History of the FanRhead, G. Woolliscroft (George Woolliscroft)
History
History of the Fan
Rhead, G. Woolliscroft (George Woolliscroft)
Fans
The single leaf or heart-shaped fan occurs constantly in Greek
terra-cottas; a number of examples are to be seen in the British and
other Museums. In the Victoria and Albert Museum is a charming little
winged Amor, draped, tripping gaily along, hiding his face behind
a fan of this shape. Blondel refers to a female figure in the Louvre,
seated at a feast, holding a leaf-fan; also in a fresco at Pompeii
a figure is seen holding a fan which this author mistakes for that
of a different shape, but which is really a perspective view of the
plantain-leaf. We see the triform leaf-fan in the hands of a Tanagra
figure in the collection of Louis Fould, illustrated in the _Gazette
des Beaux-Arts_ for 1860; this, as well as a number of Tanagra figures,
evidently representing priestesses of Venus. It is impossible to
determine with any degree of accuracy the material and construction of
these fans: in some instances they are evidently stretched on a frame,
and adorned with ornament either painted or embroidered; occasionally,
also, the decorative motif is that of the natural veining of the leaf;
the handles being usually very short, in many cases scarcely visible.
The slight vestiges of colour remaining on these statuettes must in no
instance be taken as suggesting the colouring of the original fans.
The business of the Tanagra sculptor was to make a _statuette_ and
not a portrait of any particular fan; the colouring of the fan of the
statuette would therefore be determined by the general colour scheme of
which it formed a part.
The circular fan of peacocks’ feathers appears as early as the fifth
century B.C., and even at this date had already been used in Asia Minor.
References to the feather-fan are of constant occurrence in the
writings of Greek authors. A slave in the _Orestes_ of Euripides
exclaims: ‘After the Phrygian fashion I chanced with the close circle
of feathers to be fanning the gale, that sported in the ringlets of
Helen.’
Instances of the feather-fan are common on Greek vases,—on the
Campanian Hydra (F. 212), British Museum, the shape in this instance
being that of the reversed heart. In the fourth vase room, on an
oil-flask, with Aphrodite seated in the lap of Adonis, a figure
appears holding a very large fan, but similar in shape to the first
mentioned; and on the Apulian Hydra, F. 352, a fan appears which is
evidently a conventional representation of the peacock feather-fan. The
long-handled fan was also adopted by the Greeks, these being waved by
servants or attendants, as in Egypt.
The Etruscans, amongst whom the luxury of the fan is early seen, and
who transmitted it later to the Romans, used the peacock feathers, of
different lengths, in a semicircle: such a fan appears on a large vase
in the Louvre.
[Illustration: FROM AN APULIAN HYDRA. (British Museum.)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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