African Costume for Artists: The Woodcuts in Book X of \u3cem\u3eHabiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo\u3c/em\u3e, 1598

This study investigates the woodcuts of African dress in Cesare Vecellio\u27s 1598 costume book Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. While Vecellio\u27s book has been previously studied to understand its contribution to sixteenth-century conceptions of human variation across geography and Venetian identity making, I concentrate instead on the book\u27s intended function. In doing so, I show how its woodcuts of Africans, should be understood primarily as proposals for costumes to be used in new artistic productions. Vecellio situated his representations of African costume in a highly organized geographic framework that was shaped by travel narratives. These texts recorded voyages motivated, in part, by European political and economic interests in Africa. However, the resulting associations deposited in Vecellio\u27s woodcuts are neutralized or at least complicated by the representations\u27 hybridity, their inclusion in an early modern collection, and their status as models for artists to manipulate. Vecellio explained that all of the representations in Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo displayed antiquity (antichità), diversity (diuersità), and richness (la richezza). Sixteenth-century theater directors insisted on these qualities for costume, which promoted both the imitatio naturae and superatio naturae of artistic productions. Costumes could simultaneously contribute to a painting or a theatrical performance\u27s decorum and propriety by differentiating and correctly identifying figures, and its grazia or pleasure with their exoticism and sumptuousness. This study suggests that in their intended use, the images of African costume were participating in translations of African dress into costumes for European paintings and theater. During this process, they accumulated new meanings. The dressed figures were copied from art objects with varying degrees of removal from immediate African encounters and combined with texts from published travel narratives to create mythic bricolages of Africans. The decontextualized costumes, organized into a sartorial collection with a categorization that readers understood as flexible, were tentatively defined vestmentary signs available for further signification within potential artistic contexts