Dr Margaret Cochrane Scott

I first met Stella in 1973 when I received a summons to attend, at short notice, an interview for a place on the next MA course. There was a national rail strike, and I was in the run-up to my Finals at Glasgow University. Ignoring all other considerations, such as expense, I flew south and was ushered into the Presence Chamber (aka Stella’s office in Portman Square) where I was given a monumentally uncomfortable chair to sit in this chair also meant that I was at least two feet lower than Stella and Aileen. ‘Aha,” I thought, “psychological warfare – it’s inquisitor and victim here.” After twenty minutes battling with the discomfort of the chair I was informed by Stella, smiling kindly, that she didn’t think there was any room for me on the course. Somehow I managed to make polite noises of gratitude for the ordeal I had just been subjected to, and flew home in a rage. It was therefore somewhat disconcerting to receive a couple of days later a letter offering me a place on the course.

And that is how I always remember Stella - trying to knock one off—balance. 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, I found Stella sitting where the east wall would be. ‘And Mrs. Newton is the Last Judgment,” I said. She loved that idea too much to do anything but grin with delight.

Her earliest published works dealt with the ways in which knowledge of dress and hairstyles manifestations of the zeitgeist could be used to help solve seemingly intractable problems of dating certain Italian Renaissance paintings. She used one of these early essays, for the Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, in 1953, to argue for the development of the study of the history of dress in just as detailed a way as art historians saw it necessary to study the history of art —“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, combined with imaginative insight, that are essential to the study of art history”. She also wrote disapprovingly of art historians who would “refuse to admit the significance of design in clothes’. In throwing down her gauntlet, she also explained that she had chosen the dress of the Italian Renaissance as her particular field of study because of the great volume of works produced in that period, and also because of ‘the peculiar sensitivity of the Italian people to changes in the design of clothes...’ This expertise in Italian dress was owed to the necessity of filling in the time spent on long train journeys and in waiting for trains itile she worked as an extra-mural lecturer for Cambridge during the war years. I wonder if she ever found it odd that she owed a debt of gratitude to the Third Reich, given the dislike which she manifested towards German and Northern European dress, especially in her work in the 1950s. In 1957, while writing for an Italian audience about the visit of the Emperor Frederick III to Italy in 1452, she extended mid—fifteenth-century Italian criticism of German dress to German and Anglo-Saxon dress of her own time; and in the following year, in extending this study to the collection of drawings by Marco Zoppo, now in the British Museum, she characterised Bergundian dress as rigid and austere, and German dress as archaic, “with an excessively high collar which recalls the military emblems of the junkers of the early 20th century”. The zeitgeist clearly strikes more than dress - it can strike the attitudes of historians of dress tool

It was therefore an irony, which she no doubt appreciated, that one of the first of the National Gallery catalogues whose compilers she helped with information on dress was the German catalogue, by Michael Levey, published in 1959. Little use was made later by Stella of the material she must have assembled for this particular catalogue, but the other catalogue published in the same year, Cecil Gould’s catalogue of the 16th century Venetian Schools, was to feed into her work, many years later, on the dress of the Venetians. She also contributed information to his 1962 catalogue on the 16th century Italian schools. Gould noted her help with the oft-repeated phrase “Notes by Stella Mary Pearce in the Gallery archives”.

Martin Davies in the second edition of his Early Netherlandish Schools catalogue brought her name out of the reference notes into the prefatory note; but this seems to have had little effect on her attitude to Netherlandish and Northern dress in general. I can still remember the glee with which she pointed out to us students that Andrea Mantegna, for all his archaeological obsessive ness in putting an arrow-punctured St Sebastian in front of a ruined Roman arch, had not put the archers in Roman dress, but in contemporary Netherlandish dress - a clear indication of how barbaric mid- fifteenth-century Italians found Northern dress!

The interpretation of the past formed the subject of her second book, Renaissance Theatre costume and the Sense of the Historic Past, published in 1975 and dedicated to the doyen of early

Netherlandish painting; Martin Davies.

Stella’s effect on thinking at the National Gallery can be detected outside the rather specialised world of the catalogues, in a small booklet published for the visitors to the 1979 exhibition on Moroni. The catalogue’ s author, Allan Braham, quite clearly accepted that dress was an integral part of the paintings to be described and brought into play as one of the factors in dating a painting - what Stella in 1953 had hoped art historians would become more open to accepting. Mid the National Gallery has never, since Stella’ s day, doubted the importance of dress as a means of enhancing our understanding of a painting.

The early 1990s saw a shift in Stella’s publications, back into the fourteenth century. 1990 saw Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince, a book which after over twenty years is still regularly reprinted, because there is still nothing to match it for the period. Unusually for Stella, this book began in a northern European setting -and moved on to look -at other areas of Europe; but it also included, almost inevitably, a chapter on theatrical dress in the period as well. In the early 80’s she also published an article on Hungarians as seen by Italians in the fourteenth century, and an article on the rather enchanting suit made for Philippa of Hainaut, wife of Edward III, decorated with gold squirrels (and less enchantingly, lined with squirrel fur).

The later 80’s saw a return to Renaissance Italy, with The Dress-of the Venetians, 1495-1525, published in 1987; and in 1999, a recognition by the land she had spent so much time and effort studying, an essay in the Italian publication Atlante di Schifanoia, on the clothing in the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.

Stella was always caught between a desire to see her students study new areas, as she herself was always ready to do; and a desire to ensure that those areas were ones she deemed worthy of attention. I know I was accepted as an MA student only because I could read ancient Greek and she wanted someone to ‘do’ ancient Greek dress. When I showed signs of preferring the dreaded Northern dress to Italian dress, she was less happy; and when I proposed studying Mediaeval Scottish dress, she became quite caustic, making remarks about how little there must be to say about kilts. Perhaps she would be somewhat mollified to learn that, while I have not abandoned Northern dress, I have succumbed somewhat to the sirens of the South.

As for that chair I mentioned at the start it is with us still. It sits beside my desk. No-one is ever asked to sit in it, partly because it is even less comfortable than it was nearly thirty years ago, and partly because it is currently the hone of a heap of Stella s transcriptions of English fourteenth-century wardrobe accounts, kept in the department with the intention of showing them to students as rather intimidating examples of the devotion to duty which students of the history of dress still have to develop, if they are to fellow Stella. The chair is a triumph of form over function - but at least it now has a function, as a rather bizarre shrine to Stella.

Printed for Aileen Ribefro <aiIeen.ribeiro@conrtau1d.ac.uk~. 3