"It grazed on my shoulder, takes me away six parts of an Italian cut-work band I wore, cost me three pounds in the Exchange but three days before."--Ben Jonson--_Every Man Out of His Humour_,1599. "Ruffles well wrought and fine falling bands of Italian cut-work."--_Fair Maid of the Exchange_, 1627. The Italians claim the invention of point, or needle-made lace. It has been suggested they derived the art of fine needlework from the Greeks who took refuge in Italy from the troubles of the Lower Empire; and what further confirms its Byzantine origin is, that those very places which kept up the closest intercourse with the Greek Empire are the cities where point lace was earliest made and flourished to the greatest extent.[145] A modern Italian author,[146] on the other hand, asserts that the Italians learned embroidery from the Saracens of Sicily, as the Spaniards acquired the art from the Moors of Granada or Seville, and brings forward, as proof of his theory, that the word to embroider, both in Italian and Spanish,[147] is derived from the Arabic, and no similar word exists in any other European language.[148] This theory may apply to embroidery, but certainly not to lace; for with the exception of the Turkish crochet "oyah," and some darned netting and drawn-work which occur in Persian and Chinese tissues, there is nothing approaching to lace to be found on any article of oriental manufacture. {46}We proceed to show that evidences of the lace-fabric appear in Italy as early as the fifteenth century. In 1476, the Venetian Senate decreed that no Punto in Aria whatever, executed either in flax with a needle, or in silver or gold thread, should be used on the curtains or bed-linen in the city or provinces. Among the State archives of the ducal family of Este, which reigned in Ferrara for so many centuries, Count Gandini found mentioned in a Register of the Wardrobe, dated 1476 (A. C. 87), an order given for a felt hat "alla Borgognona," trimmed with a silver and silk gimp made with bobbins. Besides this, in the same document is noted (A. C. 96) a velvet seat with a canopy trimmed at the sides with a frill of gold and silver, made in squares, with bobbins. The Cavaliere Antonio Merli, in his interesting pamphlet on Italian lace,[149] mentions an account preserved in the Municipal Archives of Ferrara, dated 1469, as probably referring to lace;[150] but he more especially brings forward a document of the Sforza family, dated[151] 1493, in which the word _trina_ (under its ancient form "tarnete") constantly occurs,[152] together with bone and bobbin lace. PLATE XI [Illustration: ITALIAN. POINT PLAT DE VENISE. NEEDLE-POINT.--Seventeenth century. Length, 25 in.; width, 16 in. Victoria and Albert Museum.] _To face page 46._ {47}Again, the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who wrote from 1520-30, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point, made by the hand of his mistress.