Opera Costuming (an interesting site on Opera)

• Opera enjoyed great popularity in the 17 & 18 th century.
• An equally valuable resource in studying opera are the paintings of that period.
• From Boquet we learn how the fashionable men and women
  dressed.
• From the painters Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau and
  Lancret, you can learn about shot (one colour going one way, one
  colour going another way) silk and watery moire (French
  fabric). Their palette was pastel: gray, citron, pistachio and
  peach.
• Tiepolo, a famous painter in the l7th century, uses the
  dark coppery browns, maroons and purples of the early
  Baroque and shows us how the muscles of the torso
  influenced the design of armor for men.
• Porcelain figurines in collections like that of the Gardiner Museum tell us more about contemporary dress, particularly of the characters in the Commedia dell’Arte.
• There are, in addition, a multitude of books on the practical aspects of costume building and of corset and hoop construction.