Dalmatic

The dalmatic was ordinary clothing before it was anything ecclesiastical. It takes its name from Dalmatia, arrived at Rome as a fashion in the imperial period, and was a wide-sleeved tunic of the sort a well-dressed Roman might wear, decorated with two vertical stripes called clavi running from shoulder to hem. Roman moralists disapproved of it as loose and foreign, which is the usual fate of an imported garment.

It became a vestment by being a privilege rather than by being prescribed. At Rome it was worn by the pope and by the deacons of the city as a mark of honour, and popes granted the right to wear it to particular churches and particular deacons elsewhere as a favour, so its spread across the west can be tracked through the grants. Only when the grants had accumulated far enough did it become simply what a deacon wears.

The stripes survived the transition, sometimes as woven orphreys and sometimes as applied bands, and the shape settled into a knee-length tunic with wide open sleeves, matching the colour of the season and normally matching the celebrant's chasuble as part of a set. Its Byzantine counterpart is the sticharion worn with the orarion, which is a different shape doing the same job.

A deacon at a solemn Mass vests in amice, alb and cincture, then the stole over the left shoulder and fastened at the right side, and then the dalmatic on top. The subdeacon wore the tunicle, a plainer garment of the same cut, until the order of subdeacon was suppressed in the Latin church in 1972; matching sets of chasuble, dalmatic and tunicle survive in large numbers in sacristies where nobody now wears the third piece.

The oddest survival is the bishop's. At a solemn pontifical liturgy a bishop may wear a dalmatic, and formerly a tunicle as well, beneath his chasuble. The reason is the old principle that a bishop holds the fullness of orders and therefore vests in the garments of the orders below his own before putting on his own, so that all of them are on him at once. It is invisible to the congregation and adds considerable weight, and it exists purely to make a point about what a bishop is.

The dalmatic also has a life outside the sanctuary. It became a coronation garment for European monarchs, on the argument that an anointed king held a quasi-clerical dignity, and the dalmatics used at English coronations are among the oldest surviving examples of the shape.

Colour follows the season in the western scheme, so a deacon changes dalmatic with the celebrant, and matched sets in each colour are what a well-provided sacristy is measured by.