Giorgione's Tempest or 'little landscape with the storm with the gypsy': more on the gypsy, and a reassessment

Like other female vagabonds and mendicants, gypsy women were commonly depicted carrying a baby; but gypsy women in particular held their child by a swaddling band or wrapped them in their cloaks. In his costume book of 1590, Cesare Vecellio remarks: ‘. . . con qualche figliuolino da qualche fascia legato al collo di essa vanno cosi vagando’ (with some little child bound by some band to their neck, that is how they wander about).[25] In the prologue to his play La zingara of 1545, Artemio Giancarli implies that the practice was distinctive:[26] ‘… il proprio figliuolo, qual'avea in collo al modo loro’ (her own son, which she had at the neck in the way they do). Vecellio further records that ‘they bind a cloak of woollen cloth [panno] over the shoulder, passing it under the other arm; and it is long enough to reach down to their feet.’ More than 150 years earlier the Paris chronicler had remarked:[27] ‘pour tout costume une vieille couverture très grossière attachée par un lien de drap ou de corde, et dessous, un pauvre corsage ou chemise pour toute parure’ (their only clothing is an old very coarse blanket attached to the shoulder by a strip of cloth or cord, and underneath a poor bodice or shirt – that is all they have to wear). Such a costume was frequently noted and depicted;[28] in Italy their overgarment or cloak was called a schiavina (‘a long garment of coarse wool, worn by pilgrims and hermits’),[29] and the expression ad armacollo used to describe the way they wore it, over one shoulder and under the other arm.[30]  More exactly, they might hold the baby by the strip that held the cloak to the shoulder.[31]

FOOTNOTES

25 C. Vecellio, Habiti antichi e moderni, Venice, 1590, p. 176.

26 G.A. Cibotto (ed.), Teatro veneto, Parma, 1960, p. 427.

27 Journal d'un Bourgeois, vol. 4, ix, p. 361.

28 So Bloch, Tsiganes, p. 10; Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 166.

29 Tommaseo and Bellini, Dizionario, s.v.

30 Cf. Muratori, vol. 18, p. 611.

31 Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 191.