Zygmunt August: Style Icon
When filtered through the sentimental 19th-century imagination, Zygmunt August tends to be represented as a bon vivant who scandalised the entire country with his secret affair with Barbara Radziwiłł – a noblewoman who kept being compared to Helen of Troy for as long as several centuries after her death. Nevertheless, the figure of the monarch seems equally interesting if we peek into not his alcove, but his wardrobe.
This February, a suit of armour arrived from Hungary to the Wawel Royal Castle – the very armour which Ferdinand I ordered for the 13-year-old Zygmunt August on the occasion of the Polish prince’s engagement to his daughter, Elisabeth Habsburg. Hence, it’s worth taking a closer look at the glamorous attire of the last of the Jagiellonian kings on the Polish throne, as well as that of his contemporaries.
The peak of the Jagiellonian dynasty’s power at the brink of the 15th century coincided with the period when the late mediaeval culture was transforming into the Renaissance; when Sigismund’s Chapel was built next to Wawel Cathedral; when Kochanowski, Rej and Copernicus were working on their literary and scientific achievements. Fashion, too, was bound to change during that time. Although there are few physical remnants of 15th- and 16th-century attire, we’ve got a substantial amount of iconographic material at our disposal, comprising panel paintings, illuminations and prints, as well as documents: inventories, chronicles, last wills and court bills. The will made by the last Jagiellonian king mentions an enormous collection of garments, and the accounts coming from those who had the opportunity to admire the royal collection of jewellery, armours and other works of Renaissance handicraft paint a picture of a treasury which could cause even Indiana Jones to become weak in the knees.
The dandy-like image of the Renaissance king was created by Eugeniusz Gołębiowski in his biography of Zygmunt August, released by the publishing house Czytelnik (Reader):
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Zygmunt August wasn’t particularly keen on books, and no passion for studies had ever been awakened in him. He did, however, enjoy spending hours in the library, browsing through volumes, savouring the beautiful binding, print, patterns and leather embossing. He relished books the way he relished jewels, women and horses.
The grass is always greener…
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Portrait of Zygmunt August, workshop of Lucas Cranach, ca. 1555, photo: Wikimedia Commons
But how did all these treasures look? How were they sewn? Kraków had been an important centre of textile trade from as early as the 13th century. After all, there’s a reason that the Cloth Hall remains the central point of the city’s Main Square up until this day. However, Polish textiles weren’t considered particularly valuable in the royal court, which was placed near the contemporaneous market stalls – local materials were only used to make mourning hoods and garments for lower-ranked servants, wardens and coachmen.
The royal family and their courtiers preferred Florentine cloth, whose import had begun during the times of Kazimierz IV Jagiellon, as well as Belgian, British and Flemish materials. What was particularly popular in the court of Zygmunt August, and earlier in that of his father Zygmunt the Old, was what they called ‘Lundian’ cloth – probably coming from ‘Lund’, a distorted name for London. It was used to sew garments for the king’s children, cooks, flautists, drummers, the imp and the pageboy.
While woollen cloth was suitable for everyday attire, ceremonial occasions required something more glamorous, preferably silk and gold. Mostly thanks to Italian merchants, the court was equipped with cloth of gold and silver – thickly woven fabrics with golden, silver and silk surface – and brocade fabrics made of silk interspersed with metallic threads. Materials imported from the West were not the only ones that passed through the hands of Italian merchants, who would also deliver fabrics from places like China to the Wawel Royal Castle, while Turkish and Persian textiles were brought to the court by Armenian merchants. Historical sources provide an abundance of names describing particular types of silk with different weaves or places of origin, such as tabin, kamcha and kitajka.
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'Saint Stanisław' by Stanisław Samostrzelnik, miniature from 'Lives of the Archbishops of Gniezno', Zygmunt I adoring the saint in a representative coat, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The vocabulary range used to describe the types of garment happens to be equally rich. It includes names known from antiquity, such as ‘tunic’ – used for centuries to describe a garment with a simple cut designed to be put on over the head, which nevertheless started to disappear in the late 15th century. There’s also pallium, also known as chlamys, referring to a coat cut out of a semicircle piece of fabric with no holes for arms, usually clasped up the front with a breastpin. When long tunics began to disappear, they were replaced by the immensely popular szuba – open at the front, with sleeves lined with fur. Different versions of szuba were worn by men, women and children alike. With time, they evolved into the popularised mostly by Stefan Batory delia – long, well-fitted on the top, flared at the bottom, clasped with several buttons. Each of these garments came in different versions, some of them inspired by Eastern, especially Turkish fashion: ferezja, torłop, dołoman.
The purchase of fabrics for ceremonial clothing and ornaments could cost several thousand florins at once, for instance when the entire court needed to be provided with black garments for the funeral of a dynasty member. The court’s love for luxury fabrics and garments and all the resulting excess were something that contemporary fashion influencers wouldn’t even dream of – yet they were also accompanied by great care for the already existing attires. The sources mention not only new purchases but also, for instance, the king’s tunics being repaired.
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Golden sable head, ca. 1550-1559, Umbria, from the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
If we were to pick one place that’s crucial for the development of court fashion, our choice wouldn’t be any of Italian, French, German, Hungarian or Turkish cities – it would be Lithuanian primaeval forests. After all, that’s where animal furs, used to some extent in every type of garment, came from. They were of equal importance in the courts of all the Jagiellonian monarchs, although it was Kazimierz IV Jagiellon who seems to have been a particular fur enthusiast – he employed almost as many furriers as tailors. Expensive furs also comprised one of the key elements of newly married Jagiellonian women’s dowries.
A king’s coat lined with ermines and dormice constituted an attire typical for all the European monarchs. The popularity of furs in the Commonwealth, partly explained by the cold climate, went far beyond the royal court, and fur trade had constituted a significant branch of the economy since the Middle Ages. They were used as a lining for almost everything from gloves to trousers. Wearing furs was so commonplace that it didn’t constitute a status symbol in and of itself, even though the prestige (and hence also the price) of the fur was determined by its type, the kind of animal and the quality and density of the bristle. That’s why there were spectacular attempts at forgery. A piece of squirrel fur that two resourceful furriers from Toruń tried to ‘turn into’ a sable has been preserved up to this day.
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Still from the film 'Epitaph for Barbara Radziwiłłówna' directed, by Janusz Majewski, 1982, photo: Jan Górski / WFDiF / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute
Squirrels, foxes, wolves, fishers, rabbits, lynxes, beavers – almost each and every furry mammal was at risk of becoming a collar, a border of a garment or padding. The sources describing Zygmunt August’s collection of fur point to a real dead zoo – one of the inventories of royal attires mentions ‘sable parts, heads, legs, tails and other, leopards and wolverines, lynxes, wolves, black foxes’, and that’s just in the title. Zygmunt II’s mother, Queen Bona, was said to have been a particular enthusiast of beaver furs, which were valued for the fact that they don’t lose brisk too easily. If the Habsburgian diplomat Zygmunt Gerberstein is to be believed, people in Poland and Eastern Europe would even use the fur of house cats to make furs – there was a somewhat fluid distinction between domestic animals and quarry, animals meant to be eaten or those meant to be worn.
Animal skins were also worn over the shoulders or wrapped around the waist. Hence, some of the animals were turned into hybrid artefacts of goldsmithing and the fur industry. Queen Bona’s connection included, among other things, ‘a black sable sewn from two individual ones, with a golden head and four golden paws adorned with jewels’. One coat could cost the lives of a dozen or so ermines and more than 2,000 dewberries – fluffy rodents in the size of rats, with grey backs and fair bellies. A few hundred years later, the distant descendants of the dewberries who lost their lives to court fashion were covered by species protection, and the species were reintroduced in several of the places where they went extinct.
In search of lost Polishness
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Portrait of Stefan Batory by Marcin Kober, 1583, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The abundance of furs in Polish wardrobes was also striking for foreign guests visiting the Commonwealth. Cesare Vecellio, a painter and engraver, privately Titian’s cousin, noted that everything in Polish fashion, from head coverings through dresses to coats was lined with fur, especially when it came to women’s attire. Vecellio also saw Poles wearing ‘shoes shaped very oddly […]. On the heel under the sole they’ve got an iron ring, allowing men to stand safely on ice, which is also why they put sharp studs in their soles’. To authors from the Italian Peninsula, Poland appeared as an ice-bound, frosty land; after her arrival in the Duchy of Lithuania, Bona herself described it, in as letter to Duke Ferrara, as ‘the furthest edge of the North’.
The character of local fashion was a matter of concern mostly for our native authors. During the times of Zygmunt August, court fashion becomes prone to international influences, both from the East and from the West. In King Zygmunt August’s court, black becomes increasingly popular – a common element of Spanish fashion, eagerly adopted by the Habsburgs as well, and a colour frequently associated with elegance, sombreness and asceticism, later to become permanently tied to the aesthetics of the Counter-Reformation. The Polish input in the Renaissance fashion consisted of manufacturing a red dye with a tinge of crimson out of the Polish cochineal – a local insect of the order Hemiptera. The dye constituted one of Poland’s most significant export goods.
The rapid changes in fashion that began at the beginning of the 16th century often encountered resistance among people of letters. Marcin Kromer imprecated the tendency to depart from the Polish tradition in favour of Western trends; Jan Kochanowski wasn’t pleased with delia’s new, peculiar cut; and Klemens Janicki published Dialog o Pstrokaciznie i Zmienności Polskich Strojów (A Dialogue Against the Diversity and Changeability of Polish Dress). Jan of Słupica, in turn, came to a far-fetched conclusion, linking the parroting of Western fashion with Poland’s military inferiority. Łukasz Górnicki’s Dworzanin (Courtier) – a Polish adaptation of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier – contains a similar warning, poignantly conveyed through the example of our kindred nation, the Hungarians: ‘When Hungarians foreign dress assumed, they died.’
Mikołaj Rej, too, was convinced that, since Poles are no geese, they should not only have their own language but also their own fashion. ‘A Pole is painted naked and with scissors; put some cloth before him: choose the cut you wish for’ – Rej’s mockery went. An identical satirical motif consisting in depicting a naked nobleman with a bale of cloth, suggesting that fashion would change before the portrait is completed, could be found in other cultures, for instance in German writings. Apparently, the front against the Renaissance ferment in fashion was an international phenomenon.
In reality, it would be difficult if not impossible to go back to a point in time when fashion was purely local – as usual, the common idea of tradition as having purely native character turns out to be a pipe dream when confronted with facts. A more or less intensive cultural exchange has always taken place, also in the area of clothing style. Representations of King Jagiełło show him wearing, for instance, wearing a pourpoint doublet, whose foreign origin is betrayed by the name itself. The truth is that the history of Polish national dress began precisely in the period of Zygmunt August’s reign. The 16th century was the time of the rising popularity of the zhupan, a long dress with narrow sleeves, buttoned all the way to the top. The zhupan made a great career and became a key element of the national dress combined with the delia, with its fur collar and sleeves cut open. Ironically, this traditional attire developed at the end of the century under the strong influence of Hungarian and Lithuanian-Russian fashion.
The Western perception of Eastern dress was more often than not stained with a tinge of orientalism. During Zygmunt the Old’s journey to Naples, to his fiancée Bona Sforza, Italian authors commented on the splendour of the Jagiellonian train with admiration. Others, however, considered it excessively and ‘barbarously’ ostentatious, sharply contrasting with the refined local style. The admiration may have been a result of exoticisation, as Polish dress was appreciated for its ‘Eastern’ splendour.
Observing the oriental flavour noticed in our native culture, it’s worth remembering that although the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has never become an overseas colonial empire, the internationalism of local fashion did have its own dark sides. Wealth was manifested not only through brocade fabrics threaded with pearls but also through the members of the court. In 1529, Chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecki begged for a Native American to be sent to him from the recently ‘discovered’ New World, while Elisabeth Habsburg’s black coachman or the Ethiopians in Stefan Batory’s court constitutes a sort of an ‘exotic’ accessory.
Communicating through dress
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Miniature of Barbara Radziwiłłówna, made around 1553 in the workshop of Łukasz Cranach the Younger, photo: Czartoryski Museum
At the beginning of the 16th century, dress started to serve an increasingly more informative function. It communicated not only one’s wealth and position on the social ladder but also their political and religious stance. In contemporaneous literature, mentions of attire are usually accompanied with a comment on the moral state of the society, with excess and following new trends being equal to the demise of virtues. What was prescribed by the etiquette, then, was no more important than what was banned. The so-called anti-excess laws (leges sumpturiae) directly forbade non-noblemen, especially burghers, to copy courtly dress. Even gloves could testify to the wearer’s social status – for a long time, only those of noble birth could wear gloves with fingers. According to the notes made by the prudent Zygmunt August, they could have a surprisingly practical application, protecting not only from the cold but potentially also from poison sneaked in, for instance, on a ring.
The rule itself wasn’t anything new – the relation between one’s social status and what one was allowed to wear dates back to ancient Rome. However, in Renaissance Commonwealth the rules seem particularly strict and specific – particular types of dress were ascribed to all estates and vocational groups, and they included such details as shoes, jewellery and the aforementioned gloves. As the rules were notoriously broken, they were also regularly updated. In Piotr Zbylitowski’s 1600 text Rozmowa Szlachcica Polskiego z Cudzoziemcem (Polish Nobleman’s Dialogue with a Foreigner), the titular nobleman complains that the copying of dress has resulted in the representatives of various social estates being indistinguishable from each other. The existence of clear class divisions with regard to garments had a way of provoking people to transgress these divisions, as one could maintain at least the appearances of social advancement through dress.
In the court, dress could also transmit many other subtle messages. During her wedding and coronation, Queen Bona was wearing a dress made of turquoise Turkish satin with gold sewn-on beehive-shaped ornaments and an azure beret adorned with the same pattern. These beehives weren’t a particularly eccentric motif, but they were meant to symbolise the future queen’s diligence and her ability to manage the kingdom well. The colour, in turn, emphasised her lineage, alluding to the colour of the dragon from the Sforza’s coat of arms.
Jewellery, too, could be used to convey certain messages. Anna Jagiellon was buried in a dress with a heart-shaped brooch in which the portrait of her dead husband, Stefan Batory, was sculpted – an ornament symbolising their emotional attachment. Jewels with initials could serve a similar function, gifted to loved ones or worn to commemorate the dead. Of course, jewellery often communicated something much simpler, namely the monarch’s might and wealth. The Jagiellonian royals’ head coverings, berets covered in diamonds, pearls, rubies and emeralds, could be no less flaunty than the famous diamond implanted into Lil Uzi Vert’s forehead.
Until 1562, Zygmunt August had spent around half a million Italian scudos – more than an annual income of the Crown’s treasury – on jewels only. Thanks to that (and the gemstones already collected by Queen Bona by that time), he managed to bedazzle the papal legate Bernardo Bongiovanni during the latter’s visit to the court. The Vatican’s envoy noted:
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For himself, His Majesty has got excellent armours, four of which are simply magnificent, especially one, made of silver, onto which the representations of all his ancestors’ victories over Moscow are delicately etched […] There’s an enormous table in one of the rooms, taking up almost the entire space. 16 jewel cases are placed on the table, each 2 ells long and 1.5 ells wide, all filled with precious stones. Neither in Venice nor in Rome, nor in any royal treasury did I see anything that could be compared to the riches of the Polish king.
The last male representative of the Jagiellonian dynasty divided his treasure among his sisters: Zofia, Anna and Katarzyna. Although the monarch himself thought long-term about making his collection the property of the entire Commonwealth, writing in his last will that ‘our enemy, death, spares no one, and there will come a day when all three sisters will surrender to her’. But the fate of his wealth was stormy, and the treasury was emptied by… the Jagiellons’ successors, among others. As the historian Urszula Borkowska wrote:
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Real havoc was eventually wrought by the Vasas who, without a warrant, stripped [the treasury] bare of its most precious jewels, taking them for themselves and their wives and, in the case of Jan Kazimierz – for their friends in France. Although opening the treasury was prohibited, they were able to get inside anyway. The inventories, occasionally requested by the Sejm to be made anew, noted these deficits. After his abdication, Jan Kazimierz was even prosecuted for pawning an enormous number of priceless gems and for taking away others, as well as for converting and hiding valuable tapestries.
Sometimes, however, making a particular impression required the application of the ‘less is more’ rule – even in the Golden Age of Renaissance. Zygmunt August was well-aware of that, as proven by Barbara Radziwiłł’s arrival in the Crown, designed by the king in a way that helped stifle a surging scandal. Shortly after Zygmunt I the Old’s death, Barbara, first married to Zygmunt August in Lithuania in secret, entered the Crown dressed in black and relatively modest Italian fabrics rather than precious brocade. Respecting mourning was supposed to work in favour of Barbara Radziwiłł by making her look like a solemn dame and nipping the rumours of her promiscuity in the bud.
One may say, without exaggeration, that the concern for clothing had stayed with Zygmunt II to the end. Although he ordered for the funeral ceremony not to be particularly lavish, he did care about other details – even at his deathbed, he was worried about whether a scarlet cloth had been prepared for his burial.
It was.
Originally written in Polish, translated by Anna Potoczny, Sep 2021
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