In Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, Fernand Braudel claimed that, “The history of costume is less anecdotal than would appear. It touches on every issue” (Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 226). The innovative catalogue and exhibition On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto take Braudel’s focus on costume as a point of departure to investigate how footwear provided a significant perspective onto social, economic, and cultural conventions around the early modern Mediterranean.

The bulk of the catalogue is devoted to constructing a trajectory for the development of women’s platform shoes, most commonly called chopines, from evidence of their earliest appearances in ancient Greece and Rome, to the boxy, cork leather-clad chopines that were popular in medieval and Renaissance Spain, and their thinner and taller counterparts that were prevalent in Republican Venice. The catalogue then analyzes the reception of the chopine and the high-heeled shoe in wealthy seventeenth-century seafaring trade centers such as England and the Netherlands, where it was regarded as a foreign luxury item. The curator of the exhibition and author of the catalogue, Elizabeth Semmelhack, argues that increased trade with the Persians led to the slow replacement of the flat platform shoe with the high heel as a common form of public footwear. Braudel serves as the methodological prototype for the exhibition, but the cross-cultural consideration of the chopine also resonates with Arjun Appadurai’s claim that commodities acquire value through their continual but changing engagement with the social world. Mining an encyclopedic corpus of textual and visual resources, On a Pedestal uses the chopine as a lens to assess status, gender, taste, social convention, morality, identity, and market exigencies.

One of the catalogue’s major strengths is the nuanced comparison it makes between the materials and production of the chopines in different regions. The light cork used to fabricate the sole of the chopine in the ancient world and Spain made walking easier than in Italy, where the shoes were often constructed with heavier wood that was covered with leather. Yet, the etymological and stylistic overlaps between the platform shoe in several locations—particularly between Spain and the Islamic world—revealed an awareness of trends abroad. Semmelhack associates the popularity of the chopine with a taste for goods from the East, where the platform protected the feet in bathhouses. As Semmelhack shows, the chopine was so ensconced in Western culture by the fifteenth century that even as relations between Spain and the Islamic world soured, and despite the absence of a strong public bathing culture in Catholic Spain, the chopine remained popular in the Spanish market. The chopine was considered foreign, regardless of whether it was imported or locally manufactured.

Scholarship on the chopine has been hampered by confusion over the social status it conveyed. In prints that illustrated conventions in costume, such as Cesare Vecellio’s Ancient and Modern Dress of Diverse Parts of the World published in 1590, the women clad in chopines were often labeled as courtesans, but several marriage dowries and inventories of noble families also mention chopines in their collections. Analyses of Vittore Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Women of 1495 at the Museo Correr dei Veneziani exemplify the confusion in determining who wore chopines. The two women portrayed by Carpaccio, seemingly bored on an altino, a Venetian terrace, have been branded as courtesans, due in large part to the representation of red chopines in front of them. Since art historians have recently identified the Correr panel as the bottom part of a painting at the Getty Museum by Carpaccio entitled Hunting on the Lagoon, the sitters have been recognized as noble women, waiting for their relatives to finish the hunt. The literature on Carpaccio’s painting illustrates the divisions scholars have created between women of differing social classes, when in fact both courtesans and noble women often appealed to the same brand of elite men.

Acknowledging the complexities in understanding the chopine, Semmelhack elegantly parses the vicissitudes of the social acceptability of the shoe in different cultural contexts. The chopine was the common denominator between the Duchess Eleanor of Toledo, the Venetian noblewoman, the Florentine courtesan, and even ancient sculpture. The ancient historian Pliny praised platform shoes as an effective attribute of the leisure class, for the increased height of a shoe significantly slowed the gait, suggesting that the wearer was not encumbered by the time restraints of work. Cesare Ripa echoed Pliny’s defense of the platform, or zoccolo as he called it, in his 1593 Iconologia.

However, the chopine also incited passionate disapproval. As Semmelhack notes in the catalogue, Cosmo Agnelli wrote in his Loving Advice on the Abuses of Vain Women (1592) that, “true beauty always consists in proper proportions. Elevating your legs with heels that are a quarter or even half an arms length leaves you looking like a monster, with the head and torso of a child perched on the legs of a giant” (72). Semmelhack encapsulates several other criticisms of the chopines with Thomas Coryate’s designation of the platform shoes as “ridiculous instruments,” a claim he made after he witnessed several women tumbling out of them on a visit to Venice (72). In contrast, the catalogue also notes a proto-feminist justification of the chopine by a nun, Arcangela Tarabotti, who praised the platform shoe’s ability to elevate the woman “above the earthly triviality” (74). Tarabotti’s defense of the chopine, despite her religious position, indicates that commentaries on the chopine were informed more by opinions of propriety in fashion rather than a deep moral imperative.

Agnelli’s negative assessment of the chopine derives from what he considered its transgression against the rules of proportion. Contemporaneous theorists of art such as Leon Battista Alberti and Pomponius Gauricus proposed ratios and measurements for the depiction of the body based on ancient prototypes of ideal human proportions. Critiques of the proportions generated by the chopines demonstrate the extent to which a woman’s public life centered on her body. As the title suggests, the exhibition analyzes the way in which footwear served as an apparatus of display to elevate the body for better view in the public sphere. A sixteenth-century chopine now in the collections of the Correr soars to twenty inches, offering an extreme illustration of how the shoes inhibited easy movement and divested the body of a measure of its autonomy.

The 2001 exhibition Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also investigated chopines as a part of a wider focus on clothes and accessories designed to manipulate the contours of the body into an ideal of beauty. On a Pedestal, however, links the physical transformations forced by the chopine to larger socio-political issues. More specifically, On a Pedestal evaluates how women participated in consumer culture, locating the chopine in the realm of “gendered economics.” The diverse factors that impacted early modern supply and demand have been mapped out on a broader scale in many studies of mercantile culture and fashion in preindustrial Europe, but by concentrating on one object, Semmelhack is able to demonstrate more precisely the role of women in early modern European economic markets. As Semmelhack demonstrates, women were usually not engaged in the transactional performances centered on commodities, but the chopine was purchased to adorn the woman, that is, to make the acquisition of an expensive luxury item conspicuous and express the wealth that enabled the purchase.

One of the most persuasive arguments of the catalogue is that the chopine was frequently regarded as an undergarment, supporting the body in its public function as a canvas. In Spain, the chopines tended to be highly ornate; they were often jeweled and had delicate polychrome tracery on the leather covering the cork. In contrast, when the chopines became popular in Venice, they were often plainer and taller. Semmelhack contends that in many cases the chopines were not necessarily meant to be seen, but they prepped the body to showcase extravagant clothing more effectively. The famous print of the Courtesan and Blind Cupid, engraved around 1588 by Pietro Bertelli, portrays a woman in a long gown holding a feather fan, and identified as a courtesan in part by Cupid’s arrow directed at her from above. In an accompanying image, the woman’s dress is lifted, revealing the undergarments and tall chopines as substructures. Prints such as Bertelli’s have helped historians of costume to understand the multifaceted system of layering that went into fashioning a public persona, but they also substantiate Semmelhack’s claim that depictions of women with elongated proportions were often wearing chopines under their outfits.

The analogy between the supportive function of the pedestal and the shoe is made explicit by the correlation Semmelhack observes between the lengthened female form enabled by the platform and the burgeoning desire for textiles among the nobility. Wealthy women required dresses with more fabric to cover the elongated platforms of their shoes. An example can be seen in a painting that was not included in the catalogue, Kitchen Interior by Dirck de Vries of ca. 1592 at the Walters Museum of Art. In the painting, a woman in a vibrant pink dress towers over the more drably dressed servants in her Venetian kitchen, suggesting the presence of chopines under her heavy silk dress.

Semmelhack deduced the most detailed information about the chopine from its appearance in Venice, for as a major trade entrepôt, the transmission of style between the East and Venice is easily comprehensible. The chopine was incorporated into the orchestrated civic and religious spectacles that marked Venetian social life. The extraordinary height of many chopines produced in Venice would require not only extra fabric but the assistance of servants to dress and to walk. The Boat Outing at Murano painted by Joseph Heintz the Younger in 1678 and the epic eighteenth-century painting The Birth of Venice, both at the Correr, illustrate Venetian women propped up by two servants, carefully maneuvering a civic procession. The chopine enabled the woman to project her image upwards; her servants became an extension of her affluence and social identity as well.

While the catalogue puts pressure on the chopines to reveal the trappings of social class, it also sets the foundation for an evaluation of issues that more commonly concern art history. Several images reproduced in the exhibition and catalogue show unworn chopines in close proximity to the woman portrayed. In one print by Vecellio, the shoes rest at the feet of a woman in a state of undress combing her hair; in Susannah and Her Elders at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, painted by Lorenzo Lotto in 1517, Susannah’s pair of green chopines near the center of the panel serve as a flimsy threshold between the unscrupulous onlookers and her vulnerability while bathing.

The removed shoe also appears most notably in the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 by Jan van Eyck. Erwin Panofsky believed that the unworn patten clogs in the foreground of Van Eyck’s painting symbolized a space made sacrosanct by a marriage commitment. Edwin Hall eschewed the symbolic meaning that Panofsky ascribed to the pattens, arguing instead that as a rare and expensive type of overshoe, the patten designated Arnolfini as wealthy. In this understanding, the unworn chopine became a synecdoche for the woman in her civic role; but in the more intimate spaces of the bath or bedroom, the body would be somewhat liberated from its public adornments. Semmelhack ties the chopine to a more mature sexuality as a way of clarifying the appeal of the chopine to noble women and courtesans alike, but the repetition of the unworn chopine in these images offers greater evidence that the shoe served as a code for gender and sexuality.

Several of the prints and paintings in the catalogue and the exhibition showcase chopines that bear strong resemblances to the shoes on display. The images demonstrate the extent to which artists sought ethnographic authenticity, but they also solidify an understanding of the chopine as an attribute. In Ripa’s Iconologia of 1593, a description of the chopine, or zoccolo—based on Pliny—as part of the attire of the upper classes, appears in the section entitled “Decoro,” roughly translated as “Decorum,” or “Ornament.” In its integrated perspective, On a Pedestal persuasively establishes that the chopine did not provide a pragmatic solution to mobility, but it adorned the wearer, as an ornament, providing a supplement to identity. This point drives the design of the shoe and accounts for its longevity. Even as the more practical heel replaced the chopine, the demands of display persisted in preindustrial Europe, where the public realm often served as a stage for the rituals of status and social standing.