In Real Life!

I've been visiting Padua a lot because OH MY GOODNESS! is there medieval and Renaissance artwork everywhere.  Plus, I'm a huge fan of Saint Anthony. :-)

So, recently, I went to the School of Saint Anthony, right next to the Basilica.  There, I saw some paintings that I have only ever seen thumbnails of and really started to understand a lot of the early 16th C dress in Veneto (Venice/Padua/Vicenza/Verona) much, much better.



First, the lady whose baby fell into the boiling pot - the story goes that the baby fell in and was miraculously brought back to live by Saint Anthony.  It's sadly one of those things that still happens today - you turn away for one second and the toddler has poured the soup pan on themselves or pulled the iron down on their head.   The panel where the woman has the red sleeves and the shaw depicts just that.  She's a bit away while the baby falls in.
In the second panel, she's showing the perfectly healed baby off to the Saint and others.  The neat thing about these two panels is she's wearing the same dress so it's nice to see both with sleeves and not.  I also love the red hem, how the skirt bellows a bit in the back, and that coif!   

The hem on this dress is a lovely red trim and the dress is green in person, not gray.  Yet, it doesn't look like a Christmas tree either.  I love seeing the open wide sleeves and the back of the dress!

I've been trying to figure this one out and, it's so different, I'm still not sure all of what is going on.  It looks like a lavender bodice with an orange sari for the skirt and false lower sleeves.  It appears to be going off the older style of the upper and lower gauntlets that were popular about 20 years earlier.  There were so many details in this that I wanted to capture - the scales on the skirt and the black star pattern I think, show, the pallu of the sari and the rest of the sari.  The lower sleeves appear to be made out of the rest of the sari. 

For those not familiar with saris, they are worn mostly in India and neighboring countries.  They tend to be about 5 or 6 yards long - making them excellent for costuming.  The saris have typically three sections - the first yard of the sari is for making the blouse piece, the next three to four yards are the skirt, and the last yard or so is the pallu.

Pallu is an Indo-European word (Palla in Latin!) that means decorated/embroidered piece of women's clothing.  That's all the pallu is - it's the heavily decorated part of the sari that gets draped over the shoulder.  Because the sari is normally cotton or silk in period (and often still), they would make it along the Silk Road.   It's not hard to trace a sari to Italy from India and figuring it would be made into a local dress.

The lady appears to have used the pallu and the second part of the sari for her skirt and maybe the blouse pieces for the lower sleeves?  It's hard to tell but I'll go check back on it. :-)

There are so many dresses in these panels!   The red dress with the blue beneath it, the fabulous green/silver skirt and sleeves with the black and orange bodice, the lady in the red dress with her back to us, and the drowned skirt in the bottom panel.  Now, the drowned girl is not wearing just her bodice - it person, it's clearly a lightly greyish skirt and sleeves attached to the green and black striped bodice.  I'll try to get a better picture next time.  

Really, it's fun looking at all this artwork in person and seeing new details.  For more photos, check out my album on Iperntiy.