The Vestiment Of The Body Politic (From The King's Vestiment To The National Dress)

Abstract

This article reconstructs Georgian political theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by analysing the vestimentary code as reflected in the portraits of Georgian kings. Political theology had not been the subject of explicit juridical, political or historiographical discourse since the fourteenth century, and therefore has to be elicited from other sources. The author demonstrates how Georgians kings, starting from Teimuraz I, had been confronted with issues of the proper representation of their kingship, and dealing with the awkward fact of being Christian kings and vassals of Muslim emperors at the same time. This article focuses on their strategies of legitimizing their kingship by means of various representational methods. The final two chapters demonstrate how the national body politic was born after the disappearance of the monarchical body and the way it inherited the previous problems of representability, both in terms of the body politic per se, as well as that of the national body; and how the solution to the above problems was provided by the ‘tergdaleulebi’ generation, the architects of the modern Georgian nation educated abroad.