by Krista West
Once a particular vestment is placed in the appropriate “bright” or “dark” category, a clergyman then needs only further follow local or regional traditions, which vary widely throughout the Orthodox Christian world. While the rubrics specify only bright and dark, there are some longstanding color associations within the Church’s usage: the most notable of these is blue for feasts of the Mother of God. In Greece blue is also used for Feast of Theophany, due to its association with water, whereas other locales use white or gold for Theophany. For Palm Sunday, the Island of Patmos uses green (a nod to the green palms that characterize this feast) while most parishes in North America will use gold vestments for the celebration of the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem.
Another means of embracing traditional color usage is to focus on harmonizing the colors in a particular service or church interior design scheme rather than attempting to have all vestments and paraments be identical in fabric and finishings. It should be typical in any Orthodox Christian service with multiple clergy to see a variety of fabrics and colors: on a Sunday morning one priest might be clothed in ivory vestments embroidered with gold and burgundy, while another is vested in a rich gold metallic brocade, while yet a third dons liturgical garments emblazoned with green leaves and red grapes along with gold and silver crosses. In the description of Procopios which opens this chapter we see the Byzantines combining a wide range of colors of marble within the church—purple, green, crimson, and white—and it is important to note that, given the vast resources of the Byzantine Empire, these columns could easily have been made identical if sameness was truly the desired end. Likewise, we should feel comfortable using a variety of textiles and colors within our own churches as long as we are adhering to the general rubrics. This same principle of harmonizing colors rather than identically matching them is typically viewed in iconography: it is far more common in iconography to see groups of saintly bishops arrayed in a variety of fabrics, designs, and colors rather than portrayed in exactly matching vestments.
For the category “dark,” a much wider range of colors than the prevailing blue-purple should be encouraged, including deep red, burgundy, and even black, all of which clearly fit within the “dark” classification. Instead of a priest vesting in a blue-purple set of vestments which he may only use during Great Lent, he could vest in burgundy vestments which he would be able to use not only during the Great Fast but also for the numerous other days assigned “dark” in the rubrics (e.g. commemorations of martyrs, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Nativity Fast).
Finally, in addition to color itself, we must also consider the matter of appearance versus substance. During the period of discovery of new painters’ pigments in the Renaissance, artists would trade secrets and techniques of how to make yellow pigments—historically the cheapest and easiest to obtain—appear to be gold.47 This kind of visual trickery began a new way of thinking that placed a higher value on the appearance of a thing—simply what it looks like—rather than its substance, the value of that from which it is made. This mindset was further entrenched during the shift to synthetic dyes, which had the virtual appearance of the old dyes, but not the substance of the precious, natural dyestuff.
In traditional Orthodox Christian color practice, quality and substance were just as important as adherence to the rubrics. As was discussed in Chapter One, Orthodox Christian theology confirms that matter, or substance, is vitally important. Our churches do not simply appear to be the Kingdom of Heaven on earth like some kind of grand and showy stage production with people going about in glitzy costumes; rather, our churches are truly the materialization of the Kingdom of Heaven, populated by the saints and servants of the Heavenly King wearing the garments of salvation. Our modern world has traded substance for appearance, a real jewel for a fantasy, and this change in outlook is precisely what leads many to believe that vestments need have only an outward pretense of glamour rather than a true and lasting substance of beauty. Looking showy is not the same thing as being beautiful and inferior-quality vestments are not appropriate for attendance at the banquet of Christ.
By following the guidance of ancient color perception with its broader, fuller, and ultimately, more joyous and heavenly expression of color, as well as giving thoughtful attention to the quality of the fabrics and brocades these colors enliven, we will continue to follow an ancient tradition and once again have our visitors remark, in concert with St. Vladimir’s emissaries:
Then we went on to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter, and therefore we cannot dwell longer here.48
May we too aim to be “at a loss to describe” the wonder and beauty of our faith as expressed in the adornment of our churches. Such sweetness will be a balm to our weary souls and keep us ever in mind of our eternal home.
Notes
1 Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 76.
2 Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans., The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), 10.
3 Gervase Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (London: John Murray, 1963), 118.
4 Philip Ball, Bright Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 17.
5 Mathew, 35.
6 Ball, 15.
7 Ball, 25.
8 One of the most stunning sets of vestments I have ever encountered was a remarkable hand-embroidered set from the famous monastery of Ormylia in Greece which had coral and brown embroidery upon an ivory ground—truly a bright set, but not falling into any simple color category of gold, red, green, blue, or purple.
9 Liddell and Scott, Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 470.
10 Patrick O’Grady and Michel Najim, The Liturgical Books of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Church, Vol. 1, The Scriptural Books (publication forthcoming).
11 For these observations on the symbolic significance of the halo in iconography, as well as for drawing my attention to the garment colors in Rublev’s Trinity icon, I am indebted to Frederica Mathewes-Green’s article, “Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity,”
12 Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1984), 15.
13 Mathew, 19.
14 Thomas Bechtold and Rita Mussak, eds., Handbook of Natural Colorants (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 3.
15 Gosta Sandberg, Edith M Matteson, trans, The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder, and Murex Purple: A World Tour of Textile Techniques (Asheville, NC: Lark Books, 1997), 21.
16 Ball, 119.
17 Faber, G.A., “Dyeing and Tanning in Classical Antiquity,” Society of Chemical Industry in Basle (1938), 292.
18 Anna Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving: AD 400 to AD 1200 (Vienna: Fassbaender, 1997), 27.
19 Visiting Ravenna in 2012, I was fascinated to discover that rather than the blue-purple robes that are so often depicted in book reproductions of these famous mosaics, Justinian and Theodora are wearing robes that are almost burgundy in color, the same color as the porphyry marble that is seen in the churches of Ravenna, as well as the columns and the famous statue of the tetrarchs that adorn San Marco in Venice. After detailed examination of the mosaics in Ravenna, I discovered that blue-purple is nowhere to be found, only the red-purple color we generally call “burgundy.” The fact that books often depict the garments in these mosaics as blue-purple (indeed my own guidebook did so) is due to the tonal limitations of modern printing methods.
> 20 Muthesius, 25.
21 Ball, 197–8.
22 Lloyd B. Jensen, “Royal Purple of Tyre” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April 1963): 108.
23 Jensen, 113.
24 Mathew, 147.
25 Sandberg, 26.
26 John Edmonds, The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye, Historic Dye Series No. 7 (2000), 24–5.
27 Ball, 197–8.
28 Bechtold and Mussak, 22.
29 Sandberg, 37.
30 To extend the mathematical metaphor, Tyrian purple would be located at the point of origin (0,0).
31 The Protoevangelion of James (London: William Hone, 1820), 29.
32 Ruth G. Kassinger, Sea Snails to Synthetics (Minneapolis: The Millbrook Press, 2003), 30.
33 Bechtold and Mussak, 15.
34 Sandberg, 75.
35 Sandberg, 60.
36 Ball, 60.
37 Kassinger, 53.
38 Kassinger, 54.
39 Anna Muthesius, Studies in Silk in Byzantium (London: Pindar Press, 2004), 49.
40 Kassinger, 62–4.
41 Kassinger, 67.
42 Ball, 59.
43 Bechtold and Mussak, 3–4.
44 Ball, 218–9.
45 Bechtold and Mussa, 25.
46 Catherine Filsinger, “A Gift of Russian Vestments,” Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Fall 1949): 54–59.
47 Ball, 100.
48 Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 10.
CHAPTER SIX
Divine worship is the heart of the monastic life, just as the katholikon is the centre of the monastery complex; and in a great imperial and patriarchal monastery such as that of Iveron, whose tradition acknowledges how much it respects ecclesiastical order and loves the comeliness of the House of God, it is natural that care is taken over the priestly vestments of worship, the drapings below the holy icons, the covers of the sacred vessels and the other decorative veils. All these things, divinely ornamented, together weave the raiment of the Church and evoke the beauty and grace of the worship of God and particularly of the Divine Liturgy, as the sacrament which sums up the mystery of the Church and of the salvation of the whole world, in which Christ, God and Man, through His sacrifice upon the cross ‘clothed Himself with majesty’, and in which the priest, ‘arrayed in the grace of priesthood’ is deemed worthy to celebrate the awful mysteries. And this unseen grace of priesthood which the priest receives at his ordination is rendered visible by the wearing of the sacred vestments. It will, therefore, be readily understood with how much love for beauty and how much awe, the tasteful spirit of the Monastery will have adorned the gold embroidered vestments for Him who ‘is clothed with light as with a garment’.
Archimandrite Vasileios, Abbot of Iveron Monastery1
While the covering of his nakedness betokened the beginning of man’s shame after the Fall, paradoxically the development of textiles has become over time one of mankind’s most stunning technological and artistic achievements. Taking a chief place among the finest examples of the textile arts are the vibrant, complex, and intricate fabrics that have been employed for liturgical garments and furnishings for almost two millennia in the Orthodox Christian Church. These beautiful brocades and embroideries have made churches glorious, amazed men, and—along with architecture, iconography, and music—been rightly acclaimed as being among the foremost arts of the Orthodox Christian world. As Byzantine scholar Gervase Mathew explains: “The textile arts . . . are never ‘minor’,”2 for, “It seems likely that textiles were judged by the same standards as mosaics, marble paneling, ivory-work and carved capitals.”3 When we begin to explore the textiles that constitute this venerable tradition of adornment within the Orthodox Christian Church, we are continually reminded of this truth. Woven of the most precious fibers, adorned with gold threads, and featuring designs and symbols that hearken to the earliest days of the Church’s history, these textiles take their rightful place among the major arts and continue to be treasured in churches and museums to this day.
A Brief History of Textiles
Before taking a closer look at the textiles used specifically for liturgical items it is first necessary to discuss textiles in general. There are four distinct fibers occurring in nature—wool, flax, silk, and cotton—and two basic tools—the loom and the needle—used for transforming them into textiles.
The loom has been used from ancient times to produce woven fabrics. A loom is a device that allows threads to be wrapped around it in a vertical orientation (known as “warp” threads) which are then pulled taut. A weaver then takes additional threads and, by means of a shuttle or similar apparatus, feeds these threads (known as “weft” threads) horizontally over and under the warp threads to create a fabric grid, tamping the weft threads every row to tighten them together and create a dense fabric. The most basic woven fabric is created using a single strand of thread with a “one-under, one-over” pattern which yields a monochromatic, plain-weave fabric.
The loom itself started out as a very simple structure—just two sticks set a distance apart with the necessary tension being achieved by either wrapping a harness attached to one stick around the weaver (as in the back strap loom still used in South America) or hanging the sticks horizontally and allowing gravity to provide tension as in the warp-weighted loom. Both of these basic types of loom can be dated to the earliest periods of human civilization.
The deceptively simple, binary concept of weaving can be expanded to create exceptionally sophisticated patterns with complex coloration depending on such factors as the fiber of the warp and weft threads, the colors of the warp and weft threads, and the intricacy of the design. The first major technological advance in weaving was tapestry weaving, in which threads of various colors were interwoven in small sections that completely obscured the warp threads. Early tapestry woven pieces were often made as bands or squares that would then be attached to garments as a form of ornamentation. This type of weaving has a very dense quality which tends to make it quite durable. Many excellent examples of ancient woven tapestry work have been preserved in Egypt where the low-humidity conditions are conducive to textile preservation.
As the complexity of weaving techniques progressed, fibers, colors, and patterns were adapted to create new and more elaborate textiles. Yet simply changing thread colors and decorative patterns was eventually not enough to satisfy the desire for innovation; the technology of the loom had to be modified as well. The development of drawloom technology sometime in the early Christian period had lasting repercussions, as textile expert Adele Weibel relates:
A fundamental change in the method of pattern weaving took place in the early centuries of the Christian era. Until then all elaborate patterns had been produced by the technique of tapestry weaving. Now the desire to weave such patterns in mechanical repetition led to the most important improvement of the loom, the invention of the drawloom. Only one other invention equals that of the drawloom in revolutionary economic importance: the invention of the printing press a thousand years later.4
The introduction of the drawloom represents a tremendous step forward in the production of textiles. Its complex arrangement of warp threads being placed, or “drawn” (hence the name), through a board drilled with a specific hole for each thread gives the weaver far better control over each thread and this allowed for the creation of more fantastical designs, in a faster and more regular fashion. In fact much of the weaving produced in Constantinople over a thousand years ago is so sophisticated that, even with the technological knowledge of our own age, it is still not fully understood how it was created.
Embroidered textiles take woven fabric one step further: the woven fabric serves as a “ground” fabric (typically reinforced with a linen backing to provide strength) which is then marked with a design and stretched taut on some kind of frame to provide uniform tension. The design is covered with a variety of stitches worked with a needle pulling through either silk floss or “metal” threads (wh
ich are comprised of a core of silk wrapped with paper-thin sheets of gold or silver), or a combination of the two, through the woven fabric. The amazing creativity and artistry of the historic embroiderer knew almost no bounds and has been discussed more fully in Chapter Four. Due to their significant metal content, many historic embroideries have stood the test of time well and excellent examples may be found in the collections of many museums.
By approximately the third or fourth century AD, woven and embroidered textiles had come to comprise the two distinct groups of fabrics used for Orthodox Christian liturgical garments and furnishings. Throughout the history of the Church, woven fabrics have been by far the predominant type of textile. Embroidered textiles have tended to be reserved for smaller pieces that were given as gifts or awards, such as the epigonation and epimanikia, or items that were used as the focus of major liturgical rites, such as the epitaphios of Great and Holy Friday. Although embroidered vestments may still be seen today, historically they have been the exception rather than the rule. While some scholars have argued that embroidery served as a less expensive substitute for complex woven fabrics until its ascendency in the twelfth century,5 the existence of gold-embroidery guilds from the time of Imperial Rome and throughout the Byzantine era, as well as the descriptions of particular altar cloths (most notably the panegyric of Paul the Silentiary that is quoted at length in Chapter Four) call such a theory into question. It is more probable that embroideries co-existed with woven fabrics, but were confined to items of a more specific use such as altar cloths and award pieces, much as they still are today.
