[SCA-AS] [tmr-l@wmich.edu: TMR 06.10.09 Ball, Byzantine Dress (Coatsworth)]

Wed Oct 4 19:13:58 CDT 2006

May be of interest to costumers:

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Ball, Jennifer L. Byzantine Dress: Representation of Secular
Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006. 176 pp. ill. $69.95. ISBN: 1403967008.

  Reviewed by Elizabeth Coatsworth
        Manchester Metropolitan University
        99901468 at lafayett.art.aca.mmu.ac.uk

In this book, the author argues that "a fashion system--one in
which clothing was designed, created and continued based on the
desires and tastes of the Byzantines--existed in the Byzantine
Empire alongside and intertwined with a traditional, prescribed
dress code" (3).  However, while the author shows that some items
of costume and some details of style "emerge, spread and often
peter out" (9) over a period, the argument about a "fashion system"
is not entirely convincing, since the "fashion season" identified
comprises the whole of the Middle Byzantine period as defined in
the title.  This argument seems an attempt to relate the surviving
evidence to modern theories of fashion and its meaning, and is a
pity since the material presented is important in its own right,
and the author seems to have reached some interesting conclusions,
in spite of the difficulties presented by the fact that no one
source of evidence is valid either for the whole period or for all
the classes of people she attempts to cover.  In this, which
results from the patchy survival of some kinds of evidence, and the
non-existence or relative unavailability of others, she is
grappling with the problems faced by all historians of material
culture in pre-modern periods.

The source on which most weight is laid in this book is painting,
both wall paintings and manuscript illumination (although mosaics
and some sculptural representations are also used under this
heading).  Only secular subjects, especially donor portraits are
used, but as these are relatively few and are all of members of the
?lite sections of society, historical scenes and depictions of
everyday life are allowed in the chapter devoted to non-?lite
dress.  The author rightly raises issues of accuracy and the degree
of license allowed to artists at several points in the book, but
considers "the reliability of portraits for correct depictions of
dress is greater, as the artist's intention was to create an
accurate picture of a real person, and the artist was painting
during the person's lifetime" (6).  However, this statement begs a
number of questions, and no evidence is provided here for the non-
Byzantine specialist on the differences between the dress of saints
in purely religious scenes, for example, and that of secular
portraits, to show that the one was more conventional or static
than the other, while the use of genre scenes for depictions of
non-?lite dress cannot be entered under the caveat allowed for
portraits, as the author herself acknowledges in the relevant
chapter.  Portraits of ?lite males also outnumber those of females.

Literary and documentary sources are also used.  For some areas
there appears to be a rich source of information in wills and dowry
settlements, and other documents detailing salaries, which were
often paid or partly paid in textiles and clothing appropriate to
the rank of recipient.  Such sources also apply in western Europe,
although survival is patchy, as here.  The author is fortunate,
however, in having two books contemporary with her period which
detail dress appropriate for court and religious ceremonies
(although again only for the ?lite, and also only for males), and
another which deals with commerce regulations, including those
pertaining to textiles and clothing.  A problem dealt with
throughout, where this evidence is used, and one which is also
familiar in western Europe, is the difficulty of relating dress and
textile terms to specific textile survivals or depicted garments.

The third source adduced is material evidence for surviving dress
fragments, of which a select catalogue is provided at the end of
the chapter dealing with this material: its position in the book
reflects the author's difficulty in relating it directly to
depicted dress.

The discussion is organized partly on socio-economic, partly on
geographical, and partly on evidential grounds, the format dictated
by the poor fit between the different types of evidence.
Nevertheless, some changes over time are deduced within particular
chapters.  Only the ?lite dress, which forms the bulk of the work,
is organized geographically, in three chapters on "Imperial Dress,"
"Court Dress" and "Dress of the Borderland ?lite" (that is of those
living within or actually just outside the borders of the Empire).
This last grouping provides one of the most interesting suggestions
for development in dress, which can be described as fashion.  The
chapter on non-?lite dress is not localized, using genre scenes
from all available sources.  The textile evidence, as indicated
above, is dealt with separately.

The section on "Imperial Dress" (chapter 1), contra other
writers in the area, but convincingly, identifies only three
garments as exclusive to the imperial family: the loros
(descendant of one version of the Roman toga, worn over a long
tunic); the stemma or diadem (crown, in female dress
often decorated with hanging jewels and pearls); and tzangia
(jeweled slippers or sandals). This section would have greatly
benefited from a diagrammatic representation of the loros,
of which there were apparently two types, one X-shaped, one with a
slit for the head like a poncho. A most interesting aspect of this
dress, which seems unique to the Byzantine court, is that it is
ungendered, a fact which the author suggests possibly relates to
the number of Imperial women powerful in their own right: this may
be true, but powerful women in other regions did not wear, or are
not depicted in, dress which could also be worn by men. This
purely imperial dress is one with which we are the most familiar
from paintings and mosaics, but Ball makes the important point that
it was actually worn on very few, specifically ceremonial,
occasions. The usual dress, it appears, was a cloak
(chlamys) which as a dress item was shared with other
members of the social and economic ?lite. A comparison of this
with the modern "business suit" for formal wear is not entirely
happy for a situation in which the other constituents of the dress
are not so easily identified, and in which we also do not know
what, if any, "informal" wear was like. However, this should not
detract from the important point in the author's argument for some
fashion development, in that this garment at the end of the Roman
period/early Byzantine period was an item of military dress which
became accepted as a more general ceremonial and indeed everyday
garment. In its ceremonial aspect, it also appears to have been
the dress of Imperial women.

Chapter 2, on "Court Dress," excludes from consideration all but
nine depictions, six of men and three of women (the last all in one
manuscript), but is able to make considerable use of documentary
sources, while acknowledging the difficulties of relating the many
terms which seem to mean "tunic" to a specific type.  The one
manuscript depicting secular females in relation to a royal wedding
seems highly significant in that the costume portrayed is gender-
specific; does not seem as far as can be seen to carry rank-
signifying detail as is noted for the depictions of male dress; and
the variation in dress detail and head gear, and the wide drooping
sleeves (a style imported from the late tenth, eleventh century
West) suggest the possibility of fashion choice.  The author
rightly points out, however, the paucity of the evidence.  This
chapter is the only one to appeal directly to surviving textile
evidence, from archaeological finds particularly in Egypt and
central Asia, but only in respect of hats, depicted in the male
portraits used.

"The Dress of the Borderland ?lite" has even fewer visual sources
to rely on; and one of the areas discussed, Kastoria, seems to lie
outside the Empire for much of the period covered.  However, two of
the most interesting speculations of the book belong to this
section.  The first is that the dress of these borderland ?lites
reflected local and regional fashions, including Islamic areas,
rather than those of the centre, and in the case of Kastoria, those
of the Normans who ruled it for a short period.  The other is that
fashions in dress in these areas spread to Byzantium from these
outskirts, citing turbans and caftans (sic) from the Islamic world
and wide drooping sleeves (which probably came from the West via
the Normans) as examples.  Wills and dowry accounts seem to be a
rich source of information from these areas.  One of the most
convincing female portraits (from the point of view of depicting
contemporary dress) illustrated here comes from these borderland
areas.

The section on "Non-?lite Dress" which includes general sections on
women and children, both groups under-represented among portraits,
fairly acknowledges that genre painting of, say, pastoral scenes
only occasionally appears to break away from standardized,
conventional, depictions of working people.  The author however
suggests the few that do may be a more reliable guide to the actual
variety of clothing worn by all sections of society than the
portraits, just as the archaeologically recovered dress surviving
from Egypt shows both that children wore clothing similar to that
of adults, and that many garments could be made in textiles of a
variety of costliness, to suit all pockets, and were therefore not
worn only by the ?lite.

This insight makes the separate final chapter on the surviving
dress     the more disappointing.  Only thirteen items make it into
the catalogue, on very strictly defined grounds.  One problem
clearly is that much in museums is uncatalogued, but one could also
argue with the criteria employed, one of which is that the presence
of a seam in a fragment implies dress--to which one could reply
that unless the seam is shaped in such a way that it can be nothing
else, it could equally indicate some other shaped textile object,
such as a cushion cover.  On the other hand, all the archaeological
evidence, which includes complete garments, from Egypt and Central
Asia, and some from Greece, some of which is earlier and some much
later than the defined period, is mentioned but excluded as direct
evidence, and becomes comparative material only--but is used at
least twice in the text to provide evidence of actual dress.  That
there seems to be none from the central area of concern is a great
pity, since she states that people were generally buried in their
clothes.

The book would have benefited from more illustrations of this
interesting material, and it is disappointing that there are no
colour illustrations--black-and-white reproduction makes detection
of details such as jeweled footwear almost impossible.
Diagrammatic drawings of garment types would also have been useful,
and so would a glossary of the many dress terms used, even if it
had to be admitted that many terms are difficult to define beyond
the general category, of tunic, for example.  There are some odd
modern comparisons--members of the British parliament will be
surprised to hear that they wear "wigs and robes of a bygone era"
(as an illustration of ceremonial conservatism).  The work on dress
in western Europe (such as that of Gale Owen-Crocker on Anglo-Saxon
dress, which does look at the material chronologically and does
show evidence of outside influences on changing dress styles) might
actually have been helpful for its analysis of common problems.
Nevertheless, this is a very interesting book, with some real
insights into the variety of dress styles across the Byzantine
Empire, contrasting with the relatively static ceremonial dress of
the court.

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