Vestments in the Grand Old Style

IN the past few years, the look of vestments used in Christian ritual has changed. Chief reason is the democratization of the Catholic Church. Vestments once had a hierarchic purpose: the presence of the priest at a raised altar, draped in a chasuble thick with gold and silver embroidery, stiff and heavy as oxhide, glittering in the taper light, symbolized the spiritual distance between God's minister and his people. Costume is a basic way of preserving differences. Moreover, since the priest stood between the faithful and the altar, mostly with his back to the congregation, his full height was in view; this gave traditional vestment makers a large canvas over which to deploy their designs. In the new Catholic liturgy, celebrants face their congregations across table-like altars. And with the emphasis on the vernacular and the essential unity of priest and people at worship, ecclesiastical garments have become plainer: chasubles tend to be simple ponchos, their ornamentation light.

Dazzling. Many mourn the passing of the grander style of vestments, since, like stained glass, it added an element of visual beauty to the ritual of worship. At the peak of the craft, medieval artisans in particular produced designs of extraordinary richness and delicacy. One of the richest collections in the Western Hemisphere is that of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art from which TIME herewith offers a sampling.

The chasuble used in liturgical celebration developed out of everyday Greco-Roman clothing; an enveloping cloak (Latin name: casula, or little house), worn over the tunic, was adopted by the church some time after the 4th century A.D. Made of wool at first, the chasuble--with the increasing availability of silk around the 10th and 11th centuries--gradually acquired a dazzling sumptuousness. The epitome of this was opus Anglicanum, or "English work," a taxingly intricate method of embroidery that flourished in London guild shops during the 13th and 14th centuries. The Met possesses one rare example, the so-called Chichester-Constable chasuble, whose scenes (like the Adoration of the Magi, opposite) are embroidered with dense, flat expanses of metal-covered thread. Tin, mined in Cornwall, was drawn to a fine ribbon, coated with gold, wound around the silk and then worked into the red velvet ground with a gold or silver needle; steel needles, as known today, were not used until the 15th century.

Embroidery is essentially decorative. As illusion, it is hobbled by the pattern of stitches, which could never attain the fluidity of line and shading that paint or wash gave. Refined as it is, with its or nue or "shaded gold" method of gold thread couched with varicolored silks, a roundel like the 16th century Spanish Adoration of the Magi (based, probably, on an unidentified Renaissance painting) is almost too limited in technique for the painting style it simulated. But in flat pattern, Renaissance and later embroiderers could and did achieve magnificent results--sometimes lighthearted and almost naive, as in the wool stitching of flowers, fruits and leaves on a white linen 18th century French dalmatic (or tunic); more often, of laboriously achieved splendor: the peacock displaying the green silk and gold-and-silver cord eyes and rays of his tail on a 16th century French chasuble, or the coiling festoons of gold grapes with silk chenille leaves that some anonymous craftworker applied to a 19th century Italian vestment.

Copes, which are worn instead of the chasuble for nonEucharistic ceremonies such as marriages or baptisms, tended to have an allover, continuous design. Typical is the exaggeratedly baroque fruitings and blossomings of what appears, on an early 18th century brocade, to be the Garden of Eden, seen against a blue satin sky. But with chasubles, a different convention arose. This sprang from the tailors' way of seaming together strips of fabric, which were then reinforced with a decorative vertical band called an orphrey. Orphreys might be relatively simple--as on the Met's heavily restored 14th-15th century Spanish chasuble, with its complex design of formalized pomegranates in woven velvet split by an embroidered ornamental band with figures of St.

Lucy and St. Barbara. Or they might turn into an iconographical picnic: witness the orphrey-like cross on a heavy Dutch tapestry chasuble from 1570, depicting the children of Israel gathering manna (which floats, in white stylized roundels, from the sky), with Moses' bulrushes below, heraldic crests on both sides, and a motto that reads "We are bent, not broken by the waves."

Compared with such elaborate efforts, the most artistically significant vestments of modern times--Henri Matisse's chasubles for the chapel he designed and decorated at Vence--seem almost transparently simple: a collage of patches. Yet their airy lucidity of color, their instinctive brightness, attests to a different type, but not a lower intensity of faith.

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