The Church and the religious fashion: Fashion for God at Museum Catharijneconvent shows the artistic commitment behind the paraments of the Catholic church in the past
Fashion for God – Our Lord in the Attic in an Amsterdam
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther presumably nailed a document with 95 statements to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. It contained truthful words against the garish Catholic church sparking a rapid expansion into a Protestant reformation all over Europe. One was to convert or to be condemned.
Except for the lucky few Catholics in the Netherlands that could continue their religious routines in secret churches, such as the famous Our Lord in the Attic in an Amsterdam canal house roof. Inside those hidden walls, ornamentation and excess remained the dominant vehicle to show that God was great. Rich decoration, loud singing, seductive smells and furnishings, everything that was not allowed outside was put into work to create an image of heaven and allowed believers to experience the divine. The fashion too, was for God.
Exhibition in Utrecht’s Museum Catharijneconvent: Fashion for God
The Netherland’s second Amsterdam, a city called Utrecht, dedicated a special exhibition to the priest fashions that were worn in secret churches throughout the Renaissance and Baroque. The exhibition chambers are filled with highly qualitative vestments made from opulent fashion fabrics, meticulously hand embroidered with biblical stories and ornaments such as fruits and flowers. After being preserved with care for centuries, they take center stage again.
Fashion for God is also a tribute to women, since they had a decisive role in the production of liturgical vestments as makers and as donors. The pastors wore their fashion for god, thereby embodying and expressing the identity of skilled craftswomen in times of oppression. After extensive research, the museum decided to let the fascinating story behind these unique works of art sound through. The exhibition space was designed in collaboration with internationally leading and award-winning studio MAISON the FAUX.
Three types of liturgical vestments
During a Renaissance church service, priests wore either a chasuble, cope or dalmatic depending on the type of celebration and the priest’s function in it. Dalmatics were worn by assistant priests. It is a robe with wide sleeves that reaches to at least the knees or lower and it often has vertical bands at the front and back. It was customary to slit the underside of the sleeves so that the dalmatic became a mantle.
Copes were worn on special occasions during or outside the mass. The borders of the long robe covered with lavish detailed hand embroidery with complex patterns are called orphreys. The cope originates from the cappa, a Roman cloak with a hood. Over the course of the Middle Ages, this hood developed into the cope shield on the back of the religious vestment.
The chasuble was the only ecclesiastical vestment that had to be consecrated, so it was always sacred. Over the centuries, the robe has gradually changed shape. In the Middle Ages a chasuble was still wide, but from the thirteenth century onwards it became narrower. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the robes were given striking indentations at the arms at the front. At the back, the side that churchgoers see most, a chasuble is decorated with a cross. The band at the front is the chasuble column.
Curator Pim Arts: how long it takes to create holy paraments – human commitment
The paraments in Fashion for God look priceless in the dimmed light – a precaution to preserve the quality of delicate fabrics. Sartorial strapworks are adorned with symbols like cornucopia, lilies, acanthus leaves and abstract anonymous flowers. They represent the bountiful ideals of the Baroque, whereas the way they were made requires strict, unpolished human commitment. The hand embroidery on the paraments show a great amount of skill and textile knowledge. It takes discipline and perseverance to sew the tiniest carnations, let alone an entire Mary Magdalene in twenty different hand dyed shades.
«It is difficult to estimate how long these embroideries have taken to make». Curator Pim Arts explains. «It will differ per embroiderer, and you have to take into account that they had no artificial light, so it was done in dark houses and with only candlelight. My estimation is that it took you several months to make a chasuble. Hand embroidery was often not the only thing they were busy with».
Upcycling for God: robes of generous ladies become paraments. About the human commitment
The costumes worn in the secret Catholic masses would have been applauded by today’s younger, conscious generations. Most paraments were upcycled creations made from luxurious female robes. In the Dutch Baroque, when multicolored, rich, and floral French, English and Chinese fabrics were in fashion, the custom arose among pious women to donate their precious dresses to the church to be turned into vestments through human commitment. This is why the service was performed in a pink floral cope – an unexpected religious choice.
Pim Arts: «Assembling a cope or chasuble from a gown is considerably faster. The construction of the robes is relatively simple, although it may take some puzzling to distribute the available material as favorably as possible over the different robes you want to make. But for the tailors who did this in the eighteenth century, this was their daily work: using fabrics and matching patterns as efficiently as possible. It took considerably less time, about two to three days».
Decorative elements on the vestments also have an upcycling nature. One 17th century cope in Fashion for God has symmetrical orphreys from late medieval times that were attached to a new base textile. A new cope shield was hand embroidered following the traditions of the same medieval period. The parameters were also mended whenever needed, which in most cases was several times. One example is a hand-woven chasuble from China, 1750. The type of silk was dyed by hand in the province Guangdong, for which a special industry arose between 1740 and 1760. The material is fragile, so rips were common. We can see traces of these alterations, including an unfinished one in 1900, since parts were left unattached.
One robe à la française for a set of paraments
The gowns that transformed into lavish paraments for priests were often robes à la française. For well-off ladies this was the dress of choice for formal gatherings and ballrooms since these robes were made of the most luxurious textile materials. They’re recognizable by their wide hips and broad back pleats that drop from the shoulders to the floor. One robe à la française could use up thirteen meters of pure silk, enough to make a full set of paraments including an antependium, chasuble, and several smaller accessories. The robes were gifts from rich women that hoped to get higher up, literally, to heaven, or in the parish. Because it was likely that the congregation would recognize the fabric. It was one of the few ways to earn a place in society for women.
Gender and religious dress
Knowing that the designs in Fashion for God were worn by noble heterosexual men feels like breaking a gender code. But gender norms were different in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, curator Pim Arts explains. «These robes look feminine to someone from the 21st century, mainly due to many pastel colors, the floral patterns, and the fact that they were originally women’s dresses naturally contributes to the idea. But that understanding of femininity much comes from the 19th century. In the eighteenth century, the Baroque and Rococo period, this distinction between men’s and women’s styles or colors hardly existed. You can see this, for example, in the portraits of Gerard Cornelis van Riebeeck and Charlotte Beatrix Strick van Linschoten that were part of the exhibition: he has just as many flowers, gold and lace on him as she does. Moreover, pink used to be more of a color for men and blue a color for women.»
More exceptional within the gender topic is the fact that most designs were embroidered by women, because back in the days, hand embroidery was a professional occupation for men.
Pim Arts: «Gender is present in this exhibition. On the one hand, we wanted to give women a rightful place in art history and on the other hand, we wanted to show that assumed male-female roles have not always been what we might have thought they were. In the Middle Ages, embroidery was in any case a male affair, also in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. But specifically in the Catholic Church and the Dutch Republic, in the late 16th and 17th centuries, it was women who embroidered paraments, and at such a high-level quality and originality that they are in no way inferior to men’s embroidery. This has often been misunderstood in the literature and with this exhibition we are showing this for the first time».
Fashion for God: give more credit to kloppen, secret priests with utmost human commitment
There was a special name for the women that upcycled and hand embroidered the dalmatics, copes, and chasuble of secret priests with utmost human commitment: kloppen. Considering that embroidery, a meticulous task, was originally a male’s profession, they earnt much respect from the congregation. The famous Maagden van den Hoeck kloppen-community was based in Haarlem. From 1583, they lived together like an alternative monastic community, slowly forming their own visual language centering female saints and mother Mary. Besides being artistic, these kloppen’s reputation was one of militant resistance towards Protestantism and a great entrepreneurial spirit – they created for many secret churches that they carefully selected themselves. The Renaissance equivalent of a textile worker is a respected, female artist fighting for ideals while leading a thriving business.
The robes in Fashion for God have their luxurious look in common. Only from up close the varieties in embroidery, hand sewing and upcycling solutions show. A green cope from 1760 that was made for The Hague’s secret church is decorated on the back with a Chinese, painted shield. Another piece made by the famous Maagden van den Hoeck is filled head-to-toe with glass beads and hand embroidered crown imperials and poppies. Due to the colorfastness of glass, the colors look as bright as 250 years ago.
When not sewing tiny beads on the work attire of their priests, kloppen were sure to spend their time in a way that was considered pious: chanting, Sacristan’s work, spinning, lace making, and bookbinding were considered devout because they served the right purpose though human commitment.
Fashion for God – Colors or Catholicism
The gowns in Fashion for God tell us a lot about the symbolism of the time that was not to be taken as a suggestion, but as an order. One chasuble from Amsterdam shows embroidery in the shape of tulips, cornflowers, grapes, insects, and a presentation of a pelican that was believed to feed its young with its own blood in case of food scarcity. It made the bird a symbol for self-sacrifice for shedding his blood like Jesus.
Colors were part of the pious textile language of the hidden Catholic practitioners. White for peace and innocence, red for blood and fire, excellent for Pentecost, mourning happened in black and repent was to be experienced in purple. Pink was considered a light purple, a signal that the waiting for advent or a fasting period was almost over. Green was neutral, blue not even a religious color even though it is traditionally understood that was – a Mary without blue doesn’t look as holy. Some of the rules of the church are better overruled.
