Good! I'm glad it wasn't some bizarre waking dream I was having! Glas someone else sees it too! :-)
There is much debate as to the origins of "Bella Nani" in particular. Some say it is Caliari's wife. This is possible, since she had posed for several of his allegorical paintings and the face matches. He was married very close to the date of this painting, so again, there is a match. All circumstantial, however. Other say that is is one of the Nani family members. There is some kind of relationship between the Nanis and Paolo, but no one can lay a finger on which one it is, or when exactly the family had contact with him. There is another theory out there that this woman is completely imaginary: the idealised woman; the renaissance pin up girl, if you wish. Elementally all the virtues of the ideal wife is there. Men would commission paintings like this for their private chambers, not unlike the calendar girls often found in husbands' garages. I personally think it's a little bit of the first and third. I have done a lot of studying and reading about his works, and have come to find a consistency in his images. He will tend to add completely fantastic, outrageous, over the top jewellry and costuming to the people who are not likely to be real persons, or those real persons representing a mythological persona. In short, I think he idealised his own wife. The huge pauldrons were the major giveaway - I can't find anything else like them anywhere, at any time in history - short of one pair of "real" pauldrons carved into a tomb stone. It's the same case with those sleeve styles. Only Veronese uses them, and all in the same period of time. There are no extant pieces of textile nor surviving painting by another unrelated painter that shows it as actually existing. For a while I had thought perhaps it was voided velvet or some variation on that theme, but the way the sleeve hang is just... off, for some reason. I had thought perhaps that they were actually embroidered, or even overlayed with punto in aria lace, but he is detailed enough that he would have shown threads and stitches. I can't recall any surviving piece of velvet that was embroidered, either. That stuff is a pain to cover up decently with embroidery silk. Kathy Ermine, a lion rampant tail nowed gules charged on the shoulder with a rose Or barbed, seeded, slipped and leaved vert(Fieldless) On a rose Or barbed vert a lion's head erased gules. Its never too late to be who you might have been. -George Eliot Tosach eólais imchomarc. - Questioning is the beginning of knowledge. http://www.sengoidelc.com/node/131 Yep, that sleeve definitely seems to match the bottom second image on the last row from the patternbooks! But, are you certain that the sleeve is invented? Perhaps the lady's dressmaker is the one with the patternbook. _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
