DETAILS, DETAILS

Of course there are greater pleasures in life than wandering around museums feasting your eyes, but not many, and very few so inspiring and lasting, especially with a little camera in your pocket... Details of the real or imagined fashions of the Renaissance are so fascinating: the colour combinations, shapes, the crisp modelling of the fabrics, often imitating sculpture. I love the pearl-embroidered lettering on the neckline, above left, the plum silk sleeves and green shift, above right and the arabesque hem details, below, probably copied from that well-thumbed sourcebook, Francesco Pellegrini's 1530 Fleur de la Science de Portraicture.

The two Arab gents above, in a vast canvas by Gentile Bellini of 1507 at the Brera, are nattily dressed in Ottoman silks, surprisingly just the thing with spurs and sword, probably seen by the artist while working in Constantinople for Mehmet II, 10 years earlier. On the other hand the 'Roman' soldiers, below, in a St. Sebastian altarpiece by Hans Holbein's father in the Munich Alte Pinakothek, are modelled on the contemporary (1516) Landsknechts, those improbably flamboyant German mercenaries who terrorised Italy and were excluded from the sumptuary laws that controlled ordinary citizens' clothing, freed to wear all the brightly coloured, slashed doublets they liked by edict of Emperor Maximilian I.

More details, above, of gorgeous cloths with stylish, contrasting borders. Below, three ladies of the 1560's with beautiful lace, jewellery and accessories, including two Zibellini - sable or marten furs, one with a gold head (with its own pearl earrings) and another with its own stuffed head, while its owner strokes her improbably tiny lapdog, itself such a fashion victim that its ears are pierced.