Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing

In a famous essay on the tenacity of the Burckhardtian conception of the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga wrote that '[A]t the sound of the word ‘Renaissance’ the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.' After reading Carole Collier Frick’s engrossing, multi-layered book, Huizinga’s romantic dreamers will have to become far more nuanced in their visual imaginings of the past. Purple, it turns out, might be the colour pavonazzo, but there is no consensus in the primary sources, and peacock blue, peahen brown, red violet, blue violet, and a colour 'between blue and black', are all equal contenders for the name.(p. 170) Indeed, whether it is possible to recapture precisely what people wore in this period is thrown open to question in this book when, in the absence of substantial material remains, all we are left with are literary and visual sources, both of which are deficient and often misleading, intentionally or otherwise.