The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 29, no. 7 (March, 1971)

6. The Transfiguration. Byzantine,
about 549. Mosaic. Sant' Appollinare
in Classe, Ravenna. Photograph:
Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
uring the second period, the fifth to the ninth
centuries, called by Marriott transitional, the basic
ecclesiastical vestments as they are known today
appeared and were standardized throughout the
shrinking empire. This was the time of barbarian invasions
and the subsequent Christianization of the
North. The principal literary sources for descriptions
of vestments during this period are acts of the fourth
council of Toledo, which sat under the presidency of
St. Isidore of Seville in 633, and some letters of
Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). The twentyeighth
canon of the council enumerates the vestments
that were to be returned to various orders
of the clergy upon reinvestiture, as follows: the
bishop was to receive the orarium (or stole), ring,
and staff; the priest, the orarium and planeta (a
cloak similar to the paenula but made of richer
fabric and apparently the forerunner of the chasuble);
the deacon was to be invested with the orarium and
alba. Since the insignia, or official garments, of the
upper orders were in all probability added to those
of the lower, the vestments of the bishop at that
time would have included, in modern terminology:
the alb, stole, chasuble, ring, and staff. Since all
these articles were considered insignia of office, the
chasuble or its predecessor, the planeta, was by
that time worn at mass as part of the pontificals.
Three additional vestments are mentioned in the
letters of Gregory the Great as being peculiar to
Rome: the dalmatica, mappula, and pallium. Previously
mentioned by Pope Silvester, the dalmatica
seems at this time to have assumed its modern
usage, being worn as a separate vestment over the
longer alb. During the early part of the period the
dalmatic was granted to certain bishops and deacons
as a special papal privilege, but by the end of the
sixth century it had come into general usage for all
clergy. The mappula was a narrow strip of cloth
first carried in the fingers of the left hand (Figure 8)
and later worn looped over the left wrist. As its
name implies, the mappula, or maniple, was originally
a small napkin and is probably the descendant
of the cloth that Pope Silvester said should be worn
over the left hand. The pallium, the third vestment,
was a strip of cloth ornamented by crosses worn
about the neck with the ends crossed over the left
shoulder (Figure 6). It was worn by the pope and
bestowed by him upon certain archbishops as a
mark of honor.
The most extensive record in works of art of
church vestments of this period comes from the
sixth-century mosaics at Ravenna. In the apse mosaic
of Sant' Apollinare in Classe the patron saint
is shown as a bishop wearing an elaborately embroidered
chasuble, an alb, and the pallium (Figure
6). His counterpart at San Vitale, St. Ecclesius, has
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