Playing with Gender, Social Status, and Sexuality in Giacomo Franco’s Habiti delle donne venetiane

This essay examines Giacomo Franco’s Habiti delle donne venetiane (Dress of Venetian Women), engraved around 1610. In the book, Franco illustrates various social types, from noblewomen to courtesans, that are printed on the page’s recto. Considering the book’s structure, in which each illustrated plate follows with a textual description of the woman on the succeeding recto, this essay posits that readers were given the opportunity to assess each woman’s identity as they made their way through the text. While Franco’s book can be taken as a humorous guessing game, this essay contends that readers were ultimately set up for failure in their estimations, as the engraved women largely match one another in costume. Shaped by tensions surrounding women’s dress, Giacomo Franco arguably created his costume book to amuse his readers, who knew of the fruitlessness in trying to tell apart a chaste Venetian lady from an unchaste one.