Day 1
Have any of you heard of:
'Idle Hands' Italian Renaissance Costuming Mini-Challenge by The Realm of Venus ?
I signed up for it and will be spending an hour a day on this through the month. I will be documenting my progress here at the end of each day.

Today I did image research. I looked at all the Italian gloves that I can find. Tomorrow I will choose a set to amalgamate. Here’s to hoping I actually stick to this one! :)

This is will also be added on to my A & S 50 Challenge

Day 2
This is not as easy as I thought it would be. I am going to post a picture a day with some commentary and hopefully by the end of these postings I will have decided on what I want to do.

Day 3
The first image is from the collection of Holbein, it resides in the Old Masters Picture Gallery at The Dresden State Art Collections in Dresden. It is a Portrait of Charles de Solier, Lord of Morette (English nobility) created around 1534-1535.
The painting itself is of an English Lord. Although this man is of English origins he wears and holds the signature Italian glove. It is an exquisit brown leather glove. By signature I mean that the cuff has been folded over the back of the hand and pinned, in this case it is with a small bit of decorative string or ribbon. There are also decorative cuts to allow the shirt cuff to be shown. You will see this type of design in many Italian and some Spanish portraits.
 

Day 4
The second image is Moretto da Brrescia’s Portrait of a Young Man, it resides in the National Gallery, created around 1542.
The black leather gloves are on the table and they have a similar design as the pair from Charles de Solier’s but there are no decorative cuts or ribbon/thread embellishment.
 

Day 5
Our third image is Bartolomeo Veneto’s Portrait of a Lady in a Green Dress, it currently resides at the Timken Museum of Art, and it was created in 1530.
This one is a bit unusual. She has two different gloves. One is a brown leather glove, note the thickness and color lightness. In her left hand is a darker, smaller glove, it looks to be black velvet. This could just be an artists stylization of the gloves.
In the end however it does show again the fold at the wrist. Not something I am fond of.

Day 8
This one is also a little different. It is Bartolomeo Veneto’s Portrait of a Young Lady; it resides at the National Gallery of Canada, painted in 1530.
This painting is one of those that has been x-rayed and found to have a different portrait underneath. So to say that these gloves have two cuffs is not necessarily true. We are just not sure on these. In this final and currently displayed version we will call it not a double cuff but an under shirt pulled out over the folded gloves. I played with this image, adjusting the contract, inverting the colors, adjusting the brightness, each time the values of the colors were totally not similar. There are four distinct layers of paint representing fabric on top of these gloves. The paint used for the leather literally disappears completely when I work with the image and there is no other part of the painting that is doing this at the same value.
 

Day 9
This is Bartolomeo Veneto’s Portrait of Master Bernardino da Lesmo; it last resided at the Gallery Ambrosiana in Milan, painted in 1530.
Here we have olive colored leather gloves with the same fold back over the hand and the cuts but no visual pinning of the cuff or any visual decoration.
 

Day 10
This is Albrecht Durer or Duerer’s Self Portrait with Gloves, the painting resides in Prado, Madrid, Spain, painted in 1498.

Here we have cream colored leather gloves to match his clothing. While we do see a fold it is not the decorative fold that we have been seeing up to this point. It is my opinion that this is just a normal glove with the cuff pushed up.
 

Day 11
This is a Gentleman with Gloves by Lotto Lorenzo, it currently resides at Palazzo di Brera in Milan Italy, it was painted in 1543.


These are a brown leather gloves. They also have no decoration, are not folded, nor is there any kind of embellishment on them other than tipping on the cuffs. We see this kind of tipping at the end of a long, drawn out cuff in paintings of clergy with gloves. There is nothing to tell us if these are of the same pattern or if they are simply folded into the holder’s hands.
 

Day 12
This is a Portrait of a Lady in White, by Moretto da Brescia. It resides in National Gallery of Art, Washington painted in 1540.
These cream leather gloves are highly decorated. They feature top stitching on the finger seams that extend down the back of the tranks. The cuffs show some short curves suggesting that they are petal shaped with some embroidery embellishments. There is no difference in the color values of the glove in both areas, that suggests that the embellishment was applied directly to the leather.
 

Day 13
This is the Portrait of a Florentine Noblewoman, it currently resides at the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, it is by Agnolo Bronzino, it was painted in 1540.

The cuffs on these brown leather gloves are not visible. There is also not very much detail beyond the finger seams and the pleating of the hankerchief.

Day 14
This portrait is called Woman in a Red Dress by Giovanni Battista Moroni, it resides at Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, it was painted in 1560.
The brown leather gloves in this portrait are difficult to see since all we have are the cuffs. There is a thickness to the fold and a possibly pinned with a small bit of decorative string or ribbon between the thumb and forefinger.
 

Day 15
This is a portrait named Man with Gloves by Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, it currently resides in the Louvre in Paris, France, it was painted in 1520.
As worn as these cream leather gloves are they seem to be the evolution between two pairs of gloves posted before. Paolo Cavazzola’s portrait of a Lady has a similar cut, so does Holbein’s Charles de Solier portrait. I think I have decided that this is not really a style I like even if it is the most popular design of Italian glove.

Day 16
This is a woodcut by Cesare Vecellio, from the collection Costume of Venetian women, it currently resides in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they were published in 1550.

The image is hard to discern but if you squint really hard you can see a fold, pinning, and the decorative stitch/ribbon. Still, it is not a style I like.

Day 17
This is a Portrait of a Woman Holding Gloves, it is by Paolo Caliari, it resides in National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, it was painted in 1550-60.
These gloves have the signature Italian fold. Unfortunately we cannot see the details hidden behind the hand. I still do not like this style but I love this dress. It is going into my project book. J

Day 18
This is a portraite of Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne painted by Jean Perréal, it currently resides at the Uffizi Museum in Florence Italy, painted in 1532.
These gloves are vastly different. While it all screams to me “Tudor” it is not, it is presented as an italian portraite. The gloves are of brown leather but the cuff is of black velvet with very intricate single line embroidered embellishment on it. These and the Bartolomeo Veneto’s Portrait of a Lady in a Green Dress black velvet gloves (from day 5) I love. I have never worked with velvet for gloves so this is my challenge, I have decided to recreate the gloves only and then in the future after I have blocked out the embellishment I will work the gloves directly with the pattern.

Day 19
I am resting today and tomorrow. I know my posts are short but for every image I actually had to hunt through lots of images and then verify where the images were then verify when they were created. In between kiddo wrangling, web admining, hubby wrangling, housewife duty wrangling, it is a wonder that I actually find time to sleep. :D
This gives me a week to make the patterns, fit them, find the velvet, and then work on the gloves themselves. Wish me luck! :D

Day 23
I have a mini library of glove patterns, commercial and drafts from historical examples. Some commercial patterns are from the 1920’s through today, the rest have either made myself from examples or have purchased in vintage kits over the decades. Believe it or not, I do not have a pattern of my own hand. I know my size so I pulled one out and started to modify it for myself that was made from this master pattern. It is taken from the book Le Gant.

Day 25
We have cut out success with pinking shears! I modified the fourchettes as this is not leather and the patterns I have save one are all for leather. The other is for linen which is a whole other ball of wax that is sitting in the corner. I used plain ol chalk to draw out the lines I needed. The process that I used is to draw the outline on the pattern itself then lay it on the medium and press and rub with my hands down to transfer the markings. I am also very careful to mark every piece with labels to help me remember which is the left hand and which is the right.

 

Day 26
All Thumbs. You can see here that I will need to run a lint brush over the gloves after I am done and also run it over every time I use them. Double velvet is a lint magnet!!

Day 29
Finishing touches. They are done. The goal has been met. Now, on to a second goal that kinda snuck up in my head when I found the picture of the pair I chose to recreate.