Download PDF | Jennifer L. Ball (auth.) - Byzantine Dress_ Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting-Palgrave Macmillan US (2005).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has grown out of my doctoral dissertation completed at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. First and foremost Iam grateful to Tom Mathews, my advisor on the original thesis, who has continued to enthusiastically support my project as 1t grew into this book. I am also indebted to Helen Evans, who always took time out of her busy schedule to encourage and assist in my research efforts, beginning with her supervision of my predoctoral fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum and continuing through the writing of this book.
The majority of the writing was done with a generous postdoctoral fellowship from the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. While I was there, I received constructive comments from several colleagues especially Dimitri Gondicas and Peter Brown who raised many issues present in this study. In addition I traveled throughout Europe on my quest for images of secular dress, especially in Turkey and Greece.
My heartfelt thanks goes to Sarah Brooks, my oft travel companion who was by my side through many of the trials of travel, such as fording ice-encrusted rivers to get to remote cave churches in Cappadocia. Others who have provided advice and feedback during this process should also be thanked: Warren Woodfin, Cecily Hilsdale, Rob Hallman, Maria Parani, Derek Krueger, Tom Dale, and MaryAnn Calo. Thank you to my editors and readers, Professors Bonnie Wheeler and Anne McLanan, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, as well as those still anonymous to me. Finally, I dedicate this book to my husband Dave who traveled with me, served as my tech support, and provided much love throughout this project.
INTRODUCTION
In the Middle Byzantine court of Constantine Porphyrogennetos Li 913-59), a courtier participating in a single day’s festivities, processing to the Great Church and back, changed his outfit five times.’ This same courtier was paid throughout the year with textiles, garments, and accessories, in addition to money. Entire prescriptive volumes were written to help him and others in the palace know what to wear for what occasion. Byzantine scholars have long been interested in the official regalia of their subject, especially as it relates to court ceremony.
However, the dress of the imperial entourage and other courtiers 1s largely seen, within and outside of Byzantine scholarship, as a vestige from the Roman Empire and strictly prescribed like a uniform. This book argues that while Byzantine dress necessarily followed long-established traditions at court, the Byzantines when left to their own devices were extremely interested in creating, borrowing, and wearing fashionable dress.
Fashion was a high art in Byzantium. The fashions that were created in the empire were considered to be among the finest in the European and Mediterranean worlds. The styles they wore permeated borders becoming the envy of Western courts.” Dress was also of primary importance to Byzantines at other levels of society outside of court, but little attention has been paid to these citizens. For example, the educated writer of histories or saints’ lives recorded descriptions of clothing with the knowledge of a connoisseur. An Early Byzantine text describes slaves wearing golden girdles to highlight their masters’ wealth.
An average citizen of Constantinople staying in the Xenon hospital in the Pantokrator Monastery would not only get the clothing he wore upon admittance washed, but also receive a new set of clothes upon release.* Sumptuous gold and silk clothing enhanced miraculous visions of holy persons in saints’ lives.” Even a charioteer in the hippodrome dressed elegantly for competition.® It is only the nun or monk who was caught wearing plain clothes of coarse fabric, perhaps in reaction to the fashion-obsessed society in which they lived. The overwhelming importance of dress to the Byzantines themselves warrants a thorough study of their fashions, yet none has been written to date.’
Byzantine dress, like that of any period, forms a code that identified the wearer, suggesting rank, wealth, gender, profession, and locale. This code could be semiotic, that is, a conscious and specific code to be read by others; the most obvious example of this is court dress, which consisted of prescribed garments, colors, and accessories that signified an exact rank. The code of dress in the Byzantine world could also be an unconscious expression of belonging to a particular group or class—displaying meaning but not in a precise and legible way as with court dress; a typical example can be found in the dress of wealthy women living 1n Kastoria, Greece in the twelfth century.
They wore dresses with long, gaping sleeves—a Western-style detail—and imported fabrics suggesting Kastoria’s frequent interaction with the West compared to other parts of the empire and its proximity to a hub of textile trade. Sociologist Fred Davis points out that in general the identity suggested by one’s clothing can be uncertain; the same garment can signify different things over time and locale, for example, or be understood differently from one group to the next.®
Perhaps [clothing] can best be viewed as an incipient or quasi-code, which, although it must necessarily draw on the conventional visual and tactile symbols of a culture, does so allusively, ambiguously, and inchoately, so that the meanings evoked by the combinations and permutations of the code’s key terms (fabric, texture, color, pattern, volume, silhouette, and occasion) are forever shifting or “in process.’”
Historians cannot expect, in other words, to crack the code, so to speak, of Byzantine dress, even when the code is more obvious, such as with imperial dress. Instead, we should expect to uncover Byzantine attitudes about clothing and, by extension, identity (gender, ethnicity, status, and the like). Furthermore, we can attain greater understanding of portraits through the messages conveyed by the subject’s garments.
Dress is inevitably linked with fashion, the phenomenon of change in the accepted code when the wearer and viewer would read new meanings in dress.'” A Byzantine example can be found in the turban: an honorific headpiece bestowed upon a ruler in Armenia or 1n Islam, became a status symbol in the Eastern provinces and finally, after the association with Islam faded, the fashion caught on in the capital city.
Many dress historians would argue that fashion did not arise until the Renaissance, when the rate of change in dress accelerated and an institutionalized system that designed, created, and sold clothes developed. Fashion 1s generally regarded as beginning in fourteenth-century Italy or France.'' These scholars would argue that before that time, and certainly in Byzantium, official regalia and utilitarian tunics existed but nothing that could be defined as fashion. For example, Anne Hollander writes of medieval dress:
Clothes of the Middle Ages all over the Christian world, East and West, show a fairly static simplicity of shape. The sense of clothing that obtained in Europe until the twelfth century certainly allowed a great deal of variation in the length of different garments and the method of adjusting them, but these were mostly utilitarian differences, equally true of rich, poor and sacerdotal dress. Sumptuous fabrics were worn by the rich, mean ones by the poor; but the cut and fit of clothes were uniformly simple and unsophisticated for all classes and both sexes. Wealth and rank were expressed in the nobility’s clothing but with no kind of aesthetic or stylistic superiority. Fashion was not really moving."
This book argues, however, that a fashion system'’—one in which clothing was designed, created, and consumed based on the desires and tastes of the Byzantines—existed in the Byzantine Empire alongside and intertwined with a traditional, prescribed dress code. The apparently sluggish changes in fashion reflect an economic situation that is different from later periods. Clothing was used until death and then reused, '* which would account for a perceived lack of sophistication in the cuts of garments. Garments were reused for other purposes, such as liturgical functions, so that the same fabrics were 1n circulation again and again. The manufacture of garments was relatively slow when compared with later periods because of the distances merchants had to travel with fabrics and dyes, and because of simpler technology available to those weaving fabrics. Later medieval and Renaissance Italy, for example, found textile manufacture, dying, and the making of garments consolidated in Italy, which was not the case in Byzantium where dye specialists worked in Greece, linen was imported from Egypt, and silk was made 1n Constantinople and Syria. Despite this, fashion existed in Byzantium even though clothes were less shapely than in later periods.
It would be prudent to pause here and also discuss the term “dress,” which is equally, if not more important in this study than the word “fashion.” Historians have variously described the general subject of clothing as “costume,” “fashion,” and “‘dress.”’ Dress is any addition to or alteration of the body that is understood by both the wearer and the viewer as conveying meaning. The term dress is favored in the current literature on fashion theory and the history of dress for several reasons.'° First, it incorporates alterations to the body, which a term such as “clothing” does not, gsoing beyond what is simply worn. Hairstyles, tattoos, piercings, and the like can therefore be included under the term dress. The term dress has a second advantage in that it may refer to body alterations and additions of any time period. Often historical dress is referred to by the word “costume” because those making costumes for theater prompted some of the first histories of dress. The description of dress as costume implies that people wore fantastical clothing that, in some way, was not real.'® Scholars use the term “fashion” to describe dress from the Renaissance to the present, as if dress was simply utilitarian up until that point. The term dress, however, is not related to any concept of time, periodization, or history. The term dress 1s also neutral with respect to gender. As both the interest 1n fashion and the scholarly study of dress have been viewed as primarily the concern of women until recently,'” it is crucial to use a gender-neutral term. Further, Byzantine men and women themselves, who were equally devoted to being fashionable, express the appropriateness of using a gender-neutral term. The bias toward fashion as a modern phenomenon is not the only culprit in the underrepresentation of dress in the history of Byzantine scholarship. The study of Byzantine dress presents a great obstacle: almost no complete garments survive. Therefore, a small group of scholars have chosen to study textile fragments through an examination of their structure, avoiding a discussion of the clothing that these fragments constituted. Anna Muthesius has had the greatest impact on the study of Byzantine textiles culminating in her corpus of Byzantine silks.'® Marielle Martiniani-R eber has also made major contributions to the study of Byzantine silks, linking their designs to Sassanian roots.!” Economic historians have explored the same textiles in their study of the silk industry.”” These studies, while essential to our knowledge of dress, do not attempt to understand the system of dress in Byzantium and its meanings. As just mentioned a second reason as to why scholars have ignored Byzantine dress as a topic of study 1s that many dress historians would argue that fashion did not exist. Historians of Western medieval dress, led by Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder,*' have overturned this view; Byzantine scholars, however, have just begun to examine dress beyond imperial regalia. Most important is Maria Parant’s extensive study of realia, including dress, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.2? Warren Woodfin has made major contributions to our understanding of ecclesiastical dress.*° In addition some focused studies also expand our knowledge of Byzantine dress, such as Robert Nelson’s study of garments on saints pictured in the Chora Monastery, Joyce Kubiski’s insightful examination of Western borrowings of Late Byzantine and Ottoman dress, and Catherine JolivetLevy’s new look at the imperial dress of archangels.** Nevertheless, no study of secular dress, at all levels of society, has been undertaken thus far.
Methodology
Through an examination of representations of dress in painting, this book seeks to elucidate a significant part of Byzantine fashion history: secular dress from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. Paintings offer a degree of detail not found in representations of dress in other media. Folds, fastenings, layers, and colors are clearer than 1n sculptural or numismatic depictions of dress, the traditional media used for the study of clothing. Paintings offer a wide range of secular subjects from which to study dress, such as donor portraits in fresco, iluminations and mosaic, and historical scenes and depictions of everyday life in manuscripts.
I have organized this study according to the socioeconomic and geoeraphical situation of the wearer. While this may seem prejudicial, this structure parallels the Byzantine use of clothing to distinguish class. A chronological history of dress would not only be impossible due to the limited materials but would also be a less fruitful channel of research due to the slow rate of change in fashions of the medieval period; for example, the Joros, an imperial stole, remains the same for nearly seven centuries.
A garment-by-garment survey of dress ignores the fact that this 1s a study of representations of dress. One must always keep in mind that Byzantine artists and patrons may have depicted particular styles of dress to express information about the wearer rather than the clothing itself. Representations of dress are best approached in the way that the Byzantines themselves viewed dress, as a mark of class, rank, and locale. Chapters 1 and 2 address Constantinopolitan dress of the imperial family and the court respectively. Chapter 3 contrasts the elite in borderlands with those of the capital. Chapter 4 attempts to deconstruct the typological representations of the non-elite citizens of the empire in an effort to glean both new meanings from these paintings and what may have been worn by the lower classes.
Chapter 5 examines the material evidence for dress and 1s accompanied by a catalogue of the few fragments of Middle Byzantine dress that survive (see appendix). This comprises the second category of data for Middle Byzantine dress. These will be used to compare and corroborate or dispel the dress seen in the painted representations. As so few garment fragments survive, the focus of the text 1s on the representations and their meanings as conveyed through dress; the textiles help give life to the painted record and to discern the fantastical from the probable portraits.
In addition to the visual and material evidence, a third and extremely important source will be used: literary descriptions of dress. Two prescriptive texts on dress survive from the Middle Byzantine era, The Book of Ceremonies and The Kletorologion, which provide invaluable information for the dress historian. The Book of the Eparch adds to our knowledge of commerce regulations surrounding the making and selling of textiles and dress in tenthcentury Constantinople. Combined with descriptions of dress, common in historical accounts and saints’ lives, the history of Middle Byzantine secular dress 1s made visible in the literary accounts.
The Middle Byzantine period was selected for this book as it represents the apex of Byzantine dress, which notably coincides with Byzantine dominance of the textile industry in Europe. Dress of the early period remains largely a vestige of the Roman Empire. The emperor continues to wear the military-influenced short chlamys and tunic, for example; the toga 1s still visible in the consular Joros; the simple tunic with vertical clavi is the same one worn throughout the Roman period. Dress of the late period, after the Byzantine Empire comes into far greater contact with the West after the fourth crusade, becomes less distinctly Byzantine.
The clothes tend to incorporate several styles from Western European locales at once, especially Italian ones to where the textile industry shifts. For example, the “Byzantines” of Crete typically wear what should rightly be called Venetian dress; in the capital, Venetian and Genoese merchants dominate the textile and clothing markets importing a greater number of Western styles. Purthermore, in Kastoria we find that Bulgarian dress dominates, while in Anatolia Byzantine dress gives way to Ottoman Turkish styles. While dress of the Middle Byzantine period certainly exhibits outside influence, it is not to the degree that it does in the later period.
Western European travelers describe dress of the middle period as “Greek” and distinct from styles with which they were familiar. My preliminary findings of dress of the late period show that issues of colonization play a far greater role.° In the Middle Byzantine period a truly Byzantine style of dress emerges; the textile patterns most associated with Byzantine dress become ubiquitous in the Middle Byzantine era; the imperial insignia is standardized in the Middle period.
The study of dress through painting raises the question of accuracy and the degree of license allowed to the artist. Recourse to literary and material evidence can be used to some extent to confirm the veracity of depictions of dress. Furthermore, the visual evidence used in this study was limited to portraits, wherever possible. The reliability of portraits for correct depictions of dress is greater, as the artist’s intention was to create an accurate record of a real person and the artist was painting during the person’s lifetime, although no one sat for portraits in Byzantium as far as we know. Genre scenes, where greater artistic license and schematized representations were used, will only be employed in this study where no portraits exist, such as in the examination of the dress of the working class.
Notably, religious imagery, such as portraits of saints, Christological scenes and the like, has largely been left out of this study. In portraits, the artist 1s certainly trying to portray an actual person, whose clothes form part of his or her identity. We can therefore assume some level of accuracy. Religious subjects, however, are shown—sometimes in the same work—in pseudo-Biblical dress and Byzantine clothing—and not always contemporary clothing—strongly suggesting that the artist was unconcerned with details of correctly portraying dress. In addition, the Byzantine viewer must have understood the contemporary dress of religious figures in painting in terms of the dress of actual persons, the codes of which are still unclear. Therefore, it is important first to establish what the basic meanings of dress in the simplest imagery are—in portraits and other scenes of actual people—and then proceed to interpreting the use of contemporary dress in religious imagery. In other words deciphering imperial dress when worn by an emperor in an imperial portrait is a fundamental question that must be examined before the image of King David in Byzantine imperial dress can be understood. This study therefore attempts to lay the groundwork on Byzantine dress; ideally it will lead to better comprehension of the use of dress in more complex images, such as religious imagery.
Despite the attempt to cull the visual artifacts of Byzantium for paintings that seem most accurate, not to mention relying on Byzantine authors for truth in their descriptions of dress, it must be acknowledged that a precise picture of what was worn 1s impossible. Prejudices of artists and authors, and accidents of survival, are difficult to discern after hundreds of years. Furthermore, this study is not intended to tell a linear story of Byzantine dress, describing what went in and out of fashion and when. Rather a more interesting and feasible project 1s undertaken: the meanings of dress are used to elucidate Byzantine paintings and give new readings to many of these portraits. In addition, the use of dress in paintings, from codified images of the tattered rags of the poor to the opulence of the imperial garb, further illuminates the Byzantine attitudes about themselves and others as they are expressed through dress. The Byzantines not only dressed to express rank and wealth, but also dressed out of desire. Their interest in fashion highlights not only the importance of textiles and dress as an economic force in the Byzantine world, but also the aesthetic and artistic importance of dress.
Paradigms of Byzantine Dress and Fashion
Several major paradigms emerged out of this study of the messages conveyed by dress, which can enlighten us as to how the fashion system operated in the Byzantine world. First, there were multiple fashion centers in the medieval world—Byzantine and otherwise—and notably fashions often sprang from places that were geographically peripheral to the capital city, such as Cappadocia. The modern reader expects a dominant fashion center—Constantinople—disseminating fashion in a ripple effect out to the provinces, as New York or Los Angeles to middle America. However, the case studies of borderland provinces in chapter 3 demonstrate that multiple fashion centers existed which in turn gave Byzantine citizens a wide range of selection in garments and fabrics. Further, our limited textile evidence demonstrates a substantial movement of clothing across borders. In the Byzantine Empire the changes in the commonly worn and accepted garments, which constitute fashion, were more often than not originating outside of the capital city.
An economic paradigm also became clear in the examination of Middle Byzantine secular dress. One expects clothes to approximate wealth: a contemporary case in point, designer clothing is more expensive and worn by wealthier people than clothes from large chain stores, worn by middle and lower classes. In the Byzantine world, this marker of wealth was taken a step further: wealth was literally conveyed with clothing because it was often equivalent to one’s salary, dowry, or inheritance. In addition to coins, most courtiers were paid in textiles and garments, so the clothes on their backs corresponded directly to, and were not just suggestive of, their salaries. The bulk of one’s dowry as well as one’s will was composed of clothing and textiles, so one’s clothing, home furnishings, and linens was a literal tally of inheritance or a dowry.
Important to the Byzantine code of dress is the adherence to tradition. Contrary to the characterization of ceremonial dress by scholars as staid, the adherence to tradition is selective, calculated, and sophisticated. For example, the Byzantines refer to their Roman past with particular garments, such as the /oros, to conjure up specific ceremonies appropriated for Byzantine purposes. They do not simply reuse Roman garments, rather they are adapted for Byzantine use to send shrewd and complex political messages. The fashion system, therefore, did not stop at the gates of the palace where clothing could simply be pulled from the imperial treasuries, but rather new clothing was created for court ceremonial, albeit a more traditional type of clothing. New styles emerged within the prescribed insignia.
Contemporary fashion theorists often discuss the dissemination of fashion to the mass market, a phenomenon ascribed to the twentieth century.”° Before this time it is understood that the economics of the fashion industry were such that all but the upper echelons of society, who paid to have their clothing made according to the tastes of the day, were excluded. In Byzantium, and likely in other premodern cultures, some literary and textile evidence, in addition to representations point to a greater variety of Byzantine clothing than is apparent in Byzantine painting. While it is difhcult to sift through the stereotypical representations of non-elites, there are a few sources that point to a variety of options available for non-elites. Furthermore, our textile evidence reinforces the notion that other levels of society participated in the buying, selling, and wearing of fashions.
Finally, from this study the rate of changes in fashion, that 1s, a fashion season, has emerged. I propose that the Middle Byzantine period itself, or an equivalent length of time, 1s a fashion season in which we see styles emerge, spread, and often peter out. The Joros 1s the most obvious example, which becomes the norm for imperial dress at the beginning of the period and becomes less important in the Late Byzantine period.
In addition we see the tiraz and turbans enter into fashions during the period until they finally become accepted at court; these fashions last into the Late Byzantine period. Dresses for women are introduced at the end of the Middle Byzantine era and replace the tunic for women in the late period. Scholars have ignored change in fashions simply because it does not happen as quickly as it does in the modern world; if we accept the slow change of fashions, however, we get a more accurate picture of the fashion system.
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