Art - Ned Denny on how clothes can reveal a painting's hidden mysteries

In The Doors of Perception, his excellent and undervalued account of an experiment with mescalin, the novelist Aldous Huxley relates how, deep into his trip, his gaze suddenly fell on his own crossed legs. Not his legs themselves, exactly, but the grey flannel in which they were sheathed, no longer a mere pair of trousers but a "labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity". Later on, with the effects of the drug beginning to wear off, Huxley is reminded of this sartorial epiphany while leafing through a Botticelli monograph. He flicks quickly past the more famous works and stops at "a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, Judith. My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination . . . at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts." Once again, the mysterious intricacies of folded cloth reduce him to open-mouthed silence.

So why this fascination with clothing? After a typically dazzling passage in which he discourses on the various ways in which artists throughout the ages have made painted draperies an active element of their pictures, Huxley comes to an interesting conclusion. "For the artist as for the mescalin taker," he surmises, "draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being." In a sense, this "unfathomable mystery", smuggled in via the complexities of folded cloth, is the secret subject of Judith or any great painting. And yet "Fabric of Vision: dress and drapery in painting", currently showing at the National Gallery, starts on a distinctly less esoteric note. A series of paired works, one a fully dressed figure and one a nude, illustrates the theory that the naked female form has always been painted to mimic the forms of contemporary fashion. "The nude woman in art," we are told breathlessly, "has looked her best to the contemporary eye when she seemed to be wearing the ghost of an absent dress." In effect, she should make the viewer feel as if he's wearing X-ray specs.

This opening gambit might be a good way of getting our attention, but it seems to miss the crucial point about fabric in art. Huxley, on the other hand, who doesn't even get a mention in the catalogue, makes it brilliantly. Clothes, his argument runs, simply because we all wear them most of the time over most of our bodies, take up a large proportion of any picture with figures in it. This abundance of abstract or near-abstract forms, with which the artist can take liberties, often sets the tone of an entire painting. If faces are the pictorial equivalent of the lonely human voice, then draperies are the thunderous, many-toned orchestra.

In the work of Piero della Francesca, for example, "stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds" that give his figures the gravitas of pillars. The tortuously wrinkled and minutely pleated silk in which Watteau's characters are swathed, on the other hand, expresses "their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator". Sometimes, as in one of the paintings in the National Gallery show, clothing can be used to give a dreamy religious image a subliminal fleshiness. The striated, flesh-pink gown that clings to Mary's body in Mantegna's The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist (c.1490-1500) almost exactly resembles the sinew and muscle of a flayed body, perhaps presaging Christ's sufferings on the Cross (and, by extension, the agonies to which all flesh is heir). And sometimes the material in a painting can seem to work directly counter to its putative meaning, as in Gaudenzio Ferrari's Christ Rising from the Tomb (c.1540) where a giant, bone-pale drape appears to lock Christ's body in its rigid folds.

In fact, most modernist painting can be shown to have its roots in the liberties artists have taken when depicting clothes. Ferrari's bone-imprisoned Christ and countless examples of meticulous, multi-faceted, gravity-defying draperies that could never exist in actuality are prototypes both of Cubism and the magical realism of artists such as DalI, Tanguy and Magritte. And how can one not think of the mysteriously charged expressiveness of abstract painting when looking at the geometrical folds in a Byzantine icon or the patterned sleeves of Veronese's Portrait of a Woman (1565)? Modern art merely made explicit that which in all previous western painting was implicit, the enigma of form and colour becoming a clearly stated rather than subliminal presence. Huxley's great insight, aided no doubt by a healthy dose of hallucinogens, was to recognise the primacy of this presence. To look at the woman's face in a painting such as Judith is to encounter another human being, whereas to look at the jagged silk of her purple skirts is to glimpse the strange face of reality itself.

"Fabric of Vision: dress and drapery in painting" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 2885), until 8 September

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website