Phantaste: Yes, faith, the other was near the common, it had no extraordinary grace; besides, I had worn it almost a day, in good troth.
Philautia: I’ll be sworn, this is most excellent for the device, and rare; ’tis after the Italian print we looked on t’other night.
This certainly suggests that one of the little eyases, perhaps even Nathaniel Field or Salathiel Pavy, was wearing a fantastic wig designed after one of the Krieger woodcuts.
Figure 11.—Courtier following the edict of 1633. He has laid aside his lace collar and fine clothes. By Abraham Bosse, 1633. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)
In the early 17th century there was nothing published in northern Europe that was closely related to the fashion trade. There are engravings of costume figures such as the Sieben Edelleute verschiedener Nation by Willem Buytewech (Amsterdam, ca. 1614), which are charmingly drawn but, as to costume, idealized and exaggerated.[23] The same criticism applies to the
later series by J. de St. Igny, especially in Le Jardin de la Noblesse, and to Jacques Callot’s La Noblesse,[24] which depict military and court dress with less caricature than most of this master’s work. Among the engravings of Abraham Bosse, there is a series (fig. 11) relating to the sumptuary law of 1633 by which Louis XIII, at the instigation of Cardinal Richelieu, tried to curb the extravagance and simplify the dress of the ladies and gentlemen of his court. This series is worth mentioning as a record of the dress at this period, but neither these engravings nor the better known “Galerie du Palais” (fig. 12) are, strictly speaking, fashion plates which provide information for dressmakers or wearers of clothes.[25]