A veil is an article of clothing or cloth hanging that is intended to cover some part of the head or face, or an object of some significance. It is especially associated with women and sacred objects.

One view is that as a religious item, it is intended to show honor to an object or space. The actual sociocultural, psychological, and sociosexual functions of veils have not been studied extensively but most likely include the maintenance of social distance and the communication of social status and cultural identity.[1][2] In Islamic society, various forms of the veil have been adopted from the Arab culture in which Islam arose
The first recorded instance of veiling for women is recorded in an Assyrian legal text from the 13th century BC, which restricted its use to noble women and forbade prostitutes and common women from adopting it.[citation needed] The Mycenaean Greek term a-pu-ko-wo-ko meaning "craftsman of horse veil" written in Linear B syllabic script is also attested since ca. 1300 BC.[3][4] In ancient Greek the word for veil was "καλύπτρα" (kaluptra, Ionic Greek "καλύπτρη" - kaluptrē, from the verb "καλύπτω" - kaluptō, "I cover"[5]) and is first attested in the works of Homer.[6][7]

Classical Greek and Hellenistic statues sometimes depict Greek women with both their head and face covered by a veil. Caroline Galt and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones have both argued from such representations and literary references that it was commonplace for women (at least those of higher status) in ancient Greece to cover their hair and face in public.

For many centuries, until around 1175, Anglo-Saxon and then Anglo-Norman women, with the exception of young unmarried girls, wore veils that entirely covered their hair, and often their necks up to their chins (see wimple). Only in the Tudor period (1485), when hoods became increasingly popular, did veils of this type become less common.

For centuries, women have worn sheer veils, but only under certain circumstances. Sometimes a veil of this type was draped over and pinned to the bonnet or hat of a woman in mourning, especially at the funeral and during the subsequent period of "high mourning". They would also have been used, as an alternative to a mask, as a simple method of hiding the identity of a woman who was traveling to meet a lover, or doing anything she didn't want other people to find out about. More pragmatically, veils were also sometimes worn to protect the complexion from sun and wind damage (when un-tanned skin was fashionable), or to keep dust out of a woman's face, much as the keffiyeh is used today. An inherited tendency of an organism to behave in a certain way, usually in reaction to its environment and for the purpose of fulfilling a specific need. The development and performance of instinctive behavior does not depend upon the specific details of an individual's learning experiences. Instead, instinctive behavior develops in the same way for all individuals of the same species or of the same sex of a species. For example, birds will build the form of nest typical of their species although they may never have seen such a nest being built before. Some butterfly species undertake long migrations to wintering grounds that they have never seen. Behavior in animals often reflects the influence of a combination of instinct and learning. The basic song pattern of many bird species is inherited, but it is often refined by learning from other members of the species. Dogs that naturally seek to gather animals such as sheep or cattle into a group are said to have a herding instinct, but the effective use of this instinct by the dog also requires learning on the dog's part. Instinct, as opposed to reflex, is usually used of inherited behavior patterns that are more complex or sometimes involve a degree of interaction with learning processes.
Blok had a tumultuous relationship with his Muse, the Divine Sophia. It mirrored his often shaky relationship with his wife, Liubov'. His cynicism towards his muse, the "Beautiful Lady," is expressed in the poem, The Stranger. She appears in the form of a diaphonous prostitute who entrances the poem's narrator through his drunken haze. In this poem, the moon, often a celestial symbol of the Muse, "...looks on with a mindless leer." Instead, the narrator sees the path to the eternal spiritual realm in the eyes of the earthly prostitute:

I gaze through the dark of her lowered veil And I behold an enchanted shoreline And enchanted distances, far and pale.
Blok, Aleksandr (Aleksandrovich)
IntroductionPrintPDFCite.
Aleksandr (Aleksandrovich) Blok 1880–1921

Russian poet, dramatist, essayist, critic, and autobiographer.

The leading figure of the Russian symbolist movement, Blok is considered the outstanding poet of the final years of Imperial Russia. While Blok's early poems reveal his efforts to find the true essence of reality in beauty, his later poetry is more concrete, frequently focusing on Russia, its history, and its future. Despite the shifting focus of his poetry, however, Blok retained the visionary outlook characteristic of the symbolists, and his ultimate source of inspiration remained constant as well. All of his poetry is infused with what he called the "spirit of music": an emotional and intellectual sense of exaltation and vivacity, and the fount of all creativity. Blok is today best remembered as the creator of the controversial Dvenadsat' (1918; The Twelve), praised as the greatest poetic celebration of the October Revolution.

Biographical Information

Born on the grounds of St. Petersburg University, Blok spent his childhood at Shakhmatovo, a small estate outside Moscow that belonged to his maternal grandfather. His parents, Alexandra Andreyevna and Alexander L'vovich, a brilliant lawyer, separated shortly before his birth, and Blok had slight contact with his father throughout his life. Raised in a cultured and literary atmosphere, first at Shakhmatovo and later in St. Petersburg, Blok was a mediocre student who much preferred the intellectual stimulation he found at home to his school work. At his father's insistence, he entered the School of Law at St. Petersburg University in 1898, the same year he fell in love with Lyubov Dmitrevna Mendeleeva, his future wife. Eventually changing his course of study from law to philology, Blok devoted much of his college years to composing poetry and studying the writings of the mystical philosopher and poet Vladimir Soloviev. For Blok, Lyubov was the incarnation of Soloviev's concept of the Eternal Feminine—Sophia, who represented eternal love and wisdom. Blok became the center of an admiring coterie of rising symbolist poets who worshipped his wife as the "Beautiful Lady," a figure Blok apotheosized in his poems of the early 1900s. However, by the time Blok's first collection of verse, Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame (1905), was published, his marriage had deteriorated. Lyubov had fallen in love with Andrey Biely—Blok's friend and a fellow symbolist. From this point on, the rarefied wonder of Blok's early verse gave way to earthbotind pessimism: his poetry, as well as his dramas, revealed his self-destructive bitterness. During the last decade of his life, Blok gradually abandoned mortal women in his search for Sophia, and he began to turn to Russia itself as his new ideal. His verse increasingly evidenced his concern for his country's culture and destiny, most strikingly in The Twelve.

Major Works

Critics often divide Blok's poetic career into three periods. His earliest poems were inspired by Soloviev's writings on Sophia, as well as by his wife, in whom he found Sophia reborn. In these works, which were written primarily between 1898 and 1904, Blok addresses a "Beautiful Lady" who is the incarnation of the divine and the object of ideal love. The imagery of the poems—twilight skies, delicate rains, wispy clouds, and golden landscapes—reinforces the ethereal qualities Blok perceived in his beloved. By the time Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame was published, Blok was suffering from an emotional crisis that had a significant impact on the direction his poetry was to take. Disillusioned by his inability to reconcile his ideal visions with the coarse nature of reality, Blok sought an outlet for his frustrations in St. Petersburg night life. Drinking escapades with gypsies, womanizing, and reckless passion became the new subjects of his poetry. Like the poems of the first period, these verses reveal Blok's obsession with the feminine ideal. In these later works, however, Blok seeks out his beloved in the material rather than the spiritual world: in taverns, brothels, and city tenements. Again, the imagery of the poems—snowstorms, howling winds, and the darkness of night—reflects the poet's emotional state. In the most famous poem from this period, "Neznakomka" (1907; "The Unknown Lady," a title he also used for a later drama), Blok views his beloved through a wine-induced haze in a noisy suburban restaurant. Toward the end of the decade, Blok's poetry changed course once again. His love of Russia and concern for its future replaced the quest for the feminine ideal. Written shortly after the Bolshevik ascension, The Twelve describes an unruly group of twelve Red Guardsmen as they march through the streets of St. Petersburg, looting, shouting obscenities, and mocking the bourgeoisie. At the end of the poem, Christ appears as the invisible leader of the men, seemingly implying that the guardsmen are to be identified with the twelve apostles, and the October Revolution with Russia's salvation. The Twelve was soon followed by Skify (1918), a threatening call for Western support of the new regime, but Blok wrote little thereafter, telling his friends that due to the hunger, violence, and devastation caused by the Russian civil war he could no longer sense the "music" of his earlier life.

Critical Reception

The image of Christ in the conclusion of The Twelve has been a common point of departure for Blok's critics throughout the twentieth century. Upon its publication, The Twelve provoked heated controversy in Russian political circles. Blok's contemporaries, most of whom interpreted The Twelve as a religious justification for the Bolshevik Revolution, believed that the work represented a radical shift in Blok's social views. Praised by communists as a stirring affirmation of the new regime, it drew the scorn of Marxists and enraged the intelligentsia. Among later critics, The Twelve has elicited a variety of readings. Some scholars argue that the poem is not a glorification of communism because Blok, as a member of the intelligentsia, never fully grasped the meaning of the revolution. Others maintain that the poem betrays no political sympathies whatsoever; rather, Blok was simply responding to a creative inspiration over which he had no control, in this case "the music of the revolution," as Blok himself phrased it. The Twelve has also been studied in terms of topics that are pertinent to Blok's poetry as a whole, notably the dichotomy between the real and the ideal and Blok's conflicting loyalties to the intelligentsia and to the masses.

Overall, scholars have generally agreed that the importance of Blok's position within Russian literature and culture lies in his successful transversal of two eras. As Marc Slonim has stated, "His poetry proclaimed in prophetic lines the collapse of the world to which he belonged. He tried to transmit his message to the new world that was being born amid the chaos of an implacable upheaval, and he also attempted to discern and to welcome the future. Thus he stands at the crossroads of two epochs … the last poet of Imperial Russia is the first poet of its triumphant Revolution."
I emphasized the mystery and enigmatic charm of my heroine, allowing the audience to imagine the rest of it.”

Cappella San Severo, Naples, Italy

Near the Church of San Domenico in Naples, a stone’s throw away from the house where Giambattista Vico was born and passed his childhood, stands a remarkable chapel. The Cappella San Severo served as the votive church for the di Sangro family for several generations and owes its present character to the significant transformations begun in the early 1740s by Raimondo di Sangro (1710–71), the seventh prince of San Severo. Under his watchful eye and following his precise iconographic program, many artists labored to make the chapel into a temple dedicated to several virtues, such as Divine Love, Decorousness, Sincerity, Education, Liberality, Self-Control and Religious Zeal. Many of the allegorical figures of the virtues were strongly influenced by Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), whose massive five volumes were republished under the patronage of R. di Sangro. Two of the sculptural masterpieces in the chapel are the Cristo velato (Veiled Christ), completed in 1753 by the Neapolitan Giuseppe Sammartino, and Pudicizia (Modesty), completed one year earlier by the Venetian Antonio Corradini. Both statues are figural essays in veiling and revealing. The marble figure of the Veiled Christ, which lays in the central bay directly facing the high altar, is sculpted as an expression of a transparent shroud covering a tortured body. The veil adheres to the sweating and bleeding body, entering the wounds made by the nails. A vein in the forehead appears so swollen so as almost to palpitate, as the tormented body reveals the agony of the Passion, the visible and the invisible wounds. At Christ’s feet, the implements of the Passion lay passive and inert, their gruesome task completed. The female figure of Modesty, ostensibly commissioned by di Sangro in memory of his mother, who died before he reached his first year, is also veiled, and the veil adheres to the elegant body, revealing the voluptuous rotundities. Barely beneath modesty and perhaps chastity, there is also voluptuousness. Her face carries a distant look, her left elbow rests on a broken and inscribed marble stela, a belt of roses adorns her waist, while at her foot an oak tree takes root. Many have aptly identified her as an allegory of veiled wisdom, veiled truth—Isis the veiled. According to a local legend, Modesty and the chapel itself are erected in the same location where a statue of Isis existed in the Greek Neapolis. The veil of Isis, Queen of Heaven, we need to recall, is the same as the veil of Our Lady, the Celestial Virgin. Both wear the heavenly firmament, the veil that contains the stars. Both represent the creative power as exemplified in motherhood. Both are mothers of the world. Pudicizia (Modesty)
Antonio Corradini, Pudicizia (Modesty), 1752
Cappella San Severo, Naples, Italy
The Veiled Christ and Modesty are, as we said, figural essays in veiling and revealing. The veil conceals the body, the body conceals a virtue, and a virtue conceals the soul. Put differently and in an opposite direction, the soul wears a virtue, virtue wears a body, and the body wears a veil. The soul wears three veils: virtue, body and clothing, each of which is capable of expressing different qualities, differently. But conveying or expressing is not a complete revealing. It still requires some form of veiling. Sammartino’s Veiled Christ expresses virtues in the transparencies of the nude that are not evident in the nakedness, say, of Rembrandt’s Deposition. Today, in our desire to see everything revealed, we neglect to notice the difference between the nude and the naked. But this neglect derives from a far more important loss: we have lost the value of veiling and revealing. Try as it may, the nude does not reveal all that the body can reveal. The nude also veils. The nude depends on veiling, as in Antonio Canova’s Venus Italia (1804–12), which is at once nude from the front and naked from the back. Mediating the naked and the nude are the inclination of her back, her neck and her turned face. Venus Italia
Antonio Canova, Venus Italia, 1804-12
Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy
In our desire to see raw reality in the image, we usually assume that the naked reveals reality the way it is. But the naked does not necessarily reveal all that we think it does, because, even in its most explicit expressions, the naked still hides many unexpected or unnoticed aspects. The nude and the naked reveal much, but they can hide intention. Naked thoughts can be veils for undeclared intentions, while declared intentions sometimes veil secret thoughts. France and Belgium, with other countries possibly following, have introduced legislation that forbids le voile intégral, the full veil, in public places. It is estimated that the number of women who wear the full veil in France ranges between 367, according to Le Monde, and 2,000, according to Le Figaro. Even assuming the larger of the two numbers, one wonders why members of the French parliament spent so much effort to pass a law that pertains to only 2,000 people? Notwithstanding the exaggerated attention of the media, the full veil has been gradually disappearing from public use among Muslim women. French Muslim women, as well as Muslim women elsewhere, have in their overwhelming majority rejected the veil. The political implications of the French law are obvious, but what is rarely voiced (also for political reasons) is that the full veil raises a confrontation between two aesthetic sensibilities. The sensibility that heralds the complete freedom to clothe oneself as one wishes is confronted with a difficult problem: women ought not to be forced to wear a full veil, but what if they so choose by their own free will and accord? The sensibility that accepts the full veil is also confronted with a difficult problem: are there not other ways to accept and convey bodily modesty than wearing the full veil? The veil, after all, pre-dates Islam and is not a requirement of Qur’anic law. But it is not only the burqa (or hijab, or niqab or chador, depending on national and linguistic variations) that veils a woman’s body. It is also her thoughts and the thoughts of the culture around her. Her own thoughts and the thoughts directed at her envelop her body and thus veil it again. The burqa calls attention to the single body more than is usually assumed; only when one observes many veiled women at once does the single body recede in attention. But the wind and the burqa can reveal the veiled body in more detail than many nude statues. The wind-blown burqa reveals much more of the veiled body than the most conservative believer wishes to hide, or allow. Both the burqa and the body under it can hide the best or the worst intentions. Both the décolleté signed by Yves St. Laurent and the body under the décolleté can hide the best or the worst intentions. What is worse, therefore, veiling the body or veiling the mind? There is a curious aesthetic reversal presented by the full veil and sunglasses. The full veil hides the body but allows the naked eyes their full expressive possibilities. Sunglasses, by contrast, present an integral veiling of the eyes and consequently the intentions behind the eyes. Wearing the full veil as well as sunglasses is probably the ultimate envelopment of the body’s expressive qualities. There are good ways of veiling, where one must discover that which is not necessarily evident at first glance, or at a second glance. Two planets that are aligned veil each other with respect to a third. Peeking though the rents in the veil of history are mythical forces waiting to be manifest. The veiled woman on a pilgrimage to Benares will soon be veiled by the waters of the Ganges. As she undertakes her purificatory ablutions, she will come to wear two veils at once: the veil of her sari and that of the waters of the Ganges. There are also good ways of revealing. In lifting the veil of Isis, one discovers some of the laws of Nature behind some of the products of nature. Walls, too, veil and reveal in good and bad ways. A wall retains a hill, presents a face to the street, encloses a hall and frames a window. A window cannot be a window without a wall; otherwise, it would be a frame. The wall and the window need each other in order to veil and reveal. But there are other kinds of walls, such as those between nations. These walls are meant to separate two identities, where the other is implicitly understood as lesser. Those on the stronger side stand guard over the ramparts of their egocentric city. Such walls are physical expressions of even more formidable mental walls, dividing the world into “us” against “them.” Mental and physical walls instill separateness, just as the woman who is forced to wear a veil is thereby forced to consider her identity as separate from that of others. From Akkad, to Troy, to Rome, to the Great Wall of China, to Iron Curtains, to electrified fences and concrete walls, we have built too many walls, and we have subsequently dismantled or abandoned most of them.
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