The Only Known Complete Contemporary Illuminated Copy of One of the Great Renaissance Costume Books
Boissard, Jean-Jacques. Habitus Variarum Orbis gentium. Habitz de Nations estrãges. Trachten mancherley Völcker des Erdskreyß. Mechelen, Caspar Rutz, 1581.
One of the most beautiful and intellectually ambitious costume books of the Renaissance: Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium, illustrated with 67 magnificent oblong folio engravings depicting the dress, customs, gestures, and social types of peoples across Europe, the Ottoman world, the Near East, Africa, and the imagined fringes of Asia and the Americas.
The present example is of exceptional importance as the only known complete copy of the first edition preserved in original contemporary illumination to appear on the market within the last century.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
Five leaves. Illustrated with 67 costume engravings, fully engraved title page, author portrait, and two additional portrait medallions, all engraved and illuminated in gold and colours at the time, together with five small coloured woodcut initials. Oblong folio (265 × 342 mm).
Nineteenth-century blind-tooled calf binding over five raised bands, with ornamental tools in spine compartments and elaborate panel decoration to covers incorporating floral and strapwork ornament. Binding rubbed; paper lightly browned; occasional marginal tears and restorations; plates 16 and 34 repaired; plates 23 and 61 with restored borders; plates 53–56 with faint waterstain.
The engravings were executed by Julius Golcius, who signed plate seven with the date 1581. Captions throughout appear in Latin, French, and German.
Costume as Human Geography
Far more than a simple collection of exotic costumes, the Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium belongs to the great humanist project of understanding humanity through geography, history, manners, and visual typology.
Jean-Jacques Boissard (1528–1602), scholar, poet, draftsman, antiquarian, and traveller from Besançon, spent much of his life moving across Europe and the Mediterranean world. After abandoning theological studies at Leuven, he followed the wandering humanist Hugues Babet through Germany before travelling extensively in Italy and Greece, collecting antiquities and absorbing the visual culture of the Renaissance firsthand.
His costume book emerged directly from these experiences.
The publisher Caspar Rutz makes clear in his multilingual preface — printed in Italian, German, Latin, and French — that clothing should be understood not merely as ornament, but as a key to national character itself. Just as books and engravings had already documented cities and landscapes, so too should humanity be represented “with its own clothing and costume,” since manners, customs, and temperament might be recognized through dress.
The work therefore transforms costume study into a form of practical ethnography.
Venice, the Ottoman World, and the Renaissance Imagination
The visual organization of the series reveals much about the Renaissance worldview.
The opening plates focus heavily upon Venice, represented as the great threshold between North and South, Christianity and the Ottoman East. The Doge and Dogaressa appear ceremonially within their domestic chamber; Venetian noblewomen veil themselves in elaborate garments; gondolas glide across canals.
Italy dominates the early part of the book, followed gradually by France, the German-speaking lands, Burgundy, the Low Countries, and the Balkans before the sequence expands eastward toward Ottoman territories, Persia, Arabia, Armenia, Syria, and beyond.
As the geographical distance from Europe increases, Renaissance uncertainty about the wider world becomes increasingly visible. Figures identified as “Indians from Africa” and “Oriental Indians” reveal lingering confusion between the Americas, Africa, and Asia nearly a century after Columbus. African figures sometimes retain idealized European facial features and blonde hair, demonstrating how imagination, inherited classical models, and limited information continued to shape European visual understanding of distant peoples.
The result is a fascinating intersection of observation, fantasy, travel literature, and early anthropology.
The Renaissance Theatre of Dress
The engravings themselves are extraordinarily elegant.
Most plates contain three standing figures arranged almost theatrically against minimal settings, allowing costume, gesture, and bodily posture to dominate the composition. Heavy fabrics trail across the ground; embroidered garments shimmer with colour; sleeves, veils, turbans, cloaks, belts, and jewelry become markers of geography and identity.
Toward the end of the volume, the representations become increasingly sensual and exoticized. Arabian and “African Indian” women appear partially nude, reflecting the Renaissance tendency to associate geographical distance with loosened social conventions and heightened eroticism.
At the same time, the extraordinary contemporary illumination transforms the engravings into something approaching miniature paintings. Rich reds, blues, greens, golds, and flesh tones animate the figures with remarkable delicacy and consistency throughout the entire series.
Humanism, Memory, and Portraiture
Immediately following the publisher’s preface appears Boissard’s own half-length portrait in profile, where he inscribes into a book Cicero’s famous description of history as:
“vita memoriae”
the life of memory.
The phrase captures the deeper ambition of the work itself: to preserve visually the peoples, manners, and appearances of the known world through the combined powers of engraving, travel, and humanist scholarship.
Provenance
Illustrated monogram ex-libris of Antoine Mouradian on front pastedown.
Literature
BM STC Dutch 37; Brunet I, 1288; Cioranesco 4261; Colas 366; Graesse I, 477; Hiler 100; Lipperheide Aa 23–25; Rahir 331; Vinet 2090 (“rare et fort curieux”).
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 62:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
