Fashioning Archaeology into Art: Greek Sculpture, Dress Reform and Health in the 1880s (2012)
Challis, Debbie (Author)
Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 5, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 53-69
Edition Details: Part of a special section, “The Nineteenth Century Archaeological Imagination”
Language: English
Drapery in sculpture and art has a function. It acts as clothing: as a way of both seeing and yet obscuring the figure. It draws attention to the body while covering it. It often lies next to a nude as fallen clothing. It plays a part in the narratives of sculpted story telling. It indicates how the female form should be seen and what parts of the body should be made visible through the draped veiling. Drapery has been an influential artistic conceit in the Western world since early antiquity and artists have revisited the form and function of drapery and the body since the early Renaissance. Gillian Clarke has argued that classical drapery is so prevalent in European art that classicists tend to think of it not as clothing but as an example of Greek and Roman art (105). Drapery has long been an `artistic conceit', a device showing artistic flair and rendering. This is brought to an apogee in the large paintings by the contemporary artist Alison Watt. The contours of flesh hidden by the folds of cloth are searched for in vain as there is no body hidden. Alison Watt's work is a study of cloth, of folds, of voids, of form for its own sake. It is what Anne Hollander has referred to as empty drapery (36), or, perhaps more positively as Gen Doy ventures, arranged cloth as art (230). The natural instinct to look for the body beneath the drapes is dictated partly by the use of drapery to show off the body, particularly in the work of nineteenth-century artists. By the end of the nineteenth century, Greek sculpture and the clothed female form was being used in an ideological and social battle -- the battle for the uncorseted body
...MoreArticle Warwick, Alexandra; Willis, Martin (2012) Introduction: The Archaeological Imagination. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 1-5).
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