8/11/2023 0 Comments 1440 civilization v background![]() One of the first places in northern Italy where Spanish influence was felt was Ferrara, due to the marriage in 1473 of Duke Ercole I to Leonora of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand of Naples (Herald 26). Since 1442 the dynasty that ruled Catalonia and Aragon, a kingdom in north-eastern Spain, had also ruled most of southern Italy and Sicily. ![]() Spanish influence came into Italian fashion via the Aragon court at Naples. While they did not catch on in other parts of Europe during this decade, other aspects of Spanish women’s fashion did. The verdugos could be stitched into channels on the exteriors of skirts and emphasized with contrasting trimmings, or they could be stitched into underskirts, or both, as seen in figures 1 and 2. This fashion was attributed to Queen Juana of Portugal, consort of King Enrique IV of Castile, who devised it in an attempt to conceal an illegitimate pregnancy (Bernis 80). The most striking features of Spanish fashion for women in the 1470s, however, were the wooden hoops ( verdugos) inserted into skirts to make them stand out away from the body. Since so much of the chemise is revealed under the segmented parts of this dress, it was worthwhile to decorate it with black silk embroidery, called blackwork, which was also characteristically Spanish (Anderson 187). The sides of her bodice are too narrow to reach the edges of the triangular stomacher black laces stretch across the front and are also seen at the shoulder connecting the sleeves, which allow the chemise to spill out below the elbow. In this painting, one woman’s dress, made of red silk velvet, appears to be coming apart (Fig. Like Italy, Spain was a center for silk-weaving, and could produce silk velvets brocaded with gold, the “cloth of gold” worn by Salomé in figure 2. ![]() While the chemise was always made of washable linen, women’s dresses were typically of wool or silk. Whether made in one piece or two, the dress in Spain could be worn sleeveless, revealing the full length of the chemise sleeves underneath, or with separate sleeves that laced around the arm, as in the case of the seated woman sometimes the sleeves are deliberately made too narrow to completely encircle the arm, and the chemise sleeves are allowed to spill out through the gap, as in the case of the standing woman. The triangular piece that fills in the V, larger and wider than the partlets seen elsewhere in Europe (Van Buren and Wieck 312), were called puertos in Spanish, and can be called stomachers in English (Bernis 36-50). Another distinctive feature is that the bodices are cut in a deep V-shape, coming to the point of the V at the center of the waistline. The woman standing at the foot of the bed in figure 1 wears a saya of a golden orange fabric, probably silk, whereas the woman sitting in front of her has a separate bodice and skirt of contrasting colors, and an underskirt ( faldilla). The general fifteenth-century tendency to divide a garment into segments, each covering a part of the body (Newton 2-3), was especially strong in Spain. The two parts of a saya, the bodice ( cos) and skirt ( falda), could also be made separately (Bernis 49-50). Over the chemise went a dress, in Spain called the brial, or saya if it had a seam at the waistline. They were characterized by long pendant sleeves and narrow vertical strips of embroidered decoration, as seen in figure 1. Spanish chemises were called camisas, from the Latin, or alternatively, alcandoras, from the Arabic (Anderson 189). In Spain, however, the chemise was often revealed and decorated in a style that was originally Moorish, derived from centuries of Islamic civilization in the Iberian peninsula. The basic undergarment remained the chemise of undyed linen, which was rarely seen when a woman was fully dressed.
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