I think I may have missed whatever comment David made that resulted in Liz's discussion of the terminology of reticella and punto in aria. But, at the risk of repeating something that David already said... The terminology of Reticella and Punto in Aria have always bothered me, and it has never been completely clear to me where the dividing line is. While it would seem natural to say that as soon as you start to lay threads, you are working in air, in fact, the designs are so similar that you need a magnifying glass to determine whether geometric laces are fabric based or on laid threads. So, is reticella a technical term or a stylistic one? Personally, when I think of Punto in Aria, I tend to think of a very small category of floral laces where the flowers tend to hang loosely on the edge of a needle lace or something else, and are built on very minimal frame works, such as a laid thread going down the center of a petal, or a leaf. In fact, these laces are very interesting, but no one seems to be exploring them. (hint, hint.) They differ from the laces that are outlines filled in, because the structural threads are a skeleton on which the flower is built, but there is great fluidity in the shapes. An example would be the floral edging on the strip of lace in plate 71B of Levey, which is in our collection. Interestingly, our museum uses the term cutwork for the fabric based reticellas in its classification system which was devised in the late 19th or early twentieth century. As for how you would tell whether the lace was made in England or elsewhere, we have some samplers with cutwork dating from the 17th century that were made in England. The work is done with very fine thread, arguably finer than Italian cutwork, but it has sort of a lack of total geometrical angularity. Maybe this is because there are more stitches in it. I think that the collar in the picture does not actually look like it is English made, but I would really like it if the only known picture of Shakespeare had him in English lace. Given that he was not aristocracy, I would think he might wear English lace. However, as has been pointed out, the collar may be a studio prop or even imaginary. Do you think Raleigh and Drake were more affluent than Shakespeare? If so, an imported collar might point to them, instead of Shakespeare. <<Both Vecellio and Vinciolo's books show edges with bands of squares that don't remotely match in any way, - and are not even the same size so they don't match up in the repeats!!>> I have had the opportunity to look at a lot of pattern books and reprints of pattern books and they all do this. I think that the reason is that being pattern books, they are trying to show as many patterns as possible, but they anticipate that the maker will take one or two and work out the pattern of the garment from them. On the topic of ruffs, Janet Arnold's newly released Patterns of Fashion, based on existing 16th and 17th century clothing in museum collections, has patterns for ruffs ranging from 1 1/2 yards to 19 yards of fabric. By comparison, Shakespeare's standing collar has much less fabric in it. I know, let's reproduce the collar and present it to the Folger Shakespeare library! I bet we make the papers then! Devon
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