Between the 1130s and the 1170s, narrative scenes in painted stained glass windows and over life size high-relief stone images of men and women dressed as courtiers revolutionized great church decoration in northern France. When the west façade of the Cathedral of Chartres was constructed, the clothes and fabrics depicted were very specific. The represented clothing of column-figures and of personages in stories depicted in the painted stained glass scenes clearly disclosed important information.
This talk will outline the language of textiles and dress that would have been legible to twelfth-century northern Europeans who could recognize the prestige and social standing of the represented individuals, and what the represented bodies and clothing may reveal to twenty-first century visitors about the society that produced them. It will address recognizable characteristics of textiles employed in painting and sculpture; the significance of represented ensembles of clothing and the appropriation of depicted textiles; some possible motivations of the patrons sponsoring portal programs with column-figures; and the use of a fine limestone, liais de Paris, for sculpture and its transportation from Parisian quarries.
Images were used to influence current political reality, at once reshaping and expressing what was to be remembered. Arranged as if for a ceremony of reception, the sculptural program articulated the peers in relation to their king as his magnates; they appear, not as rivals for royal power, but each in their proper place.
Janet E. Snyder, PhD
West Virginia University
Janet E. Snyder is Professor Emerita at West Virginia University. She the author of Early Gothic Column-Figure Sculpture in France: Appearance, Materials, and Significance and her professional presentations and publications concern twelfth-century sculpture and architecture, depicted textiles, and the transportation of stone during the Middle Ages. Snyder currently is active in organizing All Things Stone, new research into masons and sculptors during the Middle Ages, an annual international colloquium of art and architectural historians and archaeologists dedicated to the study of medieval architecture and stone. Her research interests include French and English architectural sculpture and painting, and the history of textiles. Her current work focuses on the textiles and clothing represented in painting and sculpture of Romanesque Saintonge. A native of Kansas, Snyder received her B. A. with honors from Wichita State University, her M.F.A in Design for Theatre at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of medieval art and architecture from Columbia University in New York City.
