This study investigates the woodcuts of African dress in Cesare Vecellio's 1598 costume book Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. While Vecellio's book has been previously studied to understand its contribution to sixteenth-century conceptions of human variation across geography and Venetian identity making, I concentrate instead on the book's intended function. In doing so, I show how its woodcuts of Africans, should be understood primarily as proposals for costumes to be used in new artistic productions. Vecellio situated his representations of African costume in a highly organized geographic framework that was shaped by travel narratives. These texts recorded voyages motivated, in part, by European political and economic interests in Africa. However, the resulting associations deposited in Vecellio's woodcuts are neutralized or at least complicated by the representations' hybridity, their inclusion in an early modern collection, and their status as models for artists to manipulate. Vecellio explained that all of the representations in Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo displayed antiquity (antichità), diversity (diuersità), and richness (la richezza). Sixteenth-century theater directors insisted on these qualities for costume, which promoted both the imitatio naturae and superatio naturae of artistic productions. Costumes could simultaneously contribute to a painting or a theatrical performance's decorum and propriety by differentiating and correctly identifying figures, and its grazia or pleasure with their exoticism and sumptuousness. This study suggests that in their intended use, the images of African costume were participating in "translations" of African dress into costumes for European paintings and theater. During this process, they accumulated new meanings. The dressed figures were copied from art objects with varying degrees of removal from immediate African encounters and combined with texts from published travel narratives to create mythic bricolages of Africans. The decontextualized costumes, organized into a sartorial collection with a categorization that readers understood as flexible, were tentatively defined vestmentary signs available for further signification within potential artistic contexts.

This dissertation addresses the development of the costume book in the rapidly globalising world of the sixteenth century, concentrating on two costume albums produced in the second quarter of the sixteenth century and whose owners and creators shared close ties to the imperial court of Habsburg ruler and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519-56). These richly illustrated albums were among the first known and surviving attempts to make sense of cultural difference by compiling visual information about regional clothing customs in and around Europe and further abroad. Their method of codifying sartorial customs through representative costume figures became a prevailing method through which to examine human difference on an increasingly vast and complex geo-political stage. Yet to have been satisfactorily investigated is the significant role that Habsburg networks and relationships played in shaping these costume albums and their ethnographic interests. The Trachtenbuch, or costume album, of Augsburg portrait medallist Christoph Weiditz (c. 1500-59) is a primary example, constituting a work of keen ethnographic observation which depicts customs and cultures largely witnessed first-hand when the artist travelled to Charles V’s Spanish court in 1529. Of equal interest is the second primary example of this dissertation, the costume album of Christoph von Sternsee (d. 1560) the captain of Charles V’s German Guard. Sternsee’s album, introduced to scholarship for the first time in this study, illustrates diverse cultures and costumes encountered across the imperial Habsburg lands and its neighbours. The emperor’s far-reaching sovereignty propelled Christoph Weiditz and Christoph von Sternsee across the Habsburg lands as they each attempted to benefit their careers and gain prestige from imperial patronage. Their costume albums testify to an empire that encouraged interactions between ambassadors, agents, merchants, military officers, and courtly elite of diverse cultural backgrounds, against a backdrop of shared political, religious, commercial, and military interests. This milieu facilitated the transfer of knowledge and developed methods of visual communication and human representation that were shared and reciprocally recognised.