Melanie Schuessler wrote:
If you're planning to cover up to 1600 and not just 1500-1600, you might consider expanding your talk to include discussion of 14th and 15th-century images of saints. Robin Netherton is the expert here, but I do a little version of Jeff Foxworthy's "you might be a redneck if" that I call "they might be a saint if" in my Costume History class. Images of saints are particularly common in these centuries in Italy and the Low Countries, though they appear elsewhere as well. They tend to be wearing fanciful and/or imaginary clothing, and for some reason modern people looking for research always seem to zoom in on them.
Chris Laning added:
For instance, Robin is fond of pointing out that elaborately decorated or jeweled bands along the hemline are usually confined to "queens, saints, angels and other people who don't have to worry about getting their hems dirty." ;)
With you folks out there, I don't have to feel so guilty about being away from list mail for a couple of days!
The OP asked for post-1300 examples of "why visual sources should not be taken as 100% gospel when doing costuming research." There are many, many reasons why.
One obvious issue is that of fanciful, allegorical, or symbolic depictions such as Melanie and Chris pointed out, but there are other issues as well. Some people assume, for instance, that they won't have problems as long as they stick with images of real people, but there are plenty of examples (some already brought up on this list) that underscore the point that artists depicting real individuals or historical scenes had other priorities than exact faithful reproduction. They might have been paid to make certain people appear rich, important, intelligent, pious, politically affiliated, etc., and each of those qualities could be expressed through specific clothing (which may or may not have existed, and may or may not have belonged to the person in question). Making it even more fun, sometimes artists deliberately included allegorical or symbolic elements in portraits of real people, to communicate messages that would be understood by the viewers. This is especially an issue when you're dealing with portraits of royalty or other important people. Funerary sculpture (brasses and effigies) often includes symbolic or traditional features peculiar its purpose (loose hair and garlands for women, armor for men who were not soldiers). So do some donor paintings, illuminations, and stained glass depictions that were designed to commemorate a person's position or accomplishments. Heraldic garments are a particular problem, as some types existed and others almost certainly did not.
Beyond that, you have to take into account restrictions of the visual medium involved, and these considerations differ among media. Colors used in paintings (achieved with pigments) do not exactly match up to colors of fabric (achieved with dyes). Tapestries tend to be good sources for real textile colors, but they are prone to showing disparate elements from different time periods within a single scene, the result of mixing and matching parts of cartoons dating from different periods. And on and on. Marcia Schlemm, known to some people on this list as Katrei in the SCA, gave a bang-up paper once at Kalamazoo showing how the preponderance of polka-dotted gowns in enamels were almost certainly a direct result of the process of enamel-making, not likely a representation of a particular fashion of dotty embellished garments.
I could go on, but I don't have the time for a long post. If I were speaking, it would take me an hour just to give you a good overview, and more to examine any one of these angles (as I know for a fact, as I've built multiple lectures around this issue). Other people are supplying good examples of specific artworks that might be useful for the class in question. But there's no shortage of material.
--Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
