Much torchon lace, of well-designed patterns, was also made, similar in style to that given in Fig. 40.
Though no longer fabricated in the island, the women at Naples still make a coarse lace, which they sell about the streets.[[222]]
The punto di Napoli is a bobbin lace, resembling the punto di Milano, but distinguished from it by its much rounder mesh and coarser make.
Towards the middle of the last century, many of the Italian sculptors adopted an atrocious system, only to be rivalled in bad taste by those of the Lower Empire, that of dressing the individuals they modelled in the costume of the period, the colours of the dress represented in varied marbles. In the villa of Prince Valguarnera, near Palermo, were some years since many of these strange productions with rich laces of coffee-coloured point, admirably chiselled, it must be owned, in giallo antico, the long flowing ruffles and head-*tires of the ladies being reproduced in white alabaster.[[223]]
GENOA ("Genova la Superba").
"Lost,—A rich needle work called Poynt Jean, a yard and a half long and half quarter broad."—The Intelligencer, Feb. 29, 1663.
"Genoa, for points."—Grand Tour. 1756.
The art of making gold thread, already known to the Etruscans, took a singular development in Italy during the fourteenth century.
Genoa[[224]] first imitated the gold threads of Cyprus. Lucca followed in her wake, while Venice and Milan appear much later in the field. Gold of Jeane formed, as already mentioned, an item in our early statutes. The merchants mingled the pure gold with Spanish "laton," producing a sort of "faux galon," such as is used for theatrical purposes in the present day. They made also silver and gold lace out of drawn wire, after the fashion of those discovered, not long since, at Herculaneum.
When Skippin visited Turin, in 1651, he described the manner of preparing the metal wire. The art maintained itself latest at Milan, but died out towards the end of the seventeenth century.