Şi haina îl face pe om – Veşmântul în iconografia funerară transilvană medievală şi premodernă
You are what you wear - the Garment in Medieval and Premodern Transylvanian Funerary Iconography

Summary/Abstract: The funerary sculpture tends to individualize the deceased, not just to symbolically commemorate, through a portrait of a schematized apparatus, the defunct. Figural tombstones are in the urban environment a takeover of the usual type of knightly and noble funerary slabs. In the funerary plastics in the case of the representation of the deceased, the craftsmen resorted to oversizing the general silhouette and to a massive block effect, given by ample vestments. In the 16th – 17th centuries of the Transylvanian Renaissance the masculine costume, but also the feminine one, has characteristics that highlight the natural proportions and joints of the body, aiming to amplify them through rich, widely draped clothes, with wide collars, furs, and instruments specific to the portrait d’apparat, a device of portraying the subjects with the objects associated with them in the official and ceremonial attitude, depending on their hierarchy or social status. The "apparatus" costume is aimed at obtaining a precise social meaning, it marks the belonging to a certain community or corporation. We can thus notice the social and, where appropriate, political determinants of the costume. However, there are features that remain relatively constant for many centuries. The frequent mutations in fashion are revealed precisely by the frequent vestimentary regulations that established privileges of rank and prohibitions, which if not observed could be sanctioned by punishments. Maintaining a relatively steadfast social or professional order and hierarchy allowed the preservation for a long time of the general principles applied to vestments, while the social or confessional overthrows imposed rapid changes, as in the immediate period of the adoption of the Reformation in Transylvania.

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