In 1476, the Venetian Senate decreed that no Punto in Aria whatever, executed either in flax with a needle, or in silver or gold thread, should be used on the curtains or bed-linen in the city or provinces. Among the State archives of the ducal family of Este, which reigned in Ferrara for so many centuries, Count Gandini found mentioned in a Register of the Wardrobe, dated 1476 (A. C. 87), an order given for a felt hat "alla Borgognona," trimmed with a silver and silk gimp made with bobbins. Besides this, in the same document is noted (A. C. 96) a velvet seat with a canopy trimmed at the sides with a frill of gold and silver, made in squares, with bobbins.
The Cavaliere Antonio Merli, in his interesting pamphlet on Italian lace,[[149]] mentions an account preserved in the Municipal Archives of Ferrara, dated 1469, as probably referring to lace;[[150]] but he more especially brings forward a document of the Sforza family, dated[[151]] 1493, in which the word trina (under its ancient form "tarnete") constantly occurs,[[152]] together with bone and bobbin lace.
Plate XI
Italian. Point Plat de Venise. Needle-point.—Seventeenth century. Length, 25 in.; width, 16 in. Victoria and Albert Museum.
To face page 46.
Again, the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who wrote from 1520-30, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point, made by the hand of his mistress.
Cavaliere Merli cites, as the earliest known painting in which lace occurs, a majolica disc, after the style of the Della Robbia family, in which, surrounded by a wreath of fruit, is represented the half figure of a lady, dressed in a rich brocade, with a collar of white lace. The costume is of the fifteenth century; but as Luca della Robbia's descendants worked to a later period, the precise date of the work cannot be fixed.
Evidences of white lace, or passement, are said to appear in the pictures of Carpaccio, in the gallery at Venice, and in another by the Gentile Bellini, where the dress of one of the ladies is trimmed round the neck with a white lace.[[153]] The date of this last painting is 1500.
Lace was made throughout Italy mostly by the nuns,[[154]] and expressly for the service of the Church. Venice was celebrated for her points, while Genoa produced almost exclusively pillow-lace.