belonged to the church of St. Gereon at Cologne; a large bit of it
is now in the museum at Lyons; another at Nuremberg; whilst
a small part of the border only is in the Victoria and Albert Museum,
South Kensington. The pattern consists of repeated roundels
within each of which is a chimerical bird and bull (? St. Luke),
elsewhere is a small eagle (? St. John). The style of design, strong
in oriental and Byzantine character, is frequently found in shuttle woven
silks of the period.
The renaissance of literature in the 12th century, infused with
mystical and religious tendencies, supplied subjects for
wall decoration by fresco painting, the practice of
which was revived then and came into vogue in Italy
and the south, whilst its analogue in the northern and
Tapestries from
the 13th century onwards.
more weather-wearing countries is to be found chiefly
in decorative tapestry weavings. Much tapestry is
certainly indebted for its cartoons to wall painting, but
illustrations in MSS. also furnished subjects from which
tapestry was made by the tapissiers nostrez and tapissiers de la haute
lisse in France, Germany and Flanders.[1] The earlier tapestries
usually seem to have been narrow and long, e.g. the “toile à broderie”
of Bayeux (see Embroidery) and the 12th-century tapestries of
Halberstadt cathedral. Although the making such narrow, long
tapestries survived into the 14th and 15th centuries (see fig. 16),
larger shapes (see figs. 14 and 15) suitable as curtains and as hangings
to cover large wall-spaces became the more frequent. From
this time forward the output from many European towns of big
pieces, mostly woven with coloured wools, was continuous and
considerable. The more sumptuous examples from the 14th to
the 17th century were enriched with gleaning silks and metallic
threads.[2]
The subjects of the cartoons from which tapestries were woven
varied of course with the tastes of the times, the more frequent of
the earlier ones being religious (see fig. 12) or
illustrative of moralities. Types of romantic, legendary
subjects are displayed in figs. 14 and 15 of the Siege
Variety of designs
in tapestries.
of Troy, and fig. 23 of Dido and Aeneas. Historical
design occurs in fig. 20, which is one of a set of
woven possibly at the royal factory of Fontainebleau
about 1540, to commemorate the fêtes on the occasion of the
marriage of Henri II. with Catherine de Medicis; and again in
fig. 25, of the “Glorious Defence of Londonderry.” Pastoral
incidents are shown in fig. 16, and social life episodes and incidents
in fig. 22, which was woven at the celebrated Medici factory,
Florence, in 1639 by a French weaver—Pierre Fevre—from a
design in the style of F. d’Albertino (il Bacchiaca), 16th century,
entitled “L’inverno” (winter). Less human in interest are
tapestries, mostly of the late 15th century, wrought from leafy
designs, usually termed “ventures,” of which several were made at
Brussels during the 16th century. Heraldic and floral devices
were also frequently used, see fig. 19, from a piece of the late
15th century in Winchester College, and fig. 18, which is at Haddon
Hall and was woven early in the 16th century. It is very similar
to hangings which are at Bern and are said to have been captured
from Charles the Bold at the battle of Granson. Many curiously
designed tapestries of German 15th-century origin are to be seen
in the museum at Basel—one of them (fig. 21) displays strange
beasts, unicorns, stags in the midst of Gothic foliage, and labels
with legends. Other tapestries, worked from still later phases of
ornamental design, are fantastic with schemes of abstract ornament
into which are introduced as subsidiary details figure subjects
set in panels and medallions.
The treatment of the compositions in cartoons for tapestry follows that adopted by painters. Thus examples from the 11th to the end of the 15th century are formal in the drawing of the forms introduced into them, and comparatively limited in range of colours, lights and shades, in accordance with the mannerisms of the earlier painters whether illuminators of MSS. or wall and panel painters. It has been argued from this that the designers of such early tapestry work possessed a sense of the limitations imposed by the process and materials. But in their day the relatively small number of dyes available involved conventionality in colour, quite as much as the earlier styles of drawing involved conventionality in form.
Fig. 13 is from an interesting design by Jehan Foucquet (1415–1485); and is one of a set, made by him to illustrate the Trojan War, now in the Louvre. From these drawings tapestries were woven at Arras probably in the middle of the 15th century. One of these hangings in the Victoria and Albert Museum (see figs. 14 and 15) is from Foucquet’s design, representing the arrival of Queen Penthesilea and her warrior women at Troy and the part she took in a fight in which she vanquished Diomedes. This episode was introduced by Quintus Calaber (or Smyrnaeus), a 4th-century writer, in his version of the Homeric story. A tapestry from another of Foucquet’s designs displaying King Priam in the midst of his court is in the Palais de Justice at Issoire.
When Raphael, master of a freer and more realistic style in rendering form and colour, produced his cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles for a set of hangings for Pope Leo X., a new condition naturally came into play, and practically became a principal source of the contrast which is observable Introduction of realism in designs for tapestries. between the designs of tapestries made before his time and those made after the early part of the 16th century. The provision of a bigger scale of dyes for the wools and silks was stimulated to secure success in weaving these more realistic representations of forms and greater subtleties in colour, as well as the developed effects of perspective: compare, for instance, the treatment in fig. 14 with that in fig. 22. The restraint or limitations of the earlier styles were thus gradually supplanted by the comparative complexities of the later; and it is a point of interest to note that provision for still further inventing and improving dyes and so helping tapestry to assimilate to painting is specially included in the regulations (1667) of the state manufactory of the Gobelins, where under M. Chevreul (director of the dye-works for more than fifty years during the 19th century) 14,400 tones of colour have been used.
A chronological succession of styles may also be traced in the borders enclosing such varieties of design as those just referred to. As a rule borders consisting of a selvage or plain band come first (see fig. 12), followed by those in whichlabels with block-letter legends (figs. 14 and 15 and Sizes of borders indications of date. fig. 17) are features; after them are narrow borders filled in with closely and well-arranged floral forms (see lower border in fig. 17), to which succeed borders of greater width containing elaborate detail (fig. 20). Such as these date from soon after the beginning of the 16th century, and those rather wider and more extravagant in ornament follow on somewhat later (see figs. 22 and 23). In the 18th century massive rococo proscenium frames, as in fig. 25, are sometimes adopted.
Of the notable centres where the industry of tapestry-weaving
has been in considerable practice, Arras in the 14th and 15th centuries,
Brussels in the 15th and 16th, Middelburg and Delft in
the late 16th and early 17th centuries,[3] Paris in the 16th
and 17th centuries and down to the present time, with
Notable centres
of the industry.
Mortlake in the 17th century, probably stand foremost;
and from them the services of experienced workmen
equipped with frames and implements were requisitioned
and secured at most of the short-lived contemporaneous centres
in almost all parts of Europe. Several names of tapestry-weavers
working during the first half of the 14th century in Arras, Paris,
Valenciennes, St. Omer and Reims, for Burgundian, Flemish and
French nobles, have been recorded.[4] Throughout that century a
few Weavers and many tapestries came from Arras into England,
where the term “arras” became the generic name for woven
wall-hangings. Arras tapestries also went in quantities into Italy
where they were called “Arazzi,” and into Spain where they bore
the name “pannos de raz.” The tapicers of London received their
statutes in 1331, and Edward III. caused an inquiry to be held
into the mistera tapiciarorum.[5] The industry at Arras began to
decline soon after 1460, and was succeeded about this date by works
at Bruges, Ghent, Tournai, Lille, Oudenarde, but more especially
at Brussels, at which last city the industry grew to an importance
even greater than it had enjoyed previously at Arras or elsewhere.
The regulations of the Brussels corporation of tapissiers were
framed in 1451. Under them tapissiers might draw for one another
the stuffs of hangings or of costumes in their figure compositions,
- ↑ Guiffrey’s Nicolas Bataille contains particulars of the loan by Charles V. of France to his brother Louis, duke of Anjou, of an illuminated MS. from which Hennequin or Jean of Bruges, painter in ordinary and valet de chambre to the king, made the cartoons used by Nicolas Bataille (tapissier de Paris) in weaving two hangings representing the Apocalypse (1377).
- ↑ “Tapis de haute lice de fin fil d’arras ouvré à or de Chipre” (A.D. 1395). One of the largest and most delicately wrought tapestry hangings in which gold and silver threads are freely used is that of the Adoration of the Eternal Father: on the left of this is the story of the Emperor Augustus and the Tiburtine Sibyl; on the right the story of Esther and Ahasuerus. It was bought by Mr Pierpont Morgan.
- ↑ Only one or two of the tapestries representing the several engagements between the English and Spanish fleets in 1588 which used to hang in the House of Lords (see Pine, Tapestry of the House of Lords, London, 1739) were saved from the fire (1835), and are now at Hampton Court. They closely correspond with a set commemorating engagements between the Dutch and Spanish fleets (1572 and 1576) which are in the great Assembly Hall of the Provincial States of Zeeland. These latter were woven chiefly at the tapestry works at Middelburg, 1595–1629; the former were woven at Francis Spiring’s works (or Spierincx) at Delft. Both, it appears, were designed by H. Cornelius Vroom of Harlem. For interesting details of the Middelburg works see van der Graft’s De Taptjt-Fabrieken (Middelburg, 1869), and supplementary documents by De Waard (Oud-Holland, xv., 65, 1897).
- ↑ See lists in W. G. Thomson’s History of Tapestry.
- ↑ Rot. Pat. 38 Ed. III., Hardy’s Record Rymer, vol. 3, part 2, p. 736.
