Waistcoat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this seventeenth-century jacket, floral and vegetal motifs are accounted for with scientific clarity but assembled along traditional continuous meanders. Like seventeenth-century still-life painting in its global reach and analytical approach, the jacket suggests both abundance and taxonomy.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art