Note 60 — Appendices
Reading edition
As for the clothing of sacred images in Spain, even these are subject to changes in the fashion of costume. Ford makes merry over “the Saviour in a court-dress, with wig and breeches.” Swinburne wrote in 1775, from Alicante: “We have been all the morning in great uneasiness about Sir T. G.'s valet de chambre, who, till within this hour, was not to be found in any of the places he usually frequents. His appearance has quieted our apprehensions; and it seems he has been from sunrise till dinner-time locked up in the sacristy of the great church, curling and frizzling the flaxen periwig of the statue of the Virgin, who is to-morrow to be carried in solemn procession through the city.”
A similar passage occurs in one of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “I was particularly diverted,” she wrote from Nuremberg in 1716, “in a little Roman Catholic church which is permitted here, where the professors of that religion are not very rich, and consequently cannot adorn their images in so rich a manner as their neighbours. For, not to be quite destitute of all finery, they have dressed up an image of our Saviour over the altar in a fair, full-bottomed wig, very well powdered.”