I've been fascinated for a while with some of the books full of illustrations and engravings from the 16th and 17th century. Some (Vecellio's comes to mind) are a tad fanciful with depictions of costumes from around the world including natives from the new world. Many seem a bit more realistic, especially as the locations illustrated near the publication origin.
Over the years, I've collected a few of these sources, but never came across any English in origin. So, I went on a quest to see just how many I could find. I ended up including more than just costume books. One of my favorite sources for men's customer is a military manual by Jacob de Gheyn published in 1607 (the engravings were completed in 1598). I also found some album amicorums that contain several illustrations useful to costume study.
So far, I've found 33 manuscripts that are mostly available on line. This includes 6 from Italy, 4 from France, 15 from Germany and 8 from the Netherlands area. Unfortunately, none I've found are English, which was the original reason for my search. I'm keeping a Pinterest board to collect them all.
Publication Origin - Italian
Publication Origin - Dutch
Publication Origin - French
Publication Origin - German
Even with only limited English images (drawn by those who may or may not have ever visited England), there are a lot of wonderful details to be found in these books. I've toyed with the idea of building some computer vision models to identify types of garments, but that's more effort than I'm willing to put in just yet. (maybe soon!)
No comments:
Post a Comment