In-Between: Witnessing Liturgical Vestments inside Late Antique Cathedrals

This paper explores the way in which the liturgical garments of the various clerical orders appeared to those witnessing liturgical performances inside late antique cathedrals. To this end, the analysis combines material, visual, and textual sources to reconstruct the aesthetic and general features of the spaces and consider how the garments’ materiality, chromatic qualities, and iconography engaged with them. In particular, the paper will ponder how the garments contributed to establishing both the clergy and church interiors as liminal categories, placed in-between the human and the divine. The analysis reveals the careful coordination between built space, decoration, ritual utterings, and the aesthetic and choreography of clerical movements meant to establish church interiors as spaces where the earthly and heavenly realities met and merged.