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| Credit here on the V&A. |
In the first picture seen above, I've shown two details at once. Firstly, the edge of the lace collar, with it's many stages of scalloped edging, and well-preserved pin-picots. Secondly, the gathering of the body of the rochet into the shoulder, and the density of pleats that made up the main fabric of the garment.
Here is the promised pencil, showing the scale of the stitching.
The end of a beaded tassel falling on a tie from the collar.
Another shot of the collar, showing how that beautiful peachy standing band contrasts with the complex shapes of the lace.
Another edging, found on the hem, and possibly even more complex than at the neck.
A shot of a motif that shows well the diversity of the patterns used as fillings.
More typically Venetian natural motifs.
A beautifully filled motif, along with some raised rings with several kinds of picot.
The collar - such a variety of colours within the silk.
And finally, the back of a motif, carefully shown to me by the curator. A few construction stitches can be seen, but mostly as tidy as the front, albeit without the raised sections.
I could carry on talking about the fineness of the piece, it's merits, it's span of styles and techniques, for hours. But what should be apparent, what should be far more widely known, is the rarity of such an item. Venetian lace from this date is rare, yes. And so finely worked is rarer. But this piece is on a scale that most have employed a workshop for months, if not, literally, years. Without doing my own experiments, and without anyone to ask for a time estimate, I cannot say more definitely than that. But just to stress how rare this is, and what kind of commission this must have been, let's consider similar items.
It is very difficult to judge the worth of a piece like this at the time, but it is always interesting to try, and even without coming up with a totally verifiable figure, to get a sense of the worth which was placed on textile work once upon a time is an appealing prospect. I have attempted to find prices paid for Venetian lace closer to the date of this object, but find myself without any reliable recent sources. I have, therefore, fallen back to the (admittedly less reliable, but often-quoted) Victorian sources on the subject of lace. Firstly, I looked back at Mrs Bury Palliser's A History of Lace, and in particular her chapter on Louis XIV. She talks about 'canons' (ruffles of lace at the ends of breeches, serving as boot-tops), and in particular, she asserts that the King had bought a pair worth 7000 livre. Unable to find a calculator to adjust French currency for inflation, I gave up this particular source, and turned to a physical book in my collection, Histoire du point D'Alençon by Madame G Despierres, 1886. I should stress my copy is a recent facsimile/translation! In it, she helpfully mentions a good way of converting seventeenth century French currency to English, by the estimate of two shillings to a livre (introduction, page ix).
If we take this as true (which is dubious, as it is followed by a second footnote, for another paragraph, which seems to imply that "since there were no buttons let alone button-holes in 1665 [there is no translation possible]".), it is possible to adjust worth, using the fantastic site Measuring Worth. If we take it that 7000 livre X 2 gives us the number of shillings, 14,000, then divide that by 20 to give us the number of pounds, we can enter £700 into the calculator, giving a rough year guide of 1660, as this is the date mentioned by Mrs Palliser. It makes for startling reading, and one can only hope that the information she was working from gave the wrong number of 0's. Measuring Worth gives a number of different results, based on whether you want the value of a commodity, labour, or a government investment/building project. As, one would assume, this item must have been specifically commissioned for the King, it initially makes sense to take the 'labour value' as the value of the item, especially as the labour is what gives lace it's true value. The estimates available rely on different indexes of worth. The commodity calculator uses the RPI, and therefore adjusts the cost of items and services according to the rate of inflation as applied to staple goods, such as food, clothing, and shelter. The labour value calculator is adjusted according to the average wage of the day, and how much it would cost the average person to do work to the given value you input.
Therefore the labour value defined as "the wage a worker would use to pay for a commodity" could be reversed and defined as "the wage given a worker in exchange for a commodity", surely. In 2013 values (the most recent the calculator can produce), this is £1,387,000.00. Surely, even for Louis XIV, this is ludicrous verging on dangerous! Not quite believing this, I took a look at another of Mrs Palliser's figures, a quote from a 1670 journal a little further down the page. "At the court of France... People think nothing of buying rabats, manchettes, or canons to the value of 13,000 crowns", writes her quoted party, a M. Saviniere d'Alquie (not someone I can find any trace of outside of her book, though this may be due to antiquated spelling of his name). If we take "crowns" to mean écu, sometimes called 'French Crowns', and convert them into livre by multiplying by 6, we get 78,000L. If we divide this by 10 to convert it into pounds, we get £7800. Adjusting the year to 1670, the year Mrs Palliser gives for her source on d'Alquie, entering it into the calculator gives a frankly utterly unbelievable labour value of over £15m, with a commodity value of £1.1m. This doesn't sound like a reliable source to me, but let's look at the scope of what you could buy nowadays to adorn yourself. Clothing is less important to us now, and so perhaps it is unfair to compare clothing costs nowadays to pieces of someone's wardrobe in the 17th century, especially when it comes to someone like Louis XIV (or his diamond-collecting courtiers, such as Cardinal Mazarin, who would have been a perfect candidate for a robe like this, had he lived slightly later into the century!). It might perhaps be fairer to compare this kind of luxury accessory to jewellery, or a gold watch. So let's have a look at some recent records. According to (who else?) Guinness World Records, the most expensive dress ever sold made it's price from cultural significance - being worn by Marilyn Monroe. It sold for £2.8m - but the record for jewellery - or at least, for a stone already cut, and ready to be set to wear, is £52m for a single pink diamond. And who could value the crown jewels? After all, Louis was a king. Oh - one more price: only last month the most expensive watch was sold, raising bids of £13.4m! So perhaps some new lace for a big occasion was quite possibly worth those adjusted prices.
If we take that price as possible, then, how much lace did Louis get for his money? Well, using Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4, we can see the typical length of boothose about 20-30 years before Louis' canons - this is a fair comparison, as canons certainly evolved out of this slightly earlier fashion. The boot-tops seen on page 107 are as close as we can get to official measurements of a contemporary piece, as any ruffled piece from slightly later in the century (and I'm not aware of one currently) would naturally only be measured in an estimated way. These boothose tops are about 12 inches around the leg and fall 12 inches down. If we take 12 inches to be the standard length, and add a little width-wise to allow for the gathering - say, make the measurement 20" (Venetian lace is thick, and very stiff, and wouldn't gather like fabric, I'm sure), we're left with 480 square inches of lace for the pair. If he paid £700 for the pair, that's about £1.46p an inch. In old coinage, that's £1, 9s, 2d per square inch, or 14-15 livre. If we take the UNESCO website for the cultural Heritage of Alencon's estimate of 45 hours per square inch (they say seven hours for a square centimetre, and as there are 6.45 square cm. in a square inch, I've multiplied accordingly - 45.15 hours) for Alençon lace as a guide, that's about 8 old pence (or 3.2 new pence) per hour of work. That's about 1/30th of a pound, or 1/3rd of a livre. There are 20 sols in a livre, so we'll say roughly 7 sols an hour.
It was at this point in my research that I thought I had reached an impasse. Checking back with Madame Despierres, I noticed the sentence "The wages were good, 4 to 13 sols per day from 1660 to 1780" (page 55). She also talks about the working day of an apprentice lacemaker - 6am to 8pm, or 14 hours (page 44). An apprentice would probably not be paid for her work at all, one could assume, and would be rewarded in lodging and food - when joining the profession proper, she'd likely work the same hours, but be at the lower end of the pay scale - and that's certainly less than a sol an hour. But we're getting away from the article really at hand here - let's work backwards from the figure given as a daily wage, and see how much an item like the rochet would have cost to make, disregarding how much people were said to have paid - then we'll have more of an idea which calculator is to be trusted.
So how much lace is in the rochet? Well, if we can estimate the width and length of the rochet's lace sections, perhaps we can begin to work out it's worth. The rochet flares towards the ground, and as I couldn't measure the object reliably as it had to be kept held in shape by acid-free paper, I will have to take an educated guess. If we take the flaring as a conservative six feet at the hem, assume it is made as a band (it gathers into the pleated body of the garment, so is a reasonable assumption) and work from the photo and given measurements given in the online description, we can estimate the width (or in this case, the height) of the band to be around three feet. Say the very loose sleeves are around 20" at the cuff, and a foot deep, for the sake of the experiment. The collar was about 5 inches deep, and obviously, quite wide, as it was pleated into the neck. If we refer again to Janet Arnold, and take the outside measurement of a 17th century shirt's collar (which falls in a similar way from the neck opening) as a general guide, a quick survey of the falling collars closest to this one makes it a convenient 20" around. If we say that the lace 'skirt' of the robe is 18 square feet, the cuffs and collar make a rough 4 square feet, after a bit of working out. So that's 22 square feet of lace.
It may be more sensible to work out the production costs of the robe than to compare them by the square inch to the bold claims of Louis XIV's courtiers now that we have a rough salary for them - just to reiterate, that was between 4 and 13 sol a day in French manufacturies. Let's say 10 sol a day, as Mme Despierres' salary estimate covers such a wide time-frame. If we assume the V&A's dating for the piece, 1685-1700, is correct, and in 1660 the workers were paid 4 sol in France, it makes sense for their wages to rise a little with inflation; obviously, her book concentrates mostly on the French lace of the period, and as Venetian lace was the very best, it's likely that in the early years of the French establishments, the Venetians were probably better paid than they were, being the original artisans. Again, this is only an experiment, and the perceived worth of the workers and their products was, I'm sure, less than they deserved.
So, the first thing to do is work out how many hours labour are in the piece. Well, if it measures about 22 square feet, and we multiply that by 144 to get the inches, that's 3168. Just to check my findings, I drew out a diagram to be sure, and then multiplied the length and width of each box representing a component (in inches) and added them together - my estimate of 22 sq. ft. was close, as it came out to 3172. Again, if we refer to UNESCO, and say that there are 45 hours of work per square inch, that's an astonishing and frankly incredulous 142,740 work hours. Divide that by 14 to get the number of work days - that's 10,196 days (that is, for one worker, though it's still unbelievable - perhaps this was actually a project carried out by a generation of nuns?), not including design work, revision of designs for the client, setting up the workshop for such a large design (it may have been made in pieces and assembled, like Alencon lace later was, but as it is not a mesh based lace, I think it's more likely that the fronds of the natural design would have been made in one piece, or the finished design could warp when sewn together if a few millimetres out). How many days would one have worked per week in Venice? I would incline towards 6, as it's well known that even in the later Victorian era, it was unusual for a 'seamstress' to take a half-day Saturday, and so I would expect Sundays to be given over to various church services, especially in as deeply religious a place as Venice. So, how many work days is that in a year? Well, 365 minus one seventh is roughly 313. So 10,196 days is heading towards THIRTY-THREE YEARS of work if it had been done by a single individual - though this is admittedly very unlikely, it's difficult to imagine how many people could have been involved accurately. A quick note: if we assume that the lace for the 'skirt' was put together in one piece, even if that piece was completed in sections and rolled across a frame, as I understand is sometimes done in conservation work, it's unlikely to have fitted into a worker's cottage, and as it was such specialist work, having it in the same room for one or two years as children, parties, especially cooking - it must have been done in a room set aside for the purpose. Perhaps the sleeves and collar were made by one individual, and the larger piece was worked on by one or more other lacemakers whose work was more uniform - though if there was a definite break in style, I couldn't see it in my brief study period.
But was this amount of work really feasible? Well, let's look at some other examples. In this PDF by needlework author Jane Zimmerman, she estimates the time required to complete one of the Order of the Golden Fleece copes I've talked about in previous posts. She estimates 20,000 to 30,000 work hours per cope. In the set, as I've previously mentioned, there are three copes, a dalmatic, a chasuble, and an altar frontal, all made with the same technique. Considering that this is her estimate of the stitching, who knows how long it took to make the design up, paint the master copy, paint that transfer onto the fabric, and to finish the edging and line the cope when complete. For the complete set, that could be upwards of 150,000 hours of stitching, plus those tasks.
In this PHD thesis on Opus Anglicanum, published by the university of St Andrew's, the author, Christine Linnell, talks in great depth about the work involved in producing embroidered copes, though she uses only one formal time-scale: "In the field of religious embroidery the most notable contemporary counterpart is the cope produced for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 by Beryl Dean and students... The execution of this cope was carried out over two years. In spite of the modern interpretation used for the churches which make-up the design--they were made in pieces and later assembled on the backing fabric, allowing for the use of faster techniques such as applique--it took approximately 6,015 hours to embroider them. Miss Dean spent 7,500 hours in preparation and many hundreds more to do the applied work necessary for the assembly and the making-up." This refers to the cope seen here on Beryl Dean's website. This is a cope mostly made with appliqué, as you can see from Linnell's description - yet the work hours involved are considerable. Lace is notoriously painstaking, and for most Venetian lace objects in museum collections, their scale is modest. In fact, the only piece I've seen that is a comparable size (provided my estimate of this rochet is correct, not conservative) is this piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a flounce which carries a staggering 3218.5 square inches of lace, though this does include a uniform border, which might not be considered true lace. The only piece that I have seen that is larger is also in the collection of the V&A, and is apparently an altar frontal composed entirely of needle-lace. It may be seen here, and is apparently 100x44 inches. That's 4400 square inches. In the second image of the catalogue record, the markedly raised surface shows a different variety of Venetian lace - possibly the slightly less prized 'Gros Point', as opposed to that seen in the rochet, which I believe is called 'Rose Point'. Let's now return to the rochet.
Before that tangent, I was going to work out the labour cost of those hours. I'll do it in stages to reduce the possibility of making a mistake. 10,196 days x 10 sol = 101,960 sol. There were 20 sol in a livre, so let's divide: that's 5098. A livre was worth two shillings, so let's multiply again. We're back to 10196, pleasingly. There were 20 shillings in a pound, so in pounds, that's £509.80. Again, in Mme Despierres, she adds the value of the thread for Alençon lace as being one seventh the cost of the project, as another trade, that of the thread-spinner, had to be at its peak to produce the fine thread necessary to the work (page 51). As the cost of labour was the major investment in the production of lace, I don't think it would be out of order to add one seventh to provide for the thread, which adds £72.83. On page 30, she also mentions the price of the vellum that provided the base for the designs. "In 1749 calf skins cost twenty seven sols and sheepskins ten sols." It's more likely that the higher quality material was used, but how much of it would have been? Perhaps two or three square feet per hide? Once treated (and dyed green, see above), it would have to be a regular thickness across the surface, so as to keep the threads uniformly taut. So if we say that the collar, and each cuff, required about two square feet each, that's still 6-9 hides for the main body. Let's say 11, and reduce the estimated cost for a slightly earlier time to about 20 sol or one livre, just to make the maths a little easier. That's 22 shillings or £1.10. So let's add those three components together - that's £583.73. I'm unable to reliably estimate the design and delivery costs on the evidence I have, and although I have heard of the bill for lace also including the lighting and heating of the studio (additional bills for candles and coal), and for the pricking paper to transfer the design, but these items will have had quite widely differing prices, and I'm sure will have been only a slight addition. One extra that I am unable to calculate does bother me, though. Whether the studio would have levied a profit margin, and whether that was a standard charge, or a percentage of works completed. This is, at the moment, impossible to know.
Let's enter that figure of £583.73 in the calculator for the year 1690. The commodity value comes out as £88,850.00 and the labour value as £1,135,000.00. Here's where it gets interesting. If you take the commodity value and the labour value (which, as we saw, ran into millions for both the items tested) of the lace mentioned earlier by Mrs Bury Palliser, the boot-tops for Louis cost either £91,700.00 or £1,387,000.00. Obviously, whoever the clergyman was that wore this rochet, he would have been an extremely wealthy man. Just not wealthy enough to afford what Louis XIV had (would it even have been allowed if he had the resources? It might well have been a faux pas to wear something more luxurious than the monarch). After all, his full-length robe, if these figures are to be believed, would have cost about the same as the King's boot-tops. If the lace made for the king was really so fine as to cost 7000 livre - how I wish an example of it still existed. It must have been like cobwebs.
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