DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9177#0167
CHAPTER X
DRESS AND DRAPERY
It is necessary for every one who approaches the study of
Greek sculpture and painting first to pay some attention to
the character of Greek dress. For the human figures which
are the subjects of Greek art are in the great majority of cases
clothed. And whereas every one necessarily has some small
knowledge and understanding of the human figure, very few
persons, even very few artists, understand how Greek dress
was cut and worn. This dress was astonishingly simple, and
yet in its arrangement so foreign to our habits and notions
that many learners find the greatest difficulty in understanding
it, or in believing that it was in actual use.
It does not, however, appear, in all cases, that the dress repre-
sented in Greek sculpture and painting was the dress actually
worn. There is in earlier Greek art a good deal of helplessness
and convention, and in later Greek art there is what may be
called a rhetorical tendency, a striving after a pleasing result
without strict adherence to fact. We must therefore be on our
guard in taking the evidence as to dress furnished by the monu-
ments. Works of archaic art often present to us elaborate
systems of folds and pleats which are quite conventional, and
at a later time dress has beyond doubt a tendency to pass into
drapery, that is, into dress arranged not for use but for artistic
effect, as foil or background. But notwithstanding this, it
may be fairly said that in the case of the great mass of Greek
statues, and even of figures in painting and relief, the dress is a
possible clothing, and represents the actual dress of daily life
147
DRESS AND DRAPERY
It is necessary for every one who approaches the study of
Greek sculpture and painting first to pay some attention to
the character of Greek dress. For the human figures which
are the subjects of Greek art are in the great majority of cases
clothed. And whereas every one necessarily has some small
knowledge and understanding of the human figure, very few
persons, even very few artists, understand how Greek dress
was cut and worn. This dress was astonishingly simple, and
yet in its arrangement so foreign to our habits and notions
that many learners find the greatest difficulty in understanding
it, or in believing that it was in actual use.
It does not, however, appear, in all cases, that the dress repre-
sented in Greek sculpture and painting was the dress actually
worn. There is in earlier Greek art a good deal of helplessness
and convention, and in later Greek art there is what may be
called a rhetorical tendency, a striving after a pleasing result
without strict adherence to fact. We must therefore be on our
guard in taking the evidence as to dress furnished by the monu-
ments. Works of archaic art often present to us elaborate
systems of folds and pleats which are quite conventional, and
at a later time dress has beyond doubt a tendency to pass into
drapery, that is, into dress arranged not for use but for artistic
effect, as foil or background. But notwithstanding this, it
may be fairly said that in the case of the great mass of Greek
statues, and even of figures in painting and relief, the dress is a
possible clothing, and represents the actual dress of daily life
147