ABSTRACT
The Greek artist also grappled with the problem of clothing, and by its solution he made himself master of a new means of expression. The Egyptian with his rigid drawers and his transparent tunic and the Clialdsean made only timid efforts in this genre, and their knowledge was limited to conventional folds; the Assyrian buried his figures under robes overburdened with embroidery, looking as though they were of cardboard. The materia], in the art of these lands, remains a garment which covers the body, either less or more; it had no aesthetic value for them. The Greek alone comprehended that beauty was to be achieved by means of the stuff of which a garment is made, of its folds and its adaptation to or its contrast with the body that is partially or wholly dissimulated by it. Enamoured of the real, he was to seek to render this stuff with increasing fidelity, adapting it to the personality and to the movements of the figure, and deepening its folds, and he was to do away with the conventional schemas which persisted up to the end in the art of these other lands. Drapery became for him, like pose and like anatomy, an indispensable element of statuary and drawing.
