636
PARTISAN REVIEW
usually WASP) spirit. Anyone who took a western civilization course
more than fifteen or twenty years ago will be perfectly comfortable
with the framework .
In this context, .Hollander locates the origin of a concern with
"naturalism" in the Greece of the fifth century B. C., the origins of
fashion in Europe around 1300, and the concern with individualism,
manifested in the great tradition of portraiture in Renaissance Italy
and its northern extensions. She concedes that technology effected a
visual revolution with the camera, but in general, she remains
politely steadfast in her rejection of any hint of technological or
social influence as inherently reductionist or deterministic. Her
loyalty to an uncontaminated idealism doubtless explains the
absence from her bibliography of such names as Georg Simmel,
Norbert Elias, and Edward Sapir.
Hollander does not permit a serious consideration of the nature
of fashion, its historical development, or its special relationship to
the western tradition . Her statements about periodization must be
ferreted out from the different thematic sections. Yet, her discussion
of drapery abounds with subtle discriminations among the various
uses of drapery in painting and their evolution. She offers splendid
insights in her description of the drapery in Fran<;ois Clouet's por–
trait of Pierre Quthe in which the drapery does not frame the subject
"or hang over and behind him; instead it seems to accompany him
rather like a beautifully dressed wife." And she understands perfectly
that at least until the late sixteenth century, drapery "always
appeared
somewhere
as an element of fashionable dress, a necessary
display of raw luxury." She further contends that the mesmerizing
appeal of draped fabric has persisted to the present and has fueled
the vast textile industry, "for which practical need alone would not
account. This vast aesthetic range of cloth was created not by the
spinners and weavers of textiles but by the hands and eyes of the
artists who continually represented it and celebrated it and made it
more beautiful in our sight."
None familiar with the proven cost-effectiveness of the gar–
gantuan advertising industry would contest the impact of visual
representations. But there is something less than serious in denying
so totally the extraordinary transformations in medium, audience,
and purpose over the centuries. That royalty and nobility valued
paintings as celebrations of themselves and their power cannot be
doubted. But the visual display depicted in those paintings was
