Habiti delle Donne Venetiane (Dress of Venetian Women)

Giacomo Franco

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This book consists of twenty numbered plates of ornately dressed women engraved by Giacomo Franco, each accompanied by a description in Latin and Italian. The work serves as a compendium of Venetian beauties, in which courtesans and respectable women are represented interchangeably, a juxtaposition that may explain why Franco never received a printing privilege for the book. Two plates describe aspects of Venetian wedding ceremonies. In plate 7, Franco depicts the parentado, or the ritual presentation of a bride to her relations. Here, a bride in a richly embroidered dress wearing pearls and a bejeweled crown is presented by her ballerino, a dance instructor who prevented the woman from toppling over in her chopines, or platform shoes. A following engraving illustrates the custom by which a bride would travel by gondola to visit her relatives in convents, a very public display that made the entire city seem a witness to the marriage.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art