Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

Vanity of Vanities: A 1516 Sumptuary Broadside

The urban centers of early cinquecento Italy were rich, crowded, and competitive. Families struggled to rise through the ranks of civil society through the accumulation of wealth, political wheeling and dealing, and lucrative marriage alliances. Overt displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption, including sporting the latest sartorial fashions and the most spectacular jewelry, could aid in these allied pursuits, most of all among marriageable youth. Interested to restrain excessive waste on luxuries, this extremely early and otherwise unrecorded 1516 Florentine ordinance outlines the latest sumptuary regulations passed by the municipal government, including quite detailed descriptions of what was forbidden, and what was permissible, among the young men and women, depending on their social rank and grants of liberty for special occasions.

Several hundred are known to have been issued and preserved throughout the preceding three centuries in manuscript forms, including restrictions on the consumption of food and all manner of luxurious pleasures, the specific conduct of baptisms, weddings, and funerals. These provvisioni or pragmatiche are, however, very poorly survived in printed forms until the middle of the sixteenth century, with the exception of JHU’s 1516 exemplar. Even a cursory search for “Sumptuary Law” in most national union library catalogues yields little or no examples of printed sumptuary broadsides such as this anywhere in Europe prior to 1525; one of the earliest Italian examples appears only in the 1570s, nearly a half-century later than the JHU imprint. This is likely due to the intended use of these broadsheets for temporary display in public spaces within the Florentine metropolis, subject to the elements, and perhaps even to vandalizing expressions of public scorn.

Many of these laws were motivated primarily on economic grounds, though some reflect periods of moral reform enforced by civic and ecclesiastical authorities, exerted through forms of explicit social control that tended more clearly to delineate specific privileges enjoyed based on class distinctions. Before the fall of the Florentine Republic in the 1530s, principled thrift and good husbandry were periodic watchwords within sermons, public oratory and performance, and other modes of political communication. Overt and excessive otium could poison the wealth and power that the Republic, which it enjoyed only through a proper commitment to, and command of, municipal negotium.

The locus classicus of this movement within Italy was surely the infamous falò delle vanità (“bonfire of the vanities) promulgated by the followers of the fiery and sometimes apocalyptic Dominican preacher Girolamo Savanarola on the occasion of Shrove Tuesday 1497. As Francesco Guicciardini’s celebrated Storia d’Italia (“History of Italy,” 1537-40), would later recount, all instruments of human sinfulness were consigned to vast flaming pyres erected in the Piazza della Signoria, including cards, dice, fancy dresses, wigs, masks, cosmetics, perfumes, “pagan” books, and even paintings by the Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

Despite the high theater of that moment, the repeated reissuing of sumptuary law regulations suggests that, at best, their enforcement was largely aspirational. Particularly stringent laws passed in Florence in 1472 were periodically amended, with increasingly severe sanctions threatened in revisions that appeared successively in 1497, 1504, 1511, and again in October 1516. The latter is what is expressed in the present JHU broadside, explicitly seeking to clear the slate of prior, and sometimes contradictory, ordinances by repealing them wholesale and replacing them with a single, encyclopedic declaration, though with the proviso that the earlier 1472 laws were still effective.

Printed in quite small type, the JHU broadside presents no less than forty-two separate rubrics, twenty-five of which specifically regulate dress and physical adornment according to carefully itemized rules and restrictions. The opening statement declares that these newly issued laws apply to all male and female inhabitants under thirty years of age (i.e., of marriageable age), not only in Florence itself, but in any other Florentine jurisdiction. To these adults it is forbidden to wear any gold, silver or crimson ornaments, except for crimson taffeta or as insets in belts, or any jewels, pearls, marten furs, ermine, velvet capes or clothes with fur, gold or silver that is “counterfeit and not good [i.e., not genuine].” Jewels and pearls were forbidden, except for no more than three rings decorated with precious stones or pearls.

Perhaps most revealing are the seventeen paragraphs relating to women exclusively. There great attention is paid to very particular items of female dress, including caps, sleeves, and cotte (dresses). Women are allowed to wear a gold necklace as long as it is pure and without enamel, and so long as it weighs no more than six ounces, because “such an ornament is honorable and suitable” for them. Pragmatic to its core, this document does provide for the right of women to carry a penknife (coltellino) as well as a hair-parter (dirizzatoio), and permission as well to don embroidered motifs, buttons, and hair ribbons so long as they were below a certain value, whether in silver, gold, or gilded material. Several rubrics contain specific restrictions on the excessive use of fabric, specifying exactly how many lengths (braccia) of textile can be used for dresses, overgowns (robe di sopra), detachable sleeves, facings, as well as for ribbons and trimmings. Reflecting the strict hierarchy of the age, a brief coda to this portion of the broadside also specified that the above laws definitively did not apply to the wives of “Lords, knights, doctors, soldiers, or foreigners, or to any women over the age of 30.”

Not content to stop there, even the adornment of infants at their christenings was deemed excessive by the authorities, and so the ban extended to pearls, gold, silver, furs, and velvet-lined jackets, on such occasions. The succeeding five paragraphs are then devoted to the clothes allowed to men under thirty years of age, once again exempting members of the upper classes. The final rubrics outline schedules of fines and punishments, terms of enforcement, and procedures for proper record-keeping.

While no printer is identified in the JHU broadside, the presence of the Florentine lily, also the printing device of the Florentine Giunta family of printers, is suggestive; between 1503-17, one of those, Filippo Giunta, was actively at work within the city walls.

—Earle Havens, assisted by Nina Musinsky