And during the mid-1500s an extreme heel was developed called
chopines. Cork pedestals would elevate the wearer by anything up to 24 inches.
(I can't believe Howard is right, for example, when she says that courtly women "totter[ed]" about in dances because they "often" wore "high
chopines" [102]: her footnote quotes the dancing master Fabritio Caroso instructing women how to "move entirely with grace, seemliness, and beauty" -- even in
chopines [quoted in Howard, 187, n.24].
The many other references to zoccoli or
chopines include Casola, 144; Coryat, 262; Barzaghi cites Garzoni's description of women parading through Piazza San Marco as "nane convertite in gigantesche" (100).
In this piece, the most interesting in the book, we learn about
chopines and farthingales, the ridiculously high platform shoes and the wide hooped skirts which became very fashionable even while they were preached against.
For example, to prove the feasibility of dancing in
chopines (platform overshoes worn by fashionable European women) she offers both early modern and modern examples.
Platform shoes known as
chopines were popular in Europe during the 16th century.
In order, in other words, to do justice both to the passage's obvious homoerotic content and to its claims to represent a tale out of Ovid, an audience would have to imagine the boy's profound physical androgyny, a kind of ocular proof of his femininity that goes beyond the use of long gowns and
chopines to emphasize the ambiguous "parts men love to see." This lovely boy is almost impossibly effeminate.