The Classical Studies Graduate Program warmly invites you to a talk entitled "Defining cloth-gestures in Greek and Roman Art" by Giulia Bertoni, PhD candidate in Classical Studies at Columbia University.
In this talk I propose a new term of art historical analysis: cloth-gestures. In the first part, I offer a definition by telling the genesis of the term in my research on Greek and Roman drapery patterns and their overlooked use to communicate and influence emotions. I argue for the heuristic advantage of the term in comparison to other ones (for instance, Warburg’s Pathosformeln to capture the way drapery forms, in conjunction with the body, are manipulated to communicate emotions and dispositions, or even the restraint of emotion. Why is it better to approach some ancient drapery patterns as cloth-gestures rather than as symbolic attributes or as parerga, ornaments, the category where Kant put “draperies on statues”? In the second part of the talk, by exploring ancient artistic vocabulary on the mimetic arts, I show how the idea of cloth-gestures was one not only compatible with, and perhaps even adumbrated by, ancient Greco-Roman terms applied to the mimetic arts but one occasionally directly talked about, most notably in oratorical handbooks, discussing acts of persuasion through studied motions of the drapery. While the term cloth-gesture was coined to study drapery patterns in ancient Greco-Roman art and is intimately linked to a draped style of dress, I especially invite scholars studying other visual cultures, from ancient to contemporary, to think whether this might be a useful term of analysis beyond Greco-Roman antiquity.