michaela de bruce wrote: >> There's a nice book on Spanish costume, entitled [strangely enough] >> "Hispanic Costume 1480- 1530" by R. M. Anderson (1979), where the >> author has pulled together artwork of the period and grouped it by >> garment type to show the development of styles. It's a great place >> to get started if you're interested in this era. > > And it's more than just a picture book;) There are samples of texts > that collaborate what is seen in art.
It sounds like that's the book to have. Textual analysis adds a world of meaning. > There are examples real people wearing what the saints do in the > artwork and vice versa- to a degree anyway, there are probably symbols > in the costume to signify these are important people from the past. I > have seen hoops on figures depicting real women but they had the four > panel over skirt on top. And that brings us back to the question that started this discussion: Whether it was a popular fashion to wear the hoop skirt alone, rather than an underlayer. > More hoops as per the Salome image: > http://www.oronoz.com/leefoto.php?referencia=15099 Although this is another Biblical image, it does make me think that perhaps the key is not simply real vs. biblical/historical/allegorical, but also the nature of the setting and the mood the artist wanted to evoke. This appears to be a Birth of Mary image, and the scene takes place in the confines of a lady's chamber, with only other ladies in attendance. That's a circumstance where it might make sense for upper-class women to be without their formal overgowns. It may be that showing these women without overskirts reflects the artist's intent to show the intimacy of the scene. If so, the style might be "real," but that doesn't mean it would be considered fashionable for women to have appeared in hoops without overskirts on the street, or at dinner, or at church. Among the handful of other images shown so far of women in hoops without overskirts was a camp follower (what some would call a "laundress") with soldiers -- it was hard to make out detail, but perhaps she was deliberately portrayed as such to give the overtone of half-dress or intimacy (or lack of modesty!) I think there's very likely a layer of meaning here that viewers of the artwork would have understood -- just as people in some not-so-distant cultures would read loads of meaning in the presence and number of aprons a woman wore. Or think about styles for men of a century ago, and the difference between depicting one in a full suit, as opposed to with his jacket off and shirt-sleeves showing. In any of these contexts, artists could use the recognized implications of layers of dress to signify something about the setting or the characters. The 15th c. Flemish painters did as much with the recurring presentation of women in short-sleeved underdresses, worn without a formal overdress, with or without added sleeves to cover the chemise sleeves on the lower half of the arms. You never see this in formal portraits, but you do see the style on realistic working women, AND on upper-class women in private scenes (in fact, I can think of one in another Birth of Mary), AND also as visual code to signify certain Biblical figures (notably Mary Magdalen). Does Anderson say anything about the circumstances in which the hoop-alone style appears in artwork, or does she just refer to it as one option of wearing the clothing, without discussion of the context in which that would have been done? --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
