Seminar 2: MVC Seminar Series 2025

Seminar 2: Making Liveries in the Sixteenth Century Holy Roman Empire: Collaboration between artisan workshops

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday 15th October, 5-6pm GMT, online using Zoom. Sign up to receive the joining link and reminders. Registration closes 1 hour before seminar start time.

Abstract

This paper examines how the communication and collaboration between artisans’ workshops shaped the process of livery design in the early sixteenth century Holy Roman Empire.

Imperial potentates issued liveries, or uniform dress, to their vassals several times each year as part of a culture of ritual visual-political communication. Liveries were planned in collaboration between tailors, princes, and courtiers. The design were illustrated in painters’ workshops including that of Lucas Cranach the Elder. The resulting illustrations were sent along with materials to local tailors, who interpreted them into garments. However, surviving drawings bear the signatures of court tailors and not of painters, complicating their attribution and authorship.

No liveries from this period survive, and the illustrations which do have hardly been studied. These ink drawings with a coloured wash on paper are not garment patterns or technical drawings, but detailed and characterful representations of dressed figures made by skilled painters. My research relies on the examination of these illustrations as objects, supplemented by accounts, correspondence, and my own craft skills as a trained bespoke tailor, to understand the communication process between court artisans’ workshops.

This paper argues for a collaborative culture of court artisans which contributes to recent arguments for broadening our understanding of ‘Renaissance art’ to include a wider range of crafts.

It asks what the livery design process reveals about artisanal communication across distance, material literacy across specializations, and what is gained or lost in the process of translation between media.

Bio

Sophia T. C. Feist is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Cambridge funded by the Cambridge Trust. Her dissertation explores how courts in the Holy Roman Empire between 1470 and 1550 used dress to craft and enact political programmes, looking in particular at the contributions of court tailors. She is a trained bespoke tailor with degrees in art history from Princeton University and the Courtauld Institute, and recently completed a fellowship at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Her background in art history, art-making, and technical art history inform her current research on craft and artisans in early modern Germany.