Byzantine Dress - Textiles

Textiles

As in China, there were large Byzantine Imperial workshops, apparently always based in Constantinople, for textiles as for other arts like mosaic. Although there were other important centres, the Imperial workshops led fashion and technical developments and their products were frequently used as diplomatic gifts to other rulers, as well as being distributed to favoured Byzantines. In the late 10th century the Emperor sent gold and fabrics to a Russian ruler in the hope that this would prevent him attacking the Empire.

Most surviving examples were not used for clothes and feature very large woven or embroidered designs. Before the Byzantine Iconoclasm these often contained religious scenes such as Annunciations, often in a number of panels over a large piece of cloth. This naturally stopped during the periods of Iconoclasm and with the exception of church vestments for the most part figural scenes did not reappear afterwards, being replaced by patterns and animal designs. Some examples show very large designs being used for clothing by the great - two enormous embroidered lions killing camels occupy the whole of the Coronation cloak of Roger II in Vienna, produced in Palermo about 1134 in the workshops the Byzantines had established there. A sermon by Saint Asterius of Amasia, from the end of the 5th century, gives fascinating details of imagery on the clothes of the rich (which he strongly condemns):

When, therefore, they dress themselves and appear in public, they look like pictured walls in the eyes of those that meet them. And perhaps even the children surround them, smiling to one another and pointing out with the finger the picture on the garment; and walk along after them, following them for a long time. On these garments are lions and leopards; bears and bulls and dogs; woods and rocks and hunters; and all attempts to imitate nature by painting.... But such rich men and women as are more pious, have gathered up the gospel history and turned it over to the weavers.... You may see the wedding of Galilee, and the water-pots; the paralytic carrying his bed on his shoulders; the blind man being healed with the clay; the woman with the bloody issue, taking hold of the border of the garment; the sinful woman falling at the feet of Jesus; Lazarus returning to life from the grave....

Both Christian and pagan examples, mostly embroidered panels sewn into plainer cloth, have been preserved in the exceptional conditions of graves in Egypt, although mostly iconic portrait-style images rather than the narrative scenes Asterius describes in his diocese of Amasya in northern Anatolia. The portrait of the Caesar Constantius Gallus in the Chronography of 354 shows several figurative panels on his clothes, mostly round or oval (see gallery).

Early decorated cloth is mostly embroidered in wool on a linen base, and linen is generally more common than cotton throughout the period. Raw Silk yarn was initially imported from China, and the timing and place of the first weaving of it in the Near Eastern world is a matter of controversy, with Egypt, Persia, Syria and Constantinople all being proposed, for dates in the 4th and 5th centuries. Certainly Byzantine textile decoration shows great Persian influence, and very little direct from China. According to legend agents of Justinian I bribed two Buddhist monks from Khotan in about 552 to discover the secret of cultivating silk, although much continued to be imported from China.

Resist dyeing was common from the late Roman period for those outside the Court, and woodblock printing dates to at least the 6th century, and possibly earlier - again this would function as a cheaper alternative to the woven and embroidered materials of the rich. Apart from Egyptian burial-cloths, rather fewer cheap fabrics have survived than expensive ones. It should also be remembered that depicting a patterned fabric in paint or mosaic is a very difficult task, often impossible in a small miniature, so the artistic record, which often shows patterned fabrics in large-scale figures in the best quality works, probably under-records the use of patterned cloth overall.