Fan

This brisé fan is the earliest fan in the V&A's collection. A brisé fan has sticks but no fan leaf. This one has seven sticks, each shaped to represent a feather, joined together with a green silk ribbon. The ‘feathers’ are made of rigid paste board, reinforced with fine metal rods or wires and covered in green silk decorated on both sides with high-quality appliquéd straw work. The high quality of the straw-work suggests the fan might have been made in Florence, one of the centres for this craft in the early 17th century.

The tiny pieces of straw have been arranged in a design of birds and flowers, each ‘feather’ with an individual design. This decorative design can be seen as imitating the fashion for genre paintings of birds within landscapes and of flowers. The golden colouring of the straw-work emulates the opulent gold gilding that was characteristic of Baroque design during this period, with the green silk working to enhance the richness of colour. The shaping of the fan into cock feathers also reflects Baroque attributes of extravagance and dramatic display.

Feather handscreens were one of the more popular types of fan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and this style of brisé fan may have been the only way to achieve a folding feather fan at this time. Several portraits painted in the 1660s by Girolamo Forabosco (1604-79) show fans of a similar shape to this fan. An example of a comparable fan, with a design making a more direct reference to (peacock) feathers, can be found in the Bayerisches National Museum, Munich.