Professor Aileen Ribeiro
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There was only one occasion on which I got the better
of her; for a moment and that was during a seminar we were doing on the pre-Michelangelo
frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Setting out illustrations of the paintings around
the table so that the layout mimicked the layout of the chapel, l found Stella
sitting where the east wall would be. ‘And Mrs. Newton is the Last Judgement”, l said. She loved that idea too much to do anything but grin with delight’.
In spite of my lack of ingratitude, l was accepted on
the course and there followed 2 years of total immersion in the history of dress,
a subject, which Stella’s whole career had been leading up to. The practical experience
gained by her work as costume designer in the theatre, and in haute couture, and
then - through
her marriage to the artist and art historian Eric Newton - her move into the ways in which clothes were depicted
in art.
Eric was a worker in mosaics, and he and Stella spent
their honeymoon in Italy where Eric had a commission from the family mosaic firm
to order mosaic materials in Padua. Already becoming an art historian, he spent,
according to Stella, 10 days there ‘every possible minute in art galleries and
churches. It was on this occasion, said Stella that ‘my eyes were open to art
and especially to the clothes a whole new world was opened’.
During the war years, as part of the effort ‘to keep up morale’, (Stella was unsuccessful in her attempt to join the armed forces) she lectured all over England on the history of dress for the Extra-Mural Department of the university of Cambridge; during long blacked-out train journeys she says she studied in detail the dress of the Italian Renaissance through paintings and documents.
In the late 1940s Stella persuaded Eric to come to Venice
with the idea of writing a book on Tintoretto, which he did. Stella wrote: ‘There
had always been disputes over the dating of Tintoretto’s paintings, and with my
study of 16th century dress I was able to put forward some suggestions as to the
dates of some controversial pictures. When the book was published in 1952, it
received considerable attention, one critic commenting on ‘a new parlour game, the dating of paintings by the dress of
their characters. It was this book which inspired the National Gallery to ask
Stella to date the paintings in their collection by their dress, work which occupied
her from 1952 until 1961. In the way that things work, the chairman of the trustees
of the National Gallery at that time was Lord Robbins, who was also chairman of
the Committee of Management of the Courtauld Institute; he suggested that she
found a postgraduate department for the study of the history of dress at the Courtauld,
which opened in 1 965, and at which she taught for ten years, when I took over.
At the Courtauld she found art historians who found it difficult to accept the validity of the history of dress as an academic subject. A comment by Stella on this subject in 1953 is apt here:
‘The study of the costume of the past is not a study which can be picked up for the sake of dating a painting and then dropped. It demands the same detailed research, background knowledge and acute observation, coupled with imaginative insights, which are essential to the study of art history.
Life wasn’t always easy, but her pioneering study in
the history of dress was recognised by the award of O.B.E. in 1986. The following
year in Costume 3 (the journal of the Costume Society) there was a festschrift devoted to
Stella’s achievements as a dress historian, with an introduction by Roy Strong
in which he says that ‘the establishment of the history of dress as a serious
academic discipline owes an incalculable debt to Stella Mary Newton’. In 1990,
the 25th anniversary of the foundation of History of Dress Course,
saw the setting up of the Courtauld History of Dress Association (CHODA), which
aims to build on Stella’s work at the Courtauld by raising the profile of the
subject via seminars, an annual conference and a lecture in Stella’s honour held every two years. Some of the money raised goes towards funding students
on research trips abroad; Stella felt very strongly that the history of dress
needed to encompass not just Britain, but Europe, and indeed the wider world.
It seems so obvious now to ‘read’ clothing and its implications in art, but it
was revolutionary at the time.
On her
honeymoon visit to Padua before the Second World War, Stella began to imagine
how it would be possible to see which garments the painter had done from life,
from his own period, and which ones he had made up...’ It was perhaps no accident
that the first lecture she gave to students was on Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena
Chapel in Padua; I remember it as totally absorbing, encompassing not only a vast
knowledge of dress in the early 14th century set within the social and cultural
context of the time, but the moving drama of the religious narrative.
Her fondness
for the 14th century culminated in her book Fashion in the age of the Black
Prince (1980). This seminal work demonstrated the best kind of dress history,
blending documentary sources with visual ones. As the art historian Robert Gibbs
noted in his obituary of Stella in The British Art Journal (Autumn, 2001):
‘The setting of visual sources such as illumination alongside the written ones showed not only how the forms of dress changed radically across Europebut the social values they carried with them’.
Stella’s great love was of course, Italy and in particular,
Venice. Venice she dealt with in The Dress of the Venetians 1495-1525 (1987),
and in perhaps her most important book, Renaissance Theatre Costume and the
Sense of the Historic Past (1975) she explored the links between art and theatre,
and the ways in which artists sought to express the world of the mythological,
biblical and historic past through costume.
Her
one foray outside the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was her first book in 1974
Health Art and Reason Dress Reformers of the 19th Century, a world
close in time to her own childhood and the lives of her parents who moved in the
kind of artistic and progressive circles, which form the basis of this witty and
entertaining survey.
A
slight touch of heresy here; Excellent as Stella’s books are, and still essential
reading to my mind she was above all a superb lecturer, the best I have ever heard.
In a novel whose name I have forgotten, an ideal teacher is described as a mixture
of Olivier and God; in short, one needs a sense of the theatrical and a sense
of wisdom - Stella
certainly had these qualities, and she enthused her students not just with the
main narratives of dress history, but also more arcane subjects such as the knightly
orders and regalia of the Middle Ages; if she had one inexplicable enthusiasm
it was for folk costume especially that of Eastern Europe; encouraged by British
Council tours, she would return with brightly coloured woollen and embroidered artefacts, and I’m sure she was disappointed by my lack
of enthusiasm. She continued to lecture for many years after she had retired from
the Courtauld, and many of you here will have heard her.
Above
all Stella demanded total commitment and hard work; as students we were never
allowed to be ill or to slack off, for she was always there on time, stylishly
dressed and ready to listen to our seminar papers, mostly in a charitable spirit,
but sometimes with an acerbic touch. As part of the course, we went on a study
visit to the Netherlands - I think
we must have seen every museum of regional clothing in Holland and every Rubens
in Belgium. I remember that in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam we hid in some obscure
room for a reasonably to be discovered by Stella, full of energy and urging us
on to the next gallery. A typical Stella moment on that visit: when we complained
about our fleapit of a ‘hotel’, she declared how boring and characterless international
hotels were (of the kind she was staying in) and we would have given our eyeteeth
for a proper room and a bath!
So
she could be very much the Grande Dame. She also taught by example, for her conversation
- from her long and varied
experience of life and art - was educational in the best sense of the word; elliptical comments made
us as students and colleagues think and could lead us into further intellectual
territories to be explored.
She
had strong views about certain periods in history, with a particular dislike of
the 17th century - I never got a straight
answer when I once asked her why. She never wrote on the 13th century, which is
a pity for she inspired me with my love for the period. She liked that century’s
complex mixture of worldliness, gossip, humanity, curiosity, and deep religious
faith - not a bad epitaph for
Stella herself.
Aileen Ribeiro
