A Year in Paris: Clothes at the Louvre

February 26th, 2018

I paid another visit to the Louvre this past week with Shannon and family. I passed by "Winged Victory of Samothrace," as I always do, and admired the breath-taking sculpture. I paused for a few minutes, pondering how the artist created such movement and ethereality out of a block of unmoving and quite non-ethereal stone. Her garment, pieces of fabric draped across her body held by the ceaseless winds, was the key. How the folds were rendered, how the texture of the fabric was suggested, how it pulled back towards the outstretched wings---all of those things were crucial to the illusion of movement.

So, taking the sculpture as my inspiration, I decided to embark on a close inspection of how the garments were rendered in various paintings. For such a close study, I needed to focus on a small number of paintings, so I chose one location, the Grand Galerie, which houses Renaissance paintings. I paid attention to the technical aspects---the brushstrokes, colors, and shading. I also tried to understand, though, how the clothes in the paintings suggested movement or statis, how they implied rank or class or relationships among the subjects. Obviously, the types of fabrics and ornamentation and colors would have symbolic meaning to the audiences for these Renaissance paintings. Other times, they spoke volumes about the class or personality of the wearer.