904 margaret f. rosenthal
and warping and weaving.45 When merchants did not collect the materi-
als themselves, they acted as investors by purchasing the best raw mate-
rials available such as dyes and yarns. the tintori della seda [silk dyers]
were of the highest quality; the registers of the silk guild suggests that by
the mid-16th century there were 30,000 men and women employed in the
different stages of silk manufacturing.46 male merchants could also bar-
ter textiles outside the guild by forming partnerships, for example, with
wool manufacturers since noble merchants were not obliged to enter the
guild until 1515.47 this mercantile practice required a vast knowledge of
international markets and their fluctuations and depended upon personal
affiliations in markets far from Venice. there was a notable difference,
therefore, between the person who worked the cloth and the merchant
who purchased the raw materials and finally arranged for its sale. never-
theless, once the finished textile was complete, it had to pass the inspec-
tion of a special office set up in Venice at the rialto—the Paragon—which
compared the finished textile with a high-quality prototype in order to
guarantee its perfection.48
Venice maintained this preeminent position in the world’s cloth mar-
kets throughout the period, a remarkable fact considering that the city
itself had none of its own supplies necessary to produce textiles. the silk
industry flourished even when the wool sector was in crisis in other parts
of the peninsula. Valuable silk damasks, silk brocades, and other textiles
made from a mix of silk and other fibers expanded unabated throughout
the 16th century until the 1630–31 plague.49
Vecellio’s textile vocabulary materializes this global history of cloth
when condensed into the fabrics produced and worn by 16th-century
Venetians. a light silk, ormesino, was named after [h]ormuz, an island
in the Persian gulf, where the fabric had been made for centuries before
its production became the craft of the Venetian ormesini—for whom a
Fondamenta in Canareggio is still named. Tabino or tabì, a rich, heavy silk
given a watered or moiré finish, was originally made in al-attabiya, a dis-
trict of Baghdad, and was used to form the attire of “Young men of the City
45 edoardo Demo, “Wool and silk,” in lanaro, ed., At the centre of the Old World,
p. 222.
46 Crouzet Pavan, Venice Triumphant, p. 310 n. 76; norbert heyl and Cristina gregorin,
Venice Master Artisans (Ponzano/treviso, 2003), p. 25; and molà, The Silk Industry, pp. 16,
268, 290.
47 mozzato, “the Production of Woolens,” p. 91.
48 gregorin, Venice Master Artisans, p. 28.
49 orsi landini, “Da vanità a virtù,” p. 58.