2025 Theses Doctoral

Cloth-gestures on Roman sarcophagi

Bertoni, Giulia

This dissertation sheds light on manipulations of drapery to express emotions and moral dispositions in Greek and Roman art. Using Roman sarcophagi reliefs as the main database but also reaching beyond it to other earlier or contemporary visual media, including rhetorical performances and theatre, it does so by identifying a series of recurring “cloth-gestures”, an art historical term coined to detect and analyze recurring gestures in art and life involving the manipulation of drapery for the nonverbal communication of a variety of signals.

Within the wide array of uses of drapery in ancient art, it identifies two main tendencies: one is to manipulate veiling patterns to amplify emotions and to extend the expressive range of the body, especially through windswept drapery motifs (part I), where the drapery is shown waving to suggest and elicit pathos, from eros to panic to elation. This tendency, starting in Greek art, and becoming more pronounced and codified in Roman art, crystalizes into two ubiquitous “cloth-gestures” : the semi-circular swollen veil known as velificatio, signaling an heightened emotional state most often associated with women (chapter 1), and the fluttering cape of heroes signaling a rush of courage strongly characterized as masculine, akin to concepts of virtus (chapter 2).

In part II, I explore the almost opposite tendency presented by the ancient evidence: to manipulate drapery to inhibit the expressive range of the body, communicating ideas of emotional restraint. My case-study (chapter 3) for this part is the cloth-gesture of veiling the face and body to communicate aidos in Greek art, and in Roman art, pudicitia, sexual restraint and marital faithfulness–a gesture strongly coded as feminine. The use of the same cloth-gesture as a “pathos formula” to communicate extreme forms of grief, however, challenges rigid codification, as well as the clear distinction between part I and part II, revealing that the two tendencies are manifestations of the same ancient strategy of veiling emotions, rather than displaying them more directly (for instance, on the face).

An art historical study of ancient emotions and dispositions on the folds of their drapery reveals to what extent these concepts were gendered in antiquity, as well as a blurry zone in ancient categorizations between what we distinguish as psychological and ethical phenomena. After my attempt to pin down the meaning of each cloth-gesture, I conclude that what marks out cloth-gestures from bodily gestures is their wider semantic openness and even volatility, explaining perhaps why they become such a privileged resource for the communication of emotions and dispositions, intrinsically ambivalent and shifty phenomena.