On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Zuzana Kraemerova wrote: > Sometimes you see a criss-cross pattern in styles that are normally > associated with spiral lacing (e.g. 14th century fitted dresses). In > the cases I'm thinking of, this is not done with a modern criss-cross, > but with two spirals going in opposite directions...." > > Can you give some concrete portraits or links where this can be > seen?
In Rougham, Suffolk, England, is a 1405 brass to Sir R. Drury and his wife. The lady's fitted dress clearly has a series of connected X's (forming diamond shapes) going up the front. Her sleeves are knuckle-length and buttoned. I don't know if this is online; the search function at the MBS site doesn't seem to be working at the moment. But you can find it in Muriel Clayton's "Catalogue of Rubbings of Brasses and Incised Slabs," from the Victoria and Albert Museum, published by HMSO (London); I have the 1979 edition, which was all over the place some years ago and is probably available via ILL if you're really keen on seeing it. Looking further, I see this source may be problematic. I have another image of the brass in another book (very obscure, a locally published catalog of Suffolk brasses) that shows the X's better, and each one is engraved as a single diamond-shaped quatrefoil, perhaps meant to look like buttons. Then again, I've never seen diamond-shaped buttons, so this could be the result of the brass designer drawing the design with lacings, and the engraver (or the purchaser) deciding that wasn't fancy enough and tarting up the connected diamonds so that they look more like buttons (which were common on brasses of this style in England). From my experience with brasses, I can attest that this is not unheard-of -- you can get some really weird things going on with brasses as the stock designs pass through additional hands and as patrons request changes. I have seen occasional double-spirals elsewhere, but no images are coming to hand at this instant, and I'm not keen to go through my entire collection. > Or another example of some other sorts of lacing used in the middle > ages? Spiral lacing, with its diagonal lines, is easy to find. The marble effigy of the Countess of Warwick (1370s) in St. Mary's Church, Warwick, shows clear spiral lacing on offset holes, with a pair of even holes at both top and bottom. I show slides of this sculpture in my lecture on the fitted dress (the lecture I'm giving at CostumeCon), and you can find a decent photo in Margaret Scott's "Visual History of Costume: The 14th and 15th centuries," fig. 28. The more you look, the more of these you see, though they are most likely to be apparent in images where the lacing is partly opened. The Rohan Hours illumination of the nursing Madonna shows a gold dress laced with red cord, with the dress half-open and the spiral pattern very clear. The Fouquet portrait of Agnes Sorel as the Virgin, better known for the exposed breast and the over-the-bust seams, has a single lace that zigzags up on what must be inset lacing rings that would be invisible when the dress is shut. For dresses laced closed, illuminators are more likely to treat the lacing as invisible, but not always. I remember snapping a photo of some minor anonymous illumination in the Philadelphia Art Museum (a loose leaf in the collection, not on public display) because it had a nice neat spiral lace on a fitted dress. My interest centers on England/France/Flanders through the mid 15th century. Go further afield and later in time, and you see more variations. There are loads of decorative styles of lacing in Italy and Germany in the 15th century and later, including ladder lacing, lacing that loops around itself with each pass, and so forth. Many of these are on styles where the sides of bodices are meant to stay open over a decorative underlayer, so the lacing is done in a decorative way as well. > Could a "double spiral lacing" have been used for fastening > pourpoints? Certainly it could, but I think a single spiral would probably be sufficient. It's certainly much more common in the visual sources. One of the things to think about is how this affects your lacing holes. If you intend to do a single spiral lace, you might put your lacing holes offset, so that the top edge lines up evenly after you've pulled it shut. (This has been discussed here before, so I won't go into detail now; if you don't understand that, just ask.) If you make your lacing holes even on both sides, you have two options. One is to do a double spiral, which keeps the sides even. The other is to do a single spiral and let the top be a little uneven; this also shows up in some of the images (the ones I'm thinking of are Italian and/or mid-15th century). If your friend made her pourpoint with even lacing holes, then a double-spiral lace would be a lot more secure, and more easily documentable, than a modern criss-cross. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
