of cheap pattern
paper is used each year in de Borchgrave’s studio to achieve the incredible
splendour of the pieces. Paper makes her adventurous. “I play with paper, it
was my first medium as a child. It’s a very inexpensive material, so you can
use a lot of it and cut it without fear, unlike a canvas,” she told The Washington Post (June 22, 2012). “When
I was very young my mother took me to museums. I was charmed by Manet’s Le Déjuner sur l’herbe [1863] and the
colours – the green, the white, the black spots. As a child all I could see was
the grass, the flowers and the animals at the bottom of the paintings. Little
by little I could see the people, the costumes, the space. I discovered dresses
through painting, and what I liked was the shape, the sculpture, the colour,
the details.”
Portrait of a Lady at a Window (1470–75)
is a painting by Sandro Botticelli, one of the greatest artists of the
Renaissance, and a possible portrait of a woman named Smeralda Bandinelli. The
portrait was once in the possession of the Pre-Raphaelite brother Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who took the liberty of modifying the unadorned Lady with strokes of
tempera. One of the things he changed the look of was her headgear, which de
Borchgrave and her team have remodelled one step further, and through some kind
of alchemy (and acrylic paint) recreated the translucency of the Lady’s costume,
her reddish dress and the diaphanous voile.
In 1482, Botticelli painted his
mythological works Primavera and Pallas and the Centaur, which were two
of his last playful pieces before he became too immersed in the teachings of the
Christian devout Savonarola (who was hanged and burned at the Piazza della
Signoria in 1498), and which were in the same room at the little Medici abode
Palazzo Pitti. From these paintings we have the lovely Flora and Pallas (here
unarmed) as the exhibition’s two “Botticelli angels”. And as Paola Tinagli
argues in her book, “Man may be the expression of the perfect propositions of
the universe, as Leonardo’s famous image of the Vitruvian man implies, but to
the average tourist visiting the Uffizi or the Louvre it is images of women
which embody the ideals of beauty and harmony of the Italian Renaissance.”
The only paper dresses that de
Borchgrave had made before 1994 were a few fancy dress creations for her
children. That year she went to New York to see the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective
at the Metropolitan, and to meet her friend the Canadian costume designer Rita
Brown who was in town to restore some old silk dresses. It was a combination of
the energy of New York and what she had just witnessed in the YSL exhibition that
made de Borchgrave realise that she wanted to go back to fashion, “but in
another way”: “I told my friend that I wanted to do a dress in paper and she
said, ‘Are you crazy? Why?’”
Brown, who calls herself “the
technician” in all this, came to Brussels to assist de Borchgrave in her dream
to work out a series of paper costumes, “fashion history from Elizabeth I to
Coco Chanel” based on favourites from Janet Arnold’s massive Patterns of Fashion (de Borchgrave owns
four thousand books today), thirty pieces that were ready in 1999 and which
they named Papiers à la Mode.
Medici children, by dress, were tiny
adults. de Borchgrave’s parents knew what to do with their precocious child who
painted her whole imaginative world on the walls of her bedroom – her mother
rolled them white again as soon as they were full. They allowed her to drop
school at fourteen to enter the Centre des Arts Décoratifs (“It was only pencil
drawing on paper, nothing more for three years, eight hours a day. It was like
military service. No paint, no colour, nothing”) and then there were further
studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, also in Brussels.
“I opened a little workshop. I was
seventeen and I had no clue about anything. I – comment vous dit? – I read a book about Coco Chanel” – de
Borchgrave adores Chanel – “and I opened a fashion shop and I received a lot of
customers. It was a success, but no money. So I changed the shop to be for everything
in the home. Big success, no money.”
Christopher Hibbert has a piece on
the “street fashions” of the day in his book about the Medicis: “To the dismay
of many an austere churchman, the wives of Florentine merchants were, indeed,
renowned for their sumptuous clothes, their elegance, their pale skin and fair
hair. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow
silk; if their skin was too olive they bleached it; if their cheeks were too
rosy they powdered them. And they walked the streets in all manner of styles
and colours, in dresses of silk and velvet, often adorned with sparkling jewels
and silver buttons; in winter they wore damask and fur, showing off prized
features of a wardrobe which might well have cost far more than their husband’s
house.”
What made the Florentines the best
dressers in the world were not only their great industry and craft, and all the
money. A great factor was also, and quite ironically, their sumptuary laws that
regulated showiness and consumption. “The Medici stoked residual memories of
republican dress, while simultaneously tolerating and judiciously promoting
more ostentatious clothing,” writes Elizabeth Currie in Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. “Florence was well
placed to be a leader of fashion, but various barriers prevented its wealthy
citizens from wholeheartedly embracing ostentatious dress, not least the usual
moral reservations regarding luxury, which was widely held to pose a threat to
the social order, the body politic, and the economy. Additionally, Florentines
were proud of their city’s sartorial tradition of modesty and sobriety.”
Rulers and their offspring are by
default history’s great bores. Isabelle de Borchgrave’s art is a kind of unforced,
joyous history lesson based on a particularly elegant and eccentric obsession,
which in effect superimposes our really much obvious relationship with the
past. She has pulled out Cosimo I de’ Medici from his throne in a portrait by
an unknown painter, made him stand up for her and relieved him of his sceptre.
Apart from that we see him in his full “king” regalia – Cosimo I became the
Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569 through a spree of violence and murder. Between
him and his wife in the exhibition is a little girl, their daughter Bia who
died at the age of six and who was portrayed posthumously by one of the
greatest painters during High Renaissance: Agnolo Bronzino.
“To understand the higher forms of
social intercourse at this period we must keep before our minds the fact that women
stood on a footing of perfect equality with men. We must not suffer ourselves
to be misled by the sophistical and often malicious talk about the assumed
inferiority of the female sex which we meet with now and then in the dialogues
of the time,” argued Jacob Burckhardt in his very early study of the Renaissance.
“There was no question of ‘women’s rights’ or female emancipation simply
because the thing itself was a matter of course.”
The poetic licence behind the
exhibition’s Eleonora de Toledo, the Duke’s first spouse, is that de Borchgrave
has reversed the contrasting colours in the court painter’s superb portrait of
her (and her son Giovanni) from 1544–45. The portrait is described in The Art of Florence (by the trio Glenn
Andres, John Hunsiak and Richard Turner): “Eleonora is clothed in a gorgeous
russet, cream, and black brocaded dress, the slightest threads of which are
faithfully recorded. The ample spread of this stiff garment, so assertively
flat as pattern, joins an almost iconic stiffness to the flesh and blood of the
sitters. Sometimes described as a painting in which persons are rendered as
still life, the Eleonora seeing
rather to magnify a tension present in almost all of Bronzino’s portraits,
between elegant material surfaces and the inner palpitation of individual
life.”
Maria de’ Medici and her younger
sister Isabella, two of their daughters, are from portraits by Bronzino’s right
hand, Alessandro Allori. Maria, who died when she was only seventeen, is
dressed in a beautiful royal blue gown with striped, golden sleeves. Isabella wears
a very dark and wide gown with shoulder puffs, and that irradiant white neck
ruff that was so emblematic for Renaissance fashion. She does look a bit
ghostlike here, considering the way she died: Isabella de’ Medici was murdered on
July 16, 1576 in Villa Medicea di Cerreto Guidi, a place she is said to haunt.
The divine force in de Borchgrave’s
vestimentary delights is indeed a balanced interplay between elegant material surfaces and the inner palpitation of
individual life. The Kennedy Archive in Boston commissioned her to recreate
Jackie K’s wedding dress – here is a big jump to modern history – which of
course was made in 1953. “It was dusty and fragile, wrapped up in black tissue
paper,” she told The Telegraph
(October 12, 2008). “The silk was dead, you couldn’t touch it anymore. It was
preserved as a relic. The original is dead, but the paper one brings it to life
again.”
This is Orson Welles, in F for Fake (1973): “Our works in stone,
in paint, in print are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium
or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate
and universal ash – the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A
fact of life: we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out
of the living past. ‘Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on
singing.’ Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”
Go on singing.
The depth and the yearning of Mme de Borchgrave’s paper
dreams is a celebration to the dignity of man, always on the edge of slipping
out of synch.
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| Smeralda Bandinelli by Isabelle de Borchgrave (after a painting ascribed to Botticelli). Photo: Andreas von Einseidel. |
Renaissance Fashion in Paper: The Medici Family Outside the Frame at the Royal Armoury (Livrustkammaren) in Stockholm through March 19, 2017.