Fabric of vision by Anne Hollander

Author:Anne Hollander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

89 William Blake (1757–1827), Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, about 1824–27. Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 37.2 x 57.2 cm. Tate, London.

We may note that this male figure, like Brown’s Joseph and David’s Brutus and Fuseli’s Hephaestus, is wearing legendary costume nothing like the male gear of the artists’ own time, whereas all the visionary ladies’ dresses, like the Roman ones on Brutus’ female relatives, do bear some resemblance to the close-draping feminine fashions of 1800. Female dress at that moment had a costume-like Romanticism built into its Neoclassic, figure-revealing simplicity, a nostalgic and even primitive character – since it was based on the ancient shift – that was easy for painters to promote as attractive in various styles and genres. Male dress in real life, except for actual fancy dress, did not develop such a Romantic, Neoclassically nostalgic costume-like dimension to match women’s; and so, in visionary or legendary scenes, painters had to put men in versions of pictorial legendary costume, while women could wear versions of already legend-like modern fashions; and then the whole composition would look harmoniously antique. In real life, their clothes by this time looked wholly different.

Meredith Frampton’s 1935 Portrait of a Young Woman (fig. 90) demonstrates the enduring aesthetic vitality and feminine appeal of Neoclassic drapery, and was painted at a time when Neoclassic principles were anyway informing much Modern art, design, music and architecture. For this portrait, however, nostalgia for antiquity has been expanded to include a nostalgia for several Golden Ages in the history of painting.

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