Holly K. M. Johnstone (University of Oxford, Oriel College)
Cesare Vecellio’s 1590 costume book De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diversi parti del mondo is the ultimate source of sartorial authority in 16th century Europe. In his series of 415 woodcuts, Vecellio attempts to render the people and places of the Old World knowable through dress, and in doing so, articulates a particularly Venetian worldview concerned with corporal identification and geographic mastery.
Eight years later, the second edition of Vecellio’s costume book Habiti Antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo extended that same self-confident authority onto the peoples of the Americas. Despite the New World and its peoples being “too far away for us to have news of them”, Vecellio’s woodcuts and the tone of their accompanying descriptions emit the same self-assuredness as his earlier descriptions of lands nearer the lagoon.
This paper, therefore, looks at the limits of corporal and geographic authority in Vecellio’s costume books and how artists and armchair travellers alike used them to extend their intellectual mastery over the known world. Despite being considered a lesser colonial power in the 16th and 17th centuries, the influence and global reach of Venice’s printing press helped construct overarching ideas about European authority in the New World. By compiling images and descriptions of faraway lands and peoples into readily-accessible printed materials, Vecellio’s work was broadly characteristic of these attempts to map, know, and ultimately craft a uniquely Venetian narrative about the expanding world.