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An unpublished and hitherto unknown Florentine source – four registers from the workshop of Lorenzo Gabbuggiani, a costume-maker, written between 1688 and 1731 – contains plenty of very useful information on the city of Florence’s artistic life. It also reveals a cross-section of the creativity and handicrafts that were vital to the history of drama and of artistic craftsmanship. An analysis of these rare documents unveils the hard, challenging work of a Florentine costume shop, where the workers created every kind of costume, altered and re-used them for many different performances, and sewed costumes for performances of the “drammi per musica”. The latter were the fashion of the moment, held either at the now lost private theatre in the Villa di Pratolino or at the theatre of the Villa di Poggio a Caiano, or to be staged at the grand “stanza” in Via della Pergola for the academicians’ delight.
Drawing on the voluminous daily records of the ledgers of Gabbuggiani’s workshop, the study unearths new information on the female and male singers, most of them completely unknown today, who were employed in the Medicean court. It also analyses other aspects of producing a performance, e.g. how long was spent in rehearsal. Gabbuggiani’s ledgers also offer important insights into the fabrics, their most used colours, and thus the fashions of the time, as created and spread by Gabbuggiani’s workshop. This was how the elite built up their own public image and importance, and the performances were the most important windows. Indeed, the costumes worn on the stage were used by courtiers to enact a process of mutual emulation and conditioning, where the stage and the symbolic and representative pretences very often mixed.
