Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources

Sienkiewicz had to dress the characters of Quo vadis in period garments. Their descriptions rarely appear, but they are highly suggestive of how the author understood ancient Rome and tried to recreate it in his work. Sienkiewicz gives detailed descriptions of costumes only when they concern the most important figures in his novel, or if clothing plays an important role in the plot. The rest of the protagonists are treated as collective characters whose clothing is identified only in terms of togas, stolae, or the robes of the poor. Beside the ubiquitous tunic, other Latin names of clothing primarily indicate the status of characters or are mentioned when Sienkiewicz uses clothes to disguise them. In those cases, the ubiquitous tunic receives an adjectival descriptor of colour or shade, which in the world of Quo vadis has a differentiating function. The names of the characters’ outfits have their origins in Roman literature. The terms introduced in the novel allow for an easy recreation of the author’s reading list, which consists of the basic works of a classical education—Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, Martial. Sometimes Sienkiewicz mixes his classical terminology with those of ecclesiastical Latin, creating an unintendedly humorous effect. However, the writer’s use of costume colour seems to have been inspired by the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Henryk Siemiradzki. This chapter will explore the very close relationship between text and paintings, and utilizes Sienkiewicz’s colour coding to pinpoint some of the images on which he drew.