Suu's Thread-Jack

[Nast]

Where is Suu these days? 

[LMNO]

She's on Facebook, complaining about things.

[Suu]

I'm back-ish. Mostly came back  to read things now that I'm out of school and a professional bum again.

Here's some reason thread-jacks from motherfucking Byzantium.  The first is the physical component of my master's thesis, where I went into the inventory of an 11th Century patrician woman and recreated some of her garments based on extant artwork. It took translation from Middle Greek, but fuck you: Orange. That's one of the icons I'm done as well. St. Lucia (Loukia) of Syracuse. The most recent one I've done of the Archangel Gabriel was fucking killer, but anyways, pics.

http://i.imgur.com/L4uTZ73.jpg Not embedded because BIG.

And this is a 12th Century Byzantine ensemble based on the Eisiterion of Agnes of France from 1179. It's a story of how a 9 year old princess from France came to Constantinople and married the emperor, complete with Byzantine side-eye from the empress. I shit you not, it's fucking glorious. I want to take the image of the side-eyeing empress, transform it into a banner tattoo that says, "Byz, please!"



Oh, and the side-eye, the whole thing is kind of terrifyingly pedo, though, even if it was a standard practice:

[minuspace]

Wow.  That patterning is really dope.

[Nast]

Those patterns though! 
Were Sasanian pearl roundels a common motif in the Medieval West too? I know that they show up in Chinese and Japanese textiles from time to time. Silk Road and all that.

[Junkenstein]

Oh, and the side-eye, the whole thing is kind of terrifyingly pedo, though, even if it was a standard practice:

I'm going to refer to this as the first historic use of side-eye to dodgy behaviour.

[Suu]

Those patterns though! 
Were Sasanian pearl roundels a common motif in the Medieval West too? I know that they show up in Chinese and Japanese textiles from time to time. Silk Road and all that.

They gained traction outside of Byzantium in 12th Century Italian states and for coronation outfits in the Holy Roman Empire. As far as daily wear, doubtful. Th Byzantines cornered the market on imported silks and ran quite the racket with a series of guilds as far as the silk trade went through the city. This can all be found in "The Book of the Eparch" from the 10th century. Horribly dry reading, but chock full of information as far as Silk Road commerce was concerned.

I actually just purchased some high end, EXPENSIVE, replica Sassanian silks for my husband and I since I was given a sweet deal. So I'll be working on actual early medieval Persian/Sogdian coats for the both of us. They would be fabulous for Byzantine wear, but I've been referring a lot back to the crossover coat look from the 7th-11th centuries in central Asia, and I want to take a crack at it. It's really under represented in the SCA. Most Persian you see is Safavid, which is gorgeous, but does little for my own study of Silk Road textiles and garments through late antiquity.