Roman Testudo

Roman Fashion

Looms and their effect on clothing
In general, individual clothes were woven on vertical looms during antiquity. This contrasts with the medieval period when cloth was produced on foot-powered horizontal looms that later was made into clothes by tailors. Evidence for the transition between these two distinct systems, from Egypt, suggests that it had begun by 298 AD but it is likely that it was very gradual. The weaver sat at the horizontal loom producing rectangular lengths of cloth which never were wider than the weaver's two arms could reach with the shuttle. Conversely, a weaver who stood at a vertical loom could weave cloth of a greater width than was possible sitting down, including the toga, which could, and did, have a complex shape.

Women's clothing
After the 2nd century BC, besides tunics, women wore a simple garment known as a stola and usually followed the fashions of their Greek contemporaries. Stolae typically consisted of two rectangular segments of cloth joined at the side by fibulae and buttons in a manner that allowed the garment to drape freely over the front of the wearer. Over the stola women often wore the palla, a sort of shawl made of an oblong piece of material that could be worn as a coat, with or without hood, or draped over the left shoulder, under the right arm, and then over the left arm.

Girls' clothing
Roman girls often wore nothing more than a tunic hanging below the knees or lower, belted at the waist and very simply decorated, most often white. When a girl went out she sometimes wore another tunic, longer than the first, sometimes to the ankles or even the feet. Girls also wore an amulet called a bulla, a leather or gold heart hung around the neck, until they married. The bulla was meant to be a lucky charm to protect a girl until marriage. Afterwards it was no longer needed, so the bulla was burned.

Undergarments
The basic garment for both sexes, often worn beneath one or more additional layers, was the tunica or tunic. This was a simple rectangle sewn into a tubular shape and pinned around the shoulders like a Greek chiton. Women might also wear a strophium or breast cloth. Garments to cover the loins, known as subligacula or subligaria, might also be worn, especially by soldiers. The Vindolanda tablets found in Great Britain confirm this fashion at the time of the Roman Empire, when a subligaculum might be made of leather. Farm workers wore loincloths wrapped like diapers.

Official clothing
The dress code of the day was complex and had to reflect one's position accurately in the social order, one's gender, and one's language.

Togas
Main article: Toga
The variations of clothing worn in Rome were similar to the clothing worn in Greece at the same time, with the exception of the traditionally Roman toga. Until the 2nd century BC, the toga was worn by both genders and bore no distinction of rank - after that, a woman wearing a toga was marked out as a prostitute. The differentiation between rich and poor was made through the quality of the material; the upper-classes wore thin, naturally colored, wool togas while the lower-classes wore coarse material or thin felt. They also differentiated by colours used:

the toga praetextata, with a purple border, worn by male children and magistrates during official ceremonies
the toga picta or toga palmata, with a gold border, used by generals in their triumphs
trabea' - toga entirely in purple, worn by statues of deities and emperors
saffron toga - worn by augurs and priestesses, white with a purple band, also worn by consuls on public festivals and equites during a transvectio
Red Borders - worn by men and women for festivals Blue Borders -

Religious ceremonies
laena - worn by the king and the flamens at sacrifices
crocota - saffron robe worn by women during ceremonies to Cybele
Roman clothing of Late Antiquity (after 284 AD)
Roman fashions underwent very gradual change from the late Republic to the end of the Western empire 600 years later. In the later empire after Diocletian's reforms, clothing worn by soldiers and non-military government bureaucrats became highly decorated, with woven or embellished strips, clavi, and circular roundels, orbiculi, added to tunics and cloaks. These decorative elements usually consisted of geometrical patterns and stylised plant motifs, but could include human or animal figures.The use of silk also increased steadily and most courtiers in late antiquity wore elaborate silk robes. Heavy military-style belts were worn by bureaucrats as well as soldiers, revealing the general militarization of late Roman government. Trousers — considered barbarous garments worn by Germans and Persians — achieved only limited popularity in the latter days of the empire, and were regarded by conservatives as a sign of cultural decay. In early medieval Europe, kings and aristocrats dressed like late Roman generals, not like the older toga-clad senatorial tradition.



Roman Women - Dress
As ever, Roman women's dresses were a little different from the men's tunics. For example, they were often pale rose, or aqua.
The female equivalent of the male Subacula (under tunic), was the Intusium, a sleeveless under-tunic. Women also wore a bust bodice called strophium (much like a sari bodice).
The stola was worn by married women. It was a full-length, tunic worn by the women from their wedding day onwards. This was not a fashionable garment, more an everyday dress, which signified that the woman was married. Being full in length, the stola covered the feet, and had a lower border called the instita. Fashion changes in female Roman dress came in the form of a change of coloured Stola, and many a stola had a fancy border on the hem. Even Roman women loved to ring the changes! There were also accessories such as brooches.
As well as being fashion conscious, it seems that the Roman women were practical and wore several layers of tunic in the colder weather. For going out of doors a woman covered up with a long cloak and this made her appear more modest. The cloak was a simple long length of cloth that could be wrapped as she liked.
The costume plate shown above right illustrates a Romanised British lady in a stola and cloak wrap and to the centre is a Romanised British woman. The lady has an ornate trim around her cloak wrap, wears a snake bangle cuff piece of jewellery on her arm and holds bronze mirror or fan. Her hairstyle is similar to those shown below. Raid grandma's jewellery box for a large distinctive brooch to use as a cloak clasp.
This page is an original Roman Costume History and Fancy Dress Tips article by Pauline Weston Thomas 2008


Alma Tadema paintings

The Triclinium ... The Roman dining Room

A triclinium (plural: triclinia) is a formal dining room in a Roman building. The word is adopted from the Greek τρικλίνιον, triklinion, from τρι-, tri-, "three", and κλίνη, klinē, a sort of "couch" or rather chaise longue. Each couch was wide enough to accommodate three diners who reclined on their left side on cushions while some household slaves served multiple courses rushed out of the culina, or kitchen, and others entertained guests with music, song, or dance. The triclinium was characterized by three klinai on three sides of a low square table, those surfaces sloped away from the table at about 10 degrees. Diners would recline on these surfaces in a semi-recumbent position. The fourth side of the table was left free, presumably to allow service to the table. Usually the open side faced the entrance of the room. In Roman-era dwellings, particularly wealthy ones, triclinia were common. Used to entertain company, the hosts and guest would recline on pillows while feasting. For an example of an accurately reconstructed triclinium, visit the Museum of Archeology in Arezzo, Italy, or the House of Caro in Pompeii. The custom of using klinai while taking a meal rather than sitting became popular among the Greeks in the early seventh century BC. From here it spread to their colonies in southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and was eventually adopted by the Etruscans. In contrast to the Greek tradition of allowing only male guests into the formal dinning room, called andrōn, while everyday meals where taken with the rest of the family in the oikos, the Etruscans seem to not have restricted the use of the klinē to the male gender. The Romans may have seen the first dining klinai as used by the Etruscans but may have refined the practice when they later came to closer contact with the Greek culture.


Dining was the defining ritual in Roman domestic life, lasting from late afternoon through late at night. Typically, 9-20 guests were invited, arranged in a prescribed seating order to emphasize divisions in status and relative closeness to the dominus. As static, privileged space, dining rooms received extremely elaborate decoration, with complex perspective scenes and central paintings (or, here, mosaics). Dionysus, Venus, and still lifes of food were popular, for obvious reasons. Middle class and elite Roman houses usually had at least two triclinia; it's not unusual to find four or more. Here, the triclinium maius (big dining room) would be used for larger dinner parties, which would typically include many clients of the owner.

Smaller triclinia would be used for smaller dinner parties, with a more exclusive set of guests. Hence their decoration was often at least as elaborate as that found in larger triclinia. As in the larger triclinia, wine, food, and love were always popular themes. However, because of their association with patronage and because dining entertainment often including recitation of high-brow literature like epic, dining rooms could also feature more "serious" themes. As in many houses in Pompeii, here the smaller dining room (triclinium minus) forms a suite with the adjoining cubiculum and bath

The Musée de La Vie Romantique, Paris

The Musée de la Vie romantique (The Museum of Romantic Life, or Museum of the Romantics) stands at the foot of Montmartre hill in the IXe arrondissement, 16 rue Chaptal, Paris, France in a 1830 hôtel particulier facing two twin-studios, a greenhouse, a small garden and a paved courtyard. The museum is open daily except Monday. Permanent collections are free. An admission fee is charged for temporary exhibitions. The nearest métro stations are Pigalle, Blanche, Saint-Georges and Liège.


The main pavilion, built in 1830, was the Paris base of the dutch-born painter Ary Scheffer (1795-1858) one of the prominent artists of the time, close to King Louis-Philippe and his family. For decades Scheffer and his daughter hosted Friday-evening salons, among the most famous in La Nouvelle Athènes. George Sand (1804-1876) used to come as a neighbour with Frederic Chopin, meeting Eugène Delacroix, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Alphonse de Lamartine, and singer Pauline Viardot. Later in the century, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgueniev, and Charles Gounod attended regularly.

The museum
The property remained in private hands by descent till it became a museum in 1982, under the name of "Musée Renan-Scheffer". It is now one of the City of Paris' three literary museums, along with the Maison de Balzac and the Maison de Victor Hugo. After an extensive renovation conducted by Jacques Garcia under the direction of Anne-Marie de Brem, it reopened in 1987 as "Musée de la Vie romantique". Daniel Marchesseau, conservateur général du Patrimoine, has been appointed director in november 1998. He has developped an ambitious program of exhibitions and acquisitions.

The museum displays on the first floor numerous mementos of notorious George Sand, including family portraits, household possessions, her jewelry and memorabilia among which plaster casts of the writer's sensuous right arm and Chopin's delicate left hand, plus a number of her own unique and rare watercolours called "dendrites".

On the second floor, one can also admire a number of romantic paintings, sculptures and objets d'art. Paintings by Ary Scheffer include portraits of Pauline Viardot, Queen Marie-Amélie, Princesse de Joinville, Marie d'Orléans, as well as Faust and Marguerite, Effie and Jeanie Deans after The Heart of Midlothian by Walter Scott. Works by his contemporaries include François Bouchot (Maria Malibran), Louis Hersent, Charles Durupt, François Debon, Théophile Bra, David d'Angers, François-Désiré Froment-Meurice, Redouté... It also holds several portraits and material linked to the famous scholar and writer Ernest Renan who had married Ary Scheffer's niece.











Jardins Romantiques Français (1770-1840)
Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, 8 March — 17 July 2011

Comment proposer aujourd’hui une définition du jardin romantique français, telle est la question que nous nous sommes posée alors que certains des meilleurs spécialistes en réfutent l’appellation. Aussi bien avons-nous usé du pluriel dans le titre « Jardins romantiques » pour évoquer, sans pouvoir être exhaustif, certains parmi les trop multiples reflets du romantisme au jardin.

Au fil des siècles et des saisons, le goût du jardin pittoresque s’est raffiné en un art de vivre à part entière dont les Encyclopédistes puis Beaumarchais avant l’impératrice sont les ambassadeurs écoutés. Au premier rang s’imposent naturellement voyageurs et savants qui rapportent et multiplient, d’un continent à l’autre, moult herbiers
soigneusement conservés au Muséum et rares cultivars
développés dans le secret des pépinières ou à l’arboretum.


Au XIXe siècle l’Europe des botanistes résonne tel un bruissant arbre à palabres : on y disserte en latin comme en français sur les principes modernes de la taxinomie et de la dendrologie ; jardinistes et passionnés ouvrent largement les enclos sur la nature environnante et plantent des parcs paysagers. Serres chaudes et palmariums ponctuent les propriétés que leurs commanditaires identifient à leur récente prospérité. Le sentiment du sublime inspire fabriques et cascades, grottes et lacs. Ces nouveaux jardins d’Armide s’ornent de maints caprices secrets : temple de l’amour ou laiterie, chalet ou casino, faux tombeaux ou ménagerie. Pour les délices du vert galant, il n’est pas de sens plus nomade que la vue. Ainsi, la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet voient la pratique du jardinage conquérir toutes les couches de la société, et les grands destins du romantisme s’y enracinent. . . .
Hélène Bremer

The Camondo Legacy ... Beauty and Terror ...

Beauty and terror
Duncan Fallowell in Newstatesman. Published 12 June 2008

The Camondo Legacy: the Passions of a Paris Collector Edited by Marie-Noël de Gary; photographs by Jean-Marie del Moral Thames & Hudson.

The terror of the Louvre can be endlessly deferred by Paris's treasury of small museums and, for me, the Musée Nissim de Camondo is the most magical. Now the subject of a lavish book edited by its curator and translated from the French, it has an appeal that lies not only in the fabulous things on view but also in the story of the Camondos, which is glamorous and melancholy.

They were exemplars of 19th-century multi-culturalism: Austrian Jews who were raised to the rank of Italian counts on the unification of Italy, but whose business centre was Constantinople. As bankers to the Ottoman empire, they found they could operate just as well and with a lot more pleasure from Paris, and the two leading brothers moved there in 1869, bringing 40 million francs with them - for starters.

They purchased adjoining properties backing on to the Parc Monceau, the Kensington Gardens of Paris, which was being developed as a sumptuous, high-bourgeois enclave. The benefactor here celebrated is Moïse, son of the younger immigrant brother. He was born, more interested in finery than finance, in 1860, and was trained by Charles Ephrussi, the collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (who was the model for Proust's character Swann).

Moïse's marriage failed, he sold off the bank, and his only son, Nissim, an airman and French patriot, was killed in action in the First World War. So the collection, which had begun with love, ended up as compensation, not only for loneliness, but also for the eye that Moïse had lost in his youth. It comprises French art and furniture of the 18th century, especially the latter half (that is to say, the neoclassical period, which succeeded rococo), and was assembled with the help of the greatest dealers of the age, the Seligmanns and the Duveens. The building that houses it is not the original family home. That was demolished in 1911 and the present mansion put up on the same site to marry the objects to their setting in an idealised whole. Count Moïse de Camondo, on his death in 1935, bequeathed the lot to the French nation in memory of his dead son.

It isn't a collection of staggering, stand-alone paintings and sculptures. The masterpieces are mostly items of furniture or ornament, such as Marie-Antoinette's vases of petrified wood bound by golden serpents. But every item contributes a superb, harmonious note. The photographs are intoxicating and plentiful - hardly a doorknob is missed - and their captions lengthy and informative. Of the accompanying essays, the best is by François Loyer, on the architecture of the building, often cited as an 18th-century re-creation. I always find it weirder than that, like some mansion in an Orson Welles film. The entrance front and the garden front, both dynamic, are entirely dissimilar; where they interact, within, is bound to produce strange effects. Loyer agrees: "The fluidity of the spaces belongs to a modern vision of architecture . . . spaces interlock or dilate in the most unexpected ways." He compares it to the work of Lutyens, Hoffmann and Loos.

So we are taken back not to the age of late-Louis and la douceur de vivre, but strongly to the beginning of the 20th century, underpinned by the finely preserved kitchen and garage quarters. The experience is nonetheless dreamy, partly because this is a quiet, untouristy part of town. Also it is due to the light, which is moderated by the cream stone of the interior and cooled by the pastel pinks, blues, greens and greys of the decor. Such gold as there is is discreet and often silvery. But the unexpected reason for the captivating, poignant mood is that although designated a museum, the place is as much an installation for a 20th-century tragedy.

This is played down in the book because luxury and butchery don't sit well between hard covers. However, from the storyteller's (as opposed to the collector's) point of view, the most important item in the museum is inside the entrance gateway. Among the hundreds of photos in this book, it is not to be found. It is a plaque which tells how Moïse's daughter, Béatrice, her husband and their son and daughter, the last of the family, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943-44, never to be seen again.

Pierre Assouline, in his book on the family, says they were arrested by the police in 1942 and then handed over to the Gestapo. "German police? French police? Both? What does it matter, since they were accomplices," writes Assouline. I think it does matter, especially for a family that gave everything to France. I have heard it said that the original arresting police were French. The fog around this issue is unfinished business. The present volume does, of course, mention the tragedy, telling us that the four were imprisoned first at Drancy, "the French waiting room for the death camps". But it is all done in one, overhasty paragraph, which ends with the unsettling sentence: "Their deaths were the ultimate justification for the Musée Nissim de Camondo."

On the same page is an extraordinary photograph - tiny, tucked into a corner, and so modern that it could have been snapped yesterday. It is of Bertrand Reinach, Moïse's grandson, in a T-shirt and cuddling a little dog in his arms. It was taken in 1938. He was 15 years old. The Camondo Museum remains incomplete; it requires a small additional room, very quietly done.



Pierre Assouline, “Le dernier des Camondo”
April 8, 2011 by carolwallace

Visitors to the wonderful Parisian house museum, Musée Nissim de Camondo, tend to get hung up by the photographs. There you are, gazing your fill at the stupendous decorative arts ensemble — paneling, tapestries, porcelain, mind-blowing 18th century furniture. And then sitting on the marble top of a marquetry table, you see a framed picture of a mournful-looking young man, or of a girl on horseback, or of a portly fellow in natty tailoring. Shortly you understand: they are no more. The family that assembled this museum, and the money that created it, has vanished. The last of them died at Auschwitz.
But what Pierre Assouline wants us to understand in Le dernier des Camondo is the context of this disappearance. The last of the Camondos is actually Moïse, father of Nissim for whom the museum is named. He outlived his only son by 18 years, aware that his family line would end with him. The museum thus becomes their monument, and the terms of its gift to the Paris Musée des Arts Decoratifs insists that everything in the museum remain as it was at his death. No loans, no acquisitions, no moving so much as a snuff box.

The Camondo family were Sephardic Jews who settled in Istanbul and in more recent history had become Italian citizens and bore Italian titles. They did not come to Paris until 1869 when they joined other high-flying Jewish financiers in the Parc Monceau area. Moïse’s cousin was the collector Isaac de Camondo whose death in 1911 added a splendid collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to the collection of the Louvre (rather before the Louvre was ready for them, but that’s another story). Eventually Moïse lived at 63, rue de Monceau, just down the street from the Ephrussi family. Assouline has done a great deal of research on the earlier history of the Camondo family and conscientiously links the various generations to the social movements and personalities of their eras. Proust appears here, of course, as do the Rothschilds, and notably Charles Ephrussi. But for all his research Assouline doesn’t manage to bring his characters to life the way Edmund de Waal does his Ephrussi ancestors in The Hare with Amber Eyes. Le dernier des Camondo is a fairly conventional social history.

That being said, there are fascinating questions here and Assouline is more than willing to explore them. How much, for instance, can or should a Jewish family assimilate into its host society? The Camondos left Istanbul because they were Westernized, liberal, cosmopolitan. But once in Catholic France, they stayed true to their religion. The children studied Hebrew, the family supported Jewish causes generously, they married within the faith. Assouline does an especially good job tracing the fitful rise of anti-Semitism in France, and the always ambiguous social position of families like the Ephrussis, the Camondos, and even the Rothschilds. The last survivor of the family, Beatrice Reinach, assumed that she would be safe from the Germans because as an excellent equestrian she had many German friends in the world of the horse. Wrong guess. She, her husband, and her children died in Auschwitz.

But somehow the saddest part of the tale is the death of young Nissim, the gifted, courageous son who was a much-decorated flyer in World War I. He was killed after an air battle on the German front and the Germans so admired his bravery that they paid him the honor of burying him in one of their cemeteries. After the war Moïse had to move heaven and earth to bring Nissim’s body home. He is buried in the family tomb in Montmartre and the golden stone palace, modeled after the Petit Trianon, is his memorial.



The Musée Nissim de Camondo is a non-profit house museum located in the Hôtel Camondo, 63, rue de Monceau, at the edge of the Parc Monceau, VIIIe arrondissement, Paris, France.

The mansion was built in 1911 by the Comte Moïse de Camondo, a banker, with architect René Sergent, to set off his collection of eighteenth-century French furniture and art objects. Its design was patterned upon the Petit Trianon at Versailles, though with modern conveniences. Both house and collections were bequeathed to Les Arts Décoratifs in honor of his son, Nissim de Camondo, killed in World War I, and opened as a museum in 1935. More tragedy followed when a few years later Moise’s daughter and her family were deported to Auschwitz where they died.

Today the house is maintained as if it were still a private home preserved in its original condition. Three floors are open to visitors: the lower ground floor (kitchens), upper ground floor (formal rooms), and first floor (private apartments).

The house's furnishings include needlepoint chairs and work by artisans of the Garde Meuble Royal (Royal Furniture Repository) such as Jean-François Oeben, Jean Henri Riesener, and Georges Jacob. Floors are furnished with Savonnerie carpets woven in 1678 for the Grande Galerie in the Louvre, and walls accented with tapestries (many Beauvais or Aubusson), and paintings including portraits by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, landscapes by Guardi and Hubert Robert and hunting scenes by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Table setting are of particular interest, especially the Orloff silver dinner service commissioned by Catherine II of Russia from silversmith Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers in 1770, and the Buffon porcelain services made at Sèvres in the 1780s with a bird theme. Other notable objects include a bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, bas-reliefs, Chinese vases, and crystal chandeliers.

Paris, le musée Camondo, juin 2011

Hip Hip Hurrah ! Tweedland has passed the 100.000 visitors and 160.000 page views!!

I would like to thank you all!
Yours ... Jeeves ...