Programme & Abstracts :: Registration Details :: Accommodation

THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Janet Huskinson
Open University

All dressed up and nowhere to go'? art, dress and later Roman culture

Dress is an important signifier of status, gender or ethnicity; it can reflect 'real' worlds or conjure up illusions. But trying to use visual representations of dress as historical evidence poses questions in any period; and this is especially true of the later Roman empire. As well as reflecting major socio/political changes, and artistic changes to the heritage of Graeco-Roman art, the art of this period has particular qualities which make depictions of dress problematic to evaluate. For instance, it regularly uses (as does earlier Graeco-Roman art) details of dress as indicators of status and identity, yet may put time-honoured motifs to new uses and in new contexts, raising questions to do with the transference of meaning. It has an enjoyment of bold and colourful effects (sometimes for their own sake?), yet it is often schematized and abbreviated leaving viewers to supply their own fuller understanding. It includes considerable regional variation as well as iconographical conformity. There are therefore a lot of variables which make reading of dress often far from straightforward.

This paper will look at several cases from private, non-official art, which raise some of these questions. It will try to identify an approach to finding answers that are as reliable as they can be to the question of where dress in the images is 'going' (if anywhere). It will argue that the surest approach is via consideration of historical context in terms (baldly stated) of patron's needs, craftsmen's practices, and contemporary iconographical and formal developments in art.

Ultimately, though, the paper offers more questions than conclusive answers. The final question may be to ask how many of these questions transcend these particular boundaries of time and place, and how many are period-specific.