Fifty years later, Evelyn speaks of the veils of glittering taffetas, worn by the Venetian ladies, to the corners of which hang broad but curious tassels of point laces.
According to Zedler, an author who wrote about lace in 1742, the price of Venice point in high relief varied from one to nine ducats per Italian ell.
The Venetians, unlike the Spaniards, thought much of their fine linen and the decorations pertaining to it. "La camicia preme assai più del giubbone," ran the proverb—"La chemise avant le pourpoint." Young nobles were not allowed to wear lace on their garments until they put on the robe, which they usually did at the age of five-and-twenty, on being admitted to the council.[[191]]
Towards 1770, the Venice ladies themselves commenced to forsake the fabrics of their native islands; for on the marriage of the Doge's son, in that year, we read that, although the altar was decorated with the richest Venice point, the bride and her ladies wore their sleeves covered up to the shoulders with falls of the finest Brussels lace, and a tucker of the same material.[[192]]
During the carnival, however, the people, both male and female, wore a camail, or hood of black lace, covering the chin up to the mouth, called a "bauta."[[193]] It was one of these old black lace hoods that Walpole describes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as wearing at Florence, 1762, in place of a cap.
Point de Venise à réseau is chiefly distinguished by the conventional treatment of the flowers and ornament, and a general flat look of the work. The outlining thread or cordonnet is stitched to the edge of the pattern and worked in flatly. A minute border to the cordonnet of small meshes intervenes between it and the réseau, which is of square meshes and always very fine. Whether the lace was derived from the Alençon, and was the result of an attempt to win back the custom the French manufacturers were taking away from Venice, or whether it was Alençon that imitated the Venetian réseau, is a moot point, but certain it is that the Venetian product surpassed in fineness both Alençon and Brussels. Its very delicacy has been its destruction, so that very few specimens of this lace survive. Plate XII.
Mezzo Punto, or mixed Venetian guipure, was a mixed point lace, of which the scrolls and flowers were outlined in pillow-lace, or by a tape, and the designs filled in with needle fillings, and connected by pearled brides on a coarse needle-made réseau. This variety of lace was sometimes made of silk. In point de Venise, flat or raised, the pattern is always connected by an irregular network of pearled brides. Real brides connecting the flowers here and there hardly ever occur; and the number of picots attached to one single branch of the bride network never exceeds two. The elaborately ornamental detached brides and a multiplicity of picots are characteristic of "Spanish point" and early point de France.
The old Burano laces were a coarser outcome of the point de Venise à réseau, and alone of all Venetian needle laces survived the dark days of the close of the eighteenth century. Some fine specimens of these were shown by M. Dupont d'Auberville in the International Exhibition, and Marini quotes from a document of the seventeenth century, in which, speaking of merletti, it is said that "these laces, styled 'punti in aria,' or di Burano, because the greater part of them were made in the country so called, are considered by Lannoni as more noble and of greater whiteness, and for excellency of design and perfect workmanship equal to those of Flanders, and in solidity superior."
A new departure has been taken in modern times, in the making of hand-made laces at the island of Burano, near Venice, where a large number of girls were employed in the eighteenth century, both in the town and the convents, in making a point closely resembling that of Alençon. Here the art lingered on as late as 1845, when a superannuated nun of ninety, with whom Mrs. Dennistoun, of Dennistoun, conversed on the subject, said how in her younger days she and her companions employed their time in the fabric of "punto di Burano";[[194]] how it was ordered long beforehand for great marriages, and even then cost very dear. She showed specimens still tacked on paper: the ground is made right across the thread of the lace.
Fig. 31.