Lace - Venice: A Travel Guide to Murano Glass, Carnival Masks, Gondolas, Lace, Paper and More - page 37

itself.
Venetian lace gained such fame that it became a status symbol for European nobles.
Portraits of nobles wearing outlandishly fancy lace collars—the kinds you see in the
seventeenth-century paintings of Rembrandt and van Dyck—helped make Venetian lace a
status symbol among aristocracy from Ghent to Paris. European nobles wore their Venetian
lace finery to sit for portraits that would be handed down to future generations. Painters
were challenged to capture the web-like intricacies of lace in paint, portraying their sitters'
collars, cuffs, shawls, veils, and gloves.
A PAINSTAKING ART
Apart from the beauty and fame of Venetian lace, the main thing to appreciate
is how extraordinarily painstaking it is to make. A small, seventeenth-century
lace cap now in the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in California boasts
some 10,000 stitches per square inch, and probably took some five years to
produce.
Venetian lace is well documented among the most prized possessions of European
nobles. In the 1600s, an inventory of the wardrobe of Elizabeth I of England included lace
of “Venice sylver” and “Venys gold,” a testament to the practice of weaving braids of pre-
cious metals into lace patterns for costly fine garments. Punto in aria is also well docu-
mented throughout the Renaissance as part of women's dowry inventories, a testament to
its enduring value.
In order to supply the increasing demand for Venetian lace, cloth merchants moved lace
production to the outlying lagoon islands in order to employ lacemakers at low cost. Soon,
lace produced on the island of Burano became the most highly coveted lace in Europe. The
women began working in almost an assembly-line fashion, churning out trimmings and
finery to supply the clothiers' guild. Although the lacemakers themselves never became
wealthy, those involved in the international trade of lace and textiles could soon afford to
occupy the finest palaces of Venice.
Catherine de Medici, an Italian noblewoman who became Queen of France, brought
Venetian lace designers to the French court in the mid-1500s, and punto in aria remained
popular in France for another two centuries. King Louis XIV looked to Venetian artists
rather than French ones when it came time for his coronation in 1654. For the event, he