Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary

Local Contexts and Global Practices

Tara Zanardi, Lynda Klich, Tara Zanardi, Lynda Klich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138200135, 9781138200135
• eBook ISBN: 9781315515113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary investigates the pictorial representation of types from the sixteenth to the twenty- first century. Originating in longstanding visual traditions, including street crier prints and costume albums, these images share certain conventions as they seek to convey knowledge about different peoples. The genre of the type became widespread in the early modern period, developing into a global language of identity. The chapters explore diverse pictorial representations of types, customs, and dress in numerous media, including paintings, prints, postcards, photographs, and garments. Together, they reveal that the activation of typological strategies, including seriality, repetition, appropriation, and subversion has produced a universal and dynamic pictorial language. Typological images highlight the tensions between the local and the international, the specific and the communal, and similarity and difference inherent in the construction of identity. The first full- length study to treat these images as a broader genre, Visual Typologies gives voice to a marginalized form of representation. Together, the chapters debunk the classification of such images as unmediated and authentic representations, offering fresh methodological frameworks to consider their meanings locally and globally, and establishing common ground about the operations of objects that sought to shape, embody, or challenge individual and collective identities.

Part I

Repeating, Serializing, and Borrowing the Type

1Fashion, Nation, and Morality in English Allegorical Costume Prints, ca. 1620–40

Heather A. Hughes

In 1616, English poet and dramatist Ben Jonson published Epigrams, a collection of neo-Latin poems that alternate between praising specific individuals and satirizing recognizable social types in his country. In the eighty-eighth epigram, “On English Monsieur,” he begins,

Would you believe, when you this monsieur see

That his whole body should speak French, not he?

That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,

And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hether.

Pondering how an Englishman could appear so French, Jonson muses that he inherited the “French disease” (syphilis) from his father at conception. More likely, his protagonist was one of a growing number of fashionable English citizens who in the seventeenth century turned to France for sartorial inspiration. Whether securing clothing while traveling abroad, patronizing local French tailors, or shopping for imported goods at London’s New and Royal Exchanges, the well-heeled members of English society were embracing la mode in everything from their footwear to their hairstyles.

Other writers were less amused by their compatriots’ adoption of foreign mores, which they considered both immoral and unpatriotic. In ballads, pamphlets, and essays, authors accused those who incorporated French fashions of vanity for their pursuit of fashion; of profligacy for their preference for costly satin and lace over humble English woolens; and of disloyalty for turning their backs on local custom.¹ Though anti-luxury polemics had long been a staple of moralistic tracts, the addition of a nationalistic rhetoric appears to coincide with the uptick in commercial and cultural exchange with Continental Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century.² From this point onward, intensified engagement with the Continent produced culturally heterogeneous developments in politics, court culture, the arts, education, cuisine, and, of course, fashion. Amid this flood of foreign ideas, practices, and products, moralists feared the loss of English identity—its character as well as its traditions.

Several recent studies in English literature and history have fruitfully analyzed the literary works expressing these sentiments.³ Yet these views also circulated in printed imagery, such as engravings, broadsheets, and book illustrations, which have received relatively little attention.⁴ To broaden the understanding of the attitudes toward cultural exchange in early modern England, this chapter examines three sets of engravings that combine visual representations of French fashion with verses that frame these styles as incompatible with English virtue, temperance, and humility: Robert Vaughan’s The XII Mounthes in the Habits of Severall Nations, John Goddard’s The Seaven Deadly Sins, and William Marshall’s The Foure Complexions. Together with contemporary moralistic writings, these series sought to regulate English nationality and morality in a period when both were believed to be under threat.⁵

Cultural Exchange and Textual Resistance

After a period of economic decline and cultural isolation in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the reign of James I (r. 1603–25) introduced a new era of prosperity and offered more occasions to interact with the rest of Europe.⁶ Following nearly two decades of conflict, peaceful relations with Spain (formalized in 1604) enabled English citizens—mostly men—to travel abroad for trade, diplomacy, art acquisition, and, increasingly, to round out their social education.⁷ At the same time, England received diplomats and travelers, as well as permanent emigrants, such as the Netherlandish refugees escaping the turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War.⁸ Finally, the queen consorts Anne of Denmark (r. 1603–19) and Henrietta Maria of France (r. 1625–49) transported to England their Continental tastes, as well as entourages that helped them maintain their foreign lifestyles and traditions.

Many, especially in the upper ranks of society, eagerly assimilated novel customs into English culture. Others were anxious about the consequences of “trafficking with the contagious corruptions, and customs of forreine nations,” as John Deacon wrote in 1616.⁹ In Tobacco Tortured, a treatise on both the physically and spiritually corruptive properties of tobacco, Deacon warns that copying the customs of a foreign culture rendered one vulnerable to its moral failings. With disgust, he laments that

so many of our English-mens minds are thus terriblie Turkished with Mahometan trumperies; thus ruefully Romanized with superstitious relickes; thus treacherously Italianized with sundry antichristian toyes; thus spitefully Spanished with superfluous pride; thus fearefully Frenchized with filthy prostitution; thus fantastically Flanderized with flaring net-works to catch English fooles; thus greedily Germandized with most gluttenous manner of gormandizing; […] thus inconstantly Englished with every new fantastical foolerie.¹⁰

While Deacon attributes a range of bodily, material, and social practices to imported influences, across the xenophobic writings of the period clothing received special attention. To explain the disproportionate concern with fashion, Gesa Stedman observes:

As both a material practice centered on the body and a symbolic strategy for self-fashioning and display, fashion becomes one of the central cultural phenomena for authors who reflect on cultural transformation. More so than music, dance, and food, [it] is a visible sign that some kind of cultural encounter or exchange has taken place.¹¹

In early modern England, and Europe more broadly, clothing was the most visible indication of one’s national or ethnic origin. To wear the clothing of another nation confused and subverted this social order, hence Jonson’s satirical cognitive dissonance when encountering a man in French attire who spoke no French.

A more alarmist tone is taken by moralists who, variously, cast imported styles as unnatural, frivolous, or decadent. For example, the anonymous author of the ballad “The Phantastick Age/ OR, / The Anatomy of Englands vanity, / In wearing the fashions / Of severall Nations […],” (ca. 1634) equates the hybridity of English dress with monstrosity, comparing his fellow citizens to mythical creatures who possess body parts from multiple animals:

An English man or woman now

Ile make excuse for neither,

Composed are I know not how,

of many shreds together:

Italian, Spaniard, French, and Dutch,

of each of these they have a touch.

O monsters,

Neutrall monsters,

leave these apish toyes.¹²

The ballad attributes the recent “apish” behavior to a lapse in collective humility, which in typical moralistic rhetoric, is said to have once been in abundance:

When meeknesse bore in England sway

and pride was not regarded,

Then vertue bore the bell away,

and goodnesse was rewarded

Now our phantastick innovations,

doe cause prodigious transmutations.

In Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), “Apishnesse” is one of the sins blamed for the city’s recent plague epidemic. According to Dekker, Londoners striving to emulate their more fashionable peers “fall into the disease of pride: pride is infectious, and breedes prodigality.”¹³ The fact that new styles were typically of foreign origin compounded the offense and amounted to an act of treason: “[A]‌n English-mans suite is like a traitors bodie that hath beene hanged, drawne, and quartered, and is set up in severall places: his Cod-peece is in Denmark, the coller of his Duble and the belly in France: wing and the narrow sleeve in Italy.”¹⁴ Hyperbolic though it may seem, Dekker’s invocation of betrayal was not without merit, at least from an economic perspective. For centuries, wool cloth was one of the country’s major sources of wealth. Thus, the increasing popularity of imported luxury textiles, such as silk, lace, or velvet, jeopardized England’s domestic cloth trade, as well as the moral integrity of its citizens.¹⁵

Clothing and Character in The XII Mounthes

Although the authors above describe some of the fashions that undermine English virtue, only “A Phantastick Age” is accompanied by a visual representation: a crude woodcut of figures likely recycled from a sixteenth-century source. A more refined and up-to-date representation of national costumes could be found in Robert Vaughan’s twelve-plate series The XII Mounthes of the Yeare in the Habits of Severall Nations(ca. 1621–23).¹⁶ Traditionally, the twelve months were represented by peasants engaged in various seasonal activities, a subject commonly referred to as “the labors of the month.” In Vaughan’s unusual interpretation, each month is personified instead by a romantic couple from a specific country or region. Taking leisurely strolls, the couples seem to pause to allow the viewer to study their dress. Vaughan made exact copies of all but two of these compositions from a series attributed to Dutch printmaker Crispijn van de Passe II.¹⁷ All the original Lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributor Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices
• Part I Repeating, Serializing, and Borrowing the Type
• Part II Staging Place
• Part III Performing the Documentary
• Part IV The Materials of Typology
• Part V Unmasking Stereotypes
• Index