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CHINESE TAPESTRY
Chien Lung Period
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COPTIC TAPESTRY
About 300 A. D.
EGYPT and China, India and Persia, seem made to take the conceit from upstart nations like those of Europe and our own toddling America. Directly we scratch the surface and look for the beginning of applied arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest civilisation. It would seem that in a study of fabrics which are made in modern Europe, it were enough to find their roots in the mediæval shades of the dark ages; but no, back we must go to the beginning of history where man leaped from the ambling dinosaur, which then modestly became extinct, and looking upon the lands of the Nile and the Yangtsi-kiang found them good, and proceeded to pre-empt all the ground of applied arts, so that from that time forward all the nations of the earth were and are obliged to acknowledge that there is nothing new under the sun.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a bit of tapestry, Coptic, that period where Greek and Egyptian drawing were intermixed, a woman’s head adorned with much vanity of head-dress, woven two or three centuries after Christ. (Plate facing page15.) In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts are other rare specimens of this same time. (Plates facing pages16and17.) Looking further back, an ancient decoration shows Penelopeat her high loom, four hundred years before the Christian era; and one, still older, shows the Egyptians weaving similarly three thousand years before that epoch.
It is not altogether thrilling to read that civilised people of ancient times wove fabrics for dress and decoration, but it certainly is interesting to learn that they were masters of an art which we carelessly attribute to Europe of six centuries back, and to find that the weaving apparatus and the mode of work were almost identical. The Coptic tapestry of the Third Century is woven in the same manner as the tapestries that come to us from Europe as the flower of comparatively recent times, and its dyes and treatment of shading are identical with the Gothic times. Penelope’s loom as pictured on an ancient vase, is the same in principle as the modern high-warp loom, although lacking a bit in convenience to the weaver; and so we can easily imagine the lovely lady at work on her famous web, “playing for time,†during Ulysses’ absence, when she sat up o’ nights undoing her lovely stint of the day.
And the Egyptian loom shown in ancient pictures—that is even more modern than Penelope’s, although it was set up three thousand years before, a last guide-post on the backward way to the misty land called prehistoric.
But as there is really little interest except for the archeologist in digging so far into the past for an art that has left us but traditions and museum fragments, let us skim but lightly the surface of this time, only picking up the glistening facts that attract the mind’s eye, so thatwe may quickly reach the enchanted land of more recent times which yet appear antique to the modern.
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COPTIC TAPESTRY
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
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COPTIC TAPESTRY
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
There are those to whom reading the Bible was a forced task during childhood, a class which slipped the labour as soon as years gave liberty of choice. There are others who have always turned as naturally to its accounts of grand ceremony and terrible battles as to the accounts of Cæsar, Cœur de Lion, Charlemagne. But in either case, whatever the reason for the eye to absorb these pages of ancient Hebrew history, the impression is gained of superb pomp. And always concerned with it are descriptions of details, lovingly impressed, as though the chronicler was sure of the interest of his audience. In this enumeration, decorative textiles always played a part. Such textiles as they were exceed in extravagance of material any that we know of European production, for in many cases they were woven entirely of gold and silver, and even set with jewels. These gorgeous fabrics shone like suns on the magnificent pomp of priest and ruler, and declared the wealth and power of the nation. They departed from the original intention of protecting shivering humanity from chill draughts or from close and cold association with the stones of architectural construction, and became a luxury of the eye, a source of bewilderment to the fancy and a lively intoxication to those who—irrespective of class, or of century—love to compute display in coin.
But, dipping into the history of one ancient country after another, it is easy to see that the usual fabric for hanging was woven of wool, of cotton and of silk, andcarried the design in the weaving. Babylon the great, Egypt under the Pharaohs, Greece in its heroic times, Rome under the Emperors—not omitting China and India of the Far East—these countries of ancient peoples all knew the arts of dyeing and weaving, of using the materials that we employ, and of introducing figures symbolic, geometric, or realistic into the weaving. Beyond a doubt the high loom has been known to man since prehistoric times. It may be discouraging to those who like to feel that tapestry properly belongs to Europe only,—Europe of the last six centuries—to find that the art has been sifted down through the ages; but in reality it is but one more link between us and the centuries past, the human touch that revivifies history, that unites humanity. People of the past wear a haze about them, are immovable and rigid as their pictured representations. The Assyrian is to us a huge man of impossible beard, the Egyptian is a lean angle fixed in posture, the Greek is eternally posed for the sculptor.
But once we can find that these people were not forever transfixed to frieze, but were as simple, as industrious, as human as we, the kinship is established, and through their veins begins to flow the stream that is common to all humanity. These people felt the same need for elegantly covering the walls of their homes that we in this country of new homes feel, and the craftsmen led much the same lives as do craftsmen of to-day. Even in the matter of expense, of money which purchasers were willing to spend for woven decorative fabrics, we see no novelty in the high prices of to-day, the TwentiethCentury.The Mantle of Alcisthenesis celebrated for having been bought by the Carthaginians for the equal of a hundred thousand dollars.
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TAPESTRY FOUND IN GRAVES IN PERU
Date prior to Sixteenth Century
Thus we connect ourselves with the remote past in making a continuous history. But as the purpose of this book is to assist the owner of tapestries to understand the story of his hangings and to enable the purchaser or collector to identify tapestries on his own knowledge instead of through the prejudiced statements of the salesman, it is useless to dwell long upon the fabrics that we can only see through exercise of the imagination or in disintegrated fragments in museums.
Then away with Circe and her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the time of the Crusades, and thus will we approach more modern times.
So far as known, high-warp weaving was not universally used in Europe in the first part of the Middle Ages. Whether plain or figured, most of the fabrics of that time that have come down to us for hangings or for clothing, are woven, with the decorative pattern executed by the needle on woven cloth. In Persia and neighbouring states, however, the high-warp loom was used.[1]
Europe in the Middle Ages was a place so savage, so devastated by war and by neighbouring malice, that to consider it is to hear the clash of steel, to feel the pangsof hunger, to experience the fearsome chill of dungeons or moated castles. It was a time when those who could huddle in fortresses mayhap died natural deaths, but those who lived in the world were killed as a matter of course. Man was man’s enemy and to be killed on sight.
In such gay times of carnage, art is dead. Men there were who drew designs and executed them, for theluxeof the eye is ever demanding, but the designs were timid and stunted and came far from the field of art. Fabrics were made and worn, no doubt, but when looms were like to be destroyed and the weavers with them, scant attention was given to refinements.
By the time the Tenth Century was reached matters had improved. We come into the light of records. It is positively known that the town of Saumur, down in the lovely country below Tours, became the destination of a quantity of wall-hangings, carpets, curtains, and seat covers woven of wool. This was by order of the third Abbot Robert of the Monastery of St. Florent, one of those vigorous, progressive men whose initiative inspires a host. It is recorded that he also ordered two pieces of tapestry executed, not of wool exclusively, but with silk introduced, and in these the figures of the designs were the beasts that were then favourites in decoration and that still showed the influence of Oriental drawing.
Before enumerating other authentic examples of early tapestries it is well to speak of the reason for their being invariably associated with the church. The impression left by history is that folk of those days must have been universally religious when not cutting each other in bitswith bloody cutlass. The reason is, of course, that when poor crushed humanity began to revive from the devastating onslaughts of fierce Northern barbarians, it was with a timid huddling in monasteries, for there was found immunity from attack. The lord of the castle was forced to go to war or to resist attack in his castle, but the monastery was exempt from whatever conscription the times imposed, and frocked friars were always on hand were defence needed. Thus it came about that monasteries became treasure-houses, the only safe ones, were built strong, were sufficiently manned, and therefore were the safe-deposit of whatever articles of concentrated value the great lord of the Middle Ages might accumulate. Many tapestries thus deposited became gifts to the institution which gave them asylum.
The arts and crafts of the Middle Ages were in the hands of the monasteries, monks and friars being the only persons with safety and leisure. Weaving fell naturally to them to execute as an art. In the castles, necessary weaving for the family was done by the women, as on every great lord’s domains were artisans for all crafts; and great ladies emulated Penelope and Helen of old in passing their hours of patience and anxiety with fabricating gorgeous cloths. But these are exceptional, and deal with such grand ladies as Queen Matilda, who with her maidens embroidered (not wove) the Bayeux Tapestry, and with the Duchess Gonnor, wife of Richard First, who embroidered for the church of Notre Dame at Rouen a history of the Virgin and Saints.[2]
To the monasteries must be given the honour of preserving this as many other arts, and of stimulating the laity which had wealth and power to present to religious institutions the best products of the day. The subjects executed inside the monastery were perforce religious, many revelling in the horrors of martyrology, and those intended as gifts or those ordered by the clergy were religious in subject for the sake of appropriateness. It is interesting to note the sweet childlike attitude of all lower Europe toward the church in these years, a sort of infantile way of leaving everything in its hands, all knowledge, all wisdom, all power. It was not even necessary to read or write, as the clergy conveniently concerned themselves with literacy. As late as the beginning of the Fifteenth Century Philip the Hardy, the great Duke of Burgundy, in ordering a tapestry, signed the order, not with his autograph, for he could not, but with his mark, for he, too, left pen-work to the clerks of the church.
That pile of concentrated royal history, the old abbey of St. Denis, received, late in the Tenth Century, one of the evidences of royal patronage that every abbey must have envied. It was a woven representation of the world, as scientists of that day imagined our half-discovered planet, and was presented by Queen Adelaide, the wife of Hugh Capet, whose descendants reigned for three hundred years.[3]
While dealing with records rather than with objects on which the eye can gaze and the hand can rest, notemust be made of an order of a Count of Poitou, William V, to a factory for tapestries then existing in Poitiers, showing that the art of weaving had in that spot jumped the monastery walls in 1025.[4]The order was for a large hanging with subjects taken from the Scriptures, but given the then modern touch by introducing portraits of kings and emperors and their favourite animals transfixed in ways peculiar to the nature of the day.
A century later, another Abbot of St. Florent in Saumur had hangings made important enough to be recorded. One of these represented the four and twenty elders of the Apocalypse with musical instruments, and other subjects taken from the Revelation of John. This subject was one of unending interest to the artists of that time who seemed to find in its depicting a serving of both God and imagination.
Among the few tapestries of this period, those of the Cathedral at Halberstadt must be mentioned, partly by way of conscientious chronicling, partly that the interested traveller may, as he travels, know where to find the rare specimens of the hobby he is pursuing. This is a high-warp tapestry which authorities variously place as the product of the Eleventh or the Twelfth Centuries. Entirely regardless of its age, it has for us the charm of the craft of hands long vanished, and of primitive art in all its simplicity of artifice. The subject is religious—could hardly have been otherwise in those monastic days—and for church decoration, and to fit the space they were woven to occupy, each of the two parts was but threeand a half feet high although more than fourteen yards long.
Each important event recorded in history has its expression in the material product of its time, and this is one of the charms of studying the liberal arts. Tapestry more than almost any other handicraft has left us a pictured history of events in a time when records were scarce. The effect of the Crusades was noticeable in the impetus it gave to tapestry, not only by bringing Europe into fresh contact with Oriental design but by increasing the desire for luxurious stuffs. The returning crusaders—what traveller’s tales did they not tell of the fabrics of the great Oriental sovereigns and their subjects, the soft rugs, the tent coverings, the gorgeous raiment; and these tales they illustrated with what fragments they could port in their travellers’ packs. Here lay inspiration for a continent.
FOOTNOTES:[1]Eugene Müntz, “History of Tapestry.â€[2]Jubinal, “Recherches,†Vol. I.[3]F. Michel, “Recherches.â€[4]Jubinal, “Recherches.â€
[1]Eugene Müntz, “History of Tapestry.â€
[1]Eugene Müntz, “History of Tapestry.â€
[2]Jubinal, “Recherches,†Vol. I.
[2]Jubinal, “Recherches,†Vol. I.
[3]F. Michel, “Recherches.â€
[3]F. Michel, “Recherches.â€
[4]Jubinal, “Recherches.â€
[4]Jubinal, “Recherches.â€
IN the Fourteenth Century, tapestry, the high-warp product, began to play an important part in the refinements of the day. We have seen the tendency of the past time to embellish and soften churches and monastic institutions with hangings. Records mostly in clerical Latin, speak of these as curtains for doorways, dossers for covering seats, and the backs of benches, and baldachins, as well as carpets for use on the floor. Subjects were ecclesiastic, as the favourite Apocalypse; or classic, like that of the Quedlimburg hanging which fantastically represents the marriage of Mercury and Philology.
But in the Thirteenth Century the political situation had improved and men no longer slept in armour and women no longer were prepared to thrust all household valuables into a coffer on notice that the enemy was approaching over the plains or up the rocks. Therefore, homes began to be a little less rude in their comforts. Stone walls were very much the rule inside as well as out, but it became convenient then to cover their grim asperities with the woven draperies, the remains of which so interest us to-day, and which we in our accession of luxuriousness would add to the already gently finished apartments. To put ourselves back into one of thosecastle homes we are to imagine a room of stone walls, fitted with big iron hooks, on which hung pictured tapestry which reached all around, even covering the doors in its completeness. To admit of passing in and out the door a slit was made, or two tapestries joined at this spot. Set Gothic furniture scantily about such a room, a coffer or two, some high-backed chairs, a generous table, and there is a room which the art of to-day with its multiple ingenuity cannot surpass for beauty and repose.
But such a room gave opportunity for other matters in the Thirteenth Century. Customs were less polite and morals more primitive. Important people desiring important information were given to the spying and eavesdropping which now has passed out of polite fashion. And those ancient rooms favoured the intriguer, for the hangings were suspended a foot or two away from the wall, and a man or a woman, for that matter, might easily slip behind and witness conversations to which the listener had not been invited. So it was customary on occasions of intimate and secret converse lightly to thrust a sharpened blade behind the curtains. If, as in the case in “Hamlet,†the sword pierced a human quarry, so much the worse for the listener who thus gained death and lost its dignity.
Before leaving this ancient chamber it is well to impress ourselves with the interesting fact that tapestries were originally meant to be suspended loosely, liberally, from the upper edge only, and to fall in folds or gentle undulations, thus gaining in decorative value andelegance. This practice had an important effect on the design, and also gave an appearance of movement to human figures and to foliage, as each swayed in light folds.
When considering tapestries of the Thirteenth Century we are only contemplating the stones of history, for the actual products of the looms of that time are not for us; they are all gathered into museums, public or ecclesiastic. The same might be said of tapestries of the Fourteenth Century, and almost of the Fifteenth. But those old times are so full of romance, that their history is worth our toying with. It adds infinite joy to the possessing of old tapestries, and converts museum visits into a keen chase for the elusive but fascinating figures of the past.
Let us then absorb willingly one or two dry facts. High-warp tapestry we have traced lightly from Egypt through Greece and Rome and, almost losing the thread in the Middle Ages, have seen it rising a virile industry, nursed in monasteries. It was when the stirrings of artistic life were commencing under the Van Eycks in the North and under Giotto and the Tuscans in the South that the weaving of tapestries reached a high standard of production and from that time until the Nineteenth Century has been an important artistic craft. The Thirteenth Century saw it started, the Fourteenth saw the beginnings of important factories, and the Fifteenth bloomed into full productions and beauty of the style we call Gothic.
In these early times of the close of the Thirteenth Century and the beginning of the Fourteenth, the best knownhigh-warp factories were centred in northern and midland provinces of France and Flanders, Paris and Arras being the towns most famed for their productions. As these were able to supply the rest of Europe, the skilled technique was lost otherwheres, so that later, when Italy, Germany and England wished to catch up again their ancient work, they were obliged to ask instruction of the Franco-Flemish high-warp workers.[5]
It is not possible in the light of history for either Paris or Arras to claim the invention of so nearly a prehistoric art as that of high-warp tapestry, and there is much discussion as to which of these cities should be given the honour of superiority and priority in the work of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.
Factories existed at both places and each had its rules of manufacture which regulated the workman and stimulated its excellence. The factories at Paris, however, were more given to producing copies of carpets brought from the East by returning crusaders, and these were intended for floors. The craftsmen were sometimes alluded to astapissiers Sarrazinois, named, as is easily seen, after the Saracens who played so large a part in the adventurous voyages of the day. But in Paris in 1302, by instigation of the Provost Pierre le Jumeau, there were associated with these tapissiers or workmen, ten others, for the purpose of making high-warp tapestry, and these were bound with all sorts of oaths not to depart from the strict manner of proceeding in this valued handicraft.
Indeed, the Articles of Faith, nor the Vows of the Rosicrucians, could not be more inviolable than the promises demanded of the early tapestry workers. In some cases—notably a factory of Brussels, Brabant, in the Sixteenth Century—there were frightful penalties attendant upon the breaking of these vows, like the loss of an ear or even of a hand.
The records of the undertaking of the Provost Pierre le Jumeau in introducing the high-warp (haute lisse) workers into the factory where Sarrazinois and other fabrics were produced, means only that the improvement had begun, but not that Paris had never before practised an art so ancient.
The name of Nicolas Bataille is one of the earliest which we can surround with those props of records that please the searcher for exact detail.[6]He was both manufacturer and merchant and was a man of Paris in the reign of Charles VI, a king who patronised him so well that the workshops of Paris benefited largely. The king’s brother becoming envious, tried to equal him in personal magnificence and gave orders almost as large as those of the king. Philip the Hardy, uncle of the king, also employed this designer whose importance has not lessened in the descent of the centuries.
What makes Bataille of special interest to us is that we cannot only read of him in fascinating chronicles as well as dry histories, but we can ourselves see his wondrous works. In the cathedral at Angers hangs a tapestryexecuted by him; it is a part of theApocalypse(favourite subject) drawn by Dourdin, who was artist of the cartoons as well as artist to Charles V.
In those days the weaver occupied much the same place in relation to the cartoonist as the etcher does now to the painter. That is to say, that because the drawing was his inspiration, the weaver was none the less an artist of originality and talent.
These celebrated hangings at Angers, although commenced in 1376 for Louis of Anjou, were not completed in all the series until 1490, therefore Bataille’s work was on the first ones, finished on Christmas, 1379. The design includes imposing figures, each seated on a Gothic throne reading and meditating. The larger scenes are topped with charming figures of angels in primitive skies of the “twisted ribbon†style of cloud, angels whose duty and whose joy is to trump eternally and float in defiance of natural laws of gravitation.
The museum at the Gobelins factory in Paris shows to wondering eyes the other authentic example of late Fourteenth Century high-warp tapestry, as woven in the early Paris workshops. It portrays with a lovely naïve simplicityThe Presentation in the Temple. This with the pieces of theApocalypseat Angers are all that are positively known to have come from the Paris workshops of the late Fourteenth Century.
History steps in with an event that crushed the industry in Paris. Just when design and execution were at their highest excellence, and production was prolific, political events began to annihilate the trade. The English King,Henry V, crossed the Channel and occupied Paris in 1422. Thus, under the oppression of the invaders, the art of tapestry was discouraged and fell by the way, not to rise lustily again in Paris for two hundred years.
FOOTNOTES:[5]Eugene Müntz, “La Tapisserie.â€[6]For extensive reading see Guiffrey, “Nicolas Bataille, tapissier parisien,†and “L’Histoire General de la Tapisserie,†the section called “Les Tapisseries Francaises.â€
[5]Eugene Müntz, “La Tapisserie.â€
[5]Eugene Müntz, “La Tapisserie.â€
[6]For extensive reading see Guiffrey, “Nicolas Bataille, tapissier parisien,†and “L’Histoire General de la Tapisserie,†the section called “Les Tapisseries Francaises.â€
[6]For extensive reading see Guiffrey, “Nicolas Bataille, tapissier parisien,†and “L’Histoire General de la Tapisserie,†the section called “Les Tapisseries Francaises.â€
WHETHER Arras began as early as Paris is a question better left unsettled if only for the sake of furnishing a subject of happy controversy between the champions of the two opinions. But certain it is that with fewer distractions to disturb her craftsmen, and under the stimulus of certain ducal and royal patrons, Arras succeeded in advancing the art more than did her celebrated neighbour. It was Arras, too, that gave the name to the fabric, a name which appears in England as arras and in Italy as arazzo, as though there was no other parent-region for the much-needed and much-prized stuffs than the busy Flemish town.
Among the early records is found proof that in 1311, a countess of the province of Artois, of which Arras was the capital, bought a figured cloth in that city, and two years later ordered various works in high warp.[7]It is she who became ruler of the province. To patronise the busy town of her own domains, Arras, she ordered from there the hangings that were its specialty. Paris also shared her patronage. She took as husband Otho, Count of Burgundy, and set his great family the fashion in the way of patronising the tapestry looms.
It was in the time of Charles V of France, that theBurgundian duke Philip, called the Hardy, began to patronise conspicuously the Arras factories. In 1393, as de Barante delightfully chronicles, the gorgeous equipments of this duke were more than amazing when he went to arrange peace with the English at Lelingien.[8]
The town chosen for the pourparlers, wherein assembled the English dukes, Lancaster and Gloucester and their attendants, as well as the cortége attending the Duke of Burgundy, was a poor little village ruined by wars. The conferences were held by these superb old fighters and statesmen in an ancient thatched chapel. To make it presentable and worthy of the nobles, it was covered with tapestries which entirely hid the ruined walls. The subject of the superb pieces was a series of battles, which made the Duke of Lancaster whimsically critical of a subject ill-chosen for a peace conference, he suggesting that it were better to have represented “la Passion de notre Seigneur.â€
Not satisfied with having the meeting place a gorgeous and luxurious temple, this Philip, Duke of Burgundy, demonstrated his magnificence in his own tent, which was made of wooden planks entirely covered with “toiles peintes†(authorities state that tapestries with personages were thus described), and was in form of a château flanked with towers. As a means of pleasing the English dukes and the principal envoys, Philip gave to them superb gifts of tapestries, the beautiful tapestries of Flanders such as were made only in the territory of the duke. It is interesting to note this authentic accountof the importation of certain Arras tapestries into England.
Subjects at this time introduced, besides Bible people, figures of Clovis and of Charlemagne. Two hangings represented, the oneThe Seven Cardinal Vices, with their conspicuous royal exponents in the shape of seven vicious kings and emperors; the other,The Seven Cardinal Virtues, with the royalties who had been their notable exponents. Here is a frank criticism on the lives of kings which smacks of latter-day democracy. All these tapestries were enriched with gold of Cyprus, as gold threads were called.
This same magnificent Philip the Hardy, had other treaties to make later on, and seeing how much his tapestries were appreciated, continued to make presents of them. One time it was the Duke of Brittany who had to be propitiated, all in the interests of peace, peace being a quality much sought and but little experienced at this time in France. Perhaps this especial Burgundian duke had a bit of self-interest in his desire for amity with the English, for he was lord of the Comité of Artois (including Arras) and this was a district which, because of its heavy commerce with England, might favour that country. A large part of that commerce was wool for tapestry weaving, wool which came from theprés salésof Kent, where to-day are seen the same meadows, salt with ocean spray and breezes, whereon flocks are grazing now as of old—but this time more for mutton chops than for tapestry wools.
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THE SACRAMENTS
Arras Tapestry, about 1430. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The history of the Dukes of Burgundy, because theirpatronage was so stimulating to the factories of Flanders, leads us to recall the horrors of the war with Bajazet, the terrible Sultan of Turkey, and the way in which this cool monster bartered human lives for human luxuries. It was when the flower of France (1396) invaded his country and was in the power of his hand, that he had the brave company of nobles pass in review before his royal couch that he might see them mutilated to the death. Three or four only he retained alive, then sent one of these, the Sire de Helly, back to his France withparole d’honneurto return—to amass, first, as big a ransom as could be raised; this, if in the Turk’s demanding eyes it appeared sufficient, he would accept in exchange for the remaining unhappy nobles.
Added to the money which de Helly was able to collect, were superb tapestries of Arras contributed by the Burgundian duke, Philip the Hardy. It was argued that of these luxurious hangings, Bajazet had none, for the looms of his country had not the craft to make tapestries of personages. Cloth of gold and of silver, considered an extreme elegance in France, they argued was no rarity to the terrible Turk, for it was from Damascus in his part of the world that this precious fabric came most plentifully. So de Helly took Arras tapestries into Turkey, a suite representing the history of Alexander the Great, and the avaricious monarch was persuaded by reason of this and other ransom to let his prisoners free.[9]
After the death of Philip the Hardy in 1404, his accumulated luxuries had to be sold to help pay hisfabulous debts. To this end his son sold, among other things, his superb tapestries, and thus they became distributed in Paris. And yet John without Fear, who succeeded Philip, continued to stimulate the Arras weavers. In 1409 he ordered five big hangings representing his victories of Liége, all battle subjects.[10]
Philip the Good was the next head of the Burgundian house, and he it was who assisted in the sumptuous preparations for the entry of the king, Louis XI, into Paris. The king himself could scarcely equal in magnificence this much-jewelled duke, whose splendour was a matter of excitement to the populace. People ran to see him in the streets or to the church, to feast their eyes on his cortége, his mounted escort of a hundred knights who were themselves dukes, princes and other nobles.
His house, in the old quarter of Paris, where we are wont to wander with a Baedeker veiled, was the wonder of all who were permitted to view its interior. Here he had brought his magnificent Arras tapestries and among them the set of theHistory of Gideon, which he had had made in honour of the order of the Golden Fleece founded by him at Bruges, in 1429, for, he said, the tale of Gideon was more appropriate to the Fleece than the tale of Jason, who had not kept his trust—a bit of unconventionalism appreciable even at this distance of time.
Charles le Téméraire—the Bold or rather the foolhardy—how he used and lost his tapestries is of interest to us, because his possessions fell into a place where we can see them by taking a little trouble. Some of themare among the treasures in the museum at Nancy and at Berne in Switzerland. How they got there is in itself a matter of history, the history of a war between Burgundy and Switzerland.
Like all the line of these half-barbaric, picturesque dukes, Charles could not disassociate himself from magnificence, which in those days took the place of comfort. When making war, he endeavoured to have his camp lodgment as near as possible reproduce the elegance of his home. In his campaign against Switzerland, his tent was entirely hung with the most magnificent of tapestries. After foolhardy onslaughts on a people whose strength he miscalculated, he lost his battles, his life—and his tapestries. And this is how certain Burgundian tapestries hang in the cathedral at Berne, and in the museums at Nancy.[11]
The simple Swiss mountaineers, accustomed more to expediency than to luxury, are said to have been entirely ignorant of the value of their spoils of war. Tapestries they had never seen, nor had they the experienced eye to discern their beauties; but cloth, thick woollen cloth, that would protect shivering man from the cold, was a commodity most useful; so, many of the fine products of the high-warp looms that had augmented the pride of their noble possessor, found their way into shops and were sold to the Swiss populace in any desired length, according to bourgeois household needs, a length for a warm bed-cover, or a square for a table; and thus disappeared so many that we are thankful for the few whole hangingsof that time which are ours to inspect, and which represent the best work of the day both from Arras and from Brussels, which was then (about 1476) beginning to produce.
There is a special and local reason why we should be interested in the products of the high-warp tapestries in the time of the greatest power of the Dukes of Burgundy. It is that we can have the happy experience of studying, in our own country, a set of these hangings, and this without going farther than to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where repose the set calledThe Sacraments. (Plates facing pages34,38and39.) There are in all seven pieces, although the grounds are well taken that the set originally included one more. They represent the four Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation and Extreme Unction, first by a series of ideal representations, then by the everyday ceremonies of the time—the time of Joan of Arc. Thus we have the early Fifteenth Century folk unveiled to us in their ideals and in their practicality. The one shows them to be religionists of a high order, the other reveals a sumptuous and elegant scale of living belonging to the nobility who made resplendent those early times.
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THE SACRAMENTS
Arras Tapestry, about 1430
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THE SACRAMENTS
Arras Tapestry, about 1430
The drawing is full of simplicity and honesty, the composition limited to a few individuals, each one having its place of importance. In this, the early work differed from the later, which multiplied figures until whole groups counted no more than individuals. The background is a field of conventionalised fleur-de-lis of so large a pattern as not to interfere with the details thrownagainst it. Scenes are divided by slender Gothic columns, and other architectural features are tessellated floors and a sketchy sort of brick-work that appears wherever a limit-line is needed. It is the charming naïveté of its drawing that delights. Border there is none, but its lack is never felt, for the pictures are of such interest that the eye needs no barrier to keep it from wandering. Whatever border is found is a varying structure of architecture and of lettering and of the happy flowers of Gothic times which thrust their charm into all possible and impossible places.
The dress, in the suite of ideals, is created by the imagining of the artist, admixed with the fashion of the day; but in scenes portraying life of the moment, we are given an interesting idea of how a bride à la mode was arrayed, in what manner a gay young lord dressed himself on his wedding morning, and how a young mother draped her proud brocade. The colouring is that of ancient stained glass, simple, rich, the gamut of colours limited, but the manner of their combining is infinite in its power to please. The conscientiousness of the ancient dyer lives after him through the centuries, and the fresh ruby-colour, the golden yellow of the large-figured brocades, glow almost as richly now as they did when the Burgundian dukes were marching up and down the land from the Mediterranean, east of France, to the coast of Flanders, carrying with them the woven pictures of their ideals, their religion and their conquests. The weave is smooth and even, speaking for the work of the tapissier or weaver, although time has distorted the faces beyondthe lines of absolute beauty; and hatching accomplishes the shading.
The repairer has been at work on this valuable set, not the intelligent restorer, but the frank bungler who has not hesitated to turn certain pieces wrong side out, nor to set in large sections obviously cut from another tapestry. It is surmised that the set contained one more piece—it would be regrettable, indeed, if that missing square had been cut up for repairs.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns these tapestries through the altruistic generosity of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. They are the most interesting primitive work which are on public view in our country, and awake to enthusiasm even the most insensate dullard, who has a half hour to stand before them and realise all they mean in art, in morals and in history.
To the lives of the Prophets and Saints we can always turn; from the romance of men and women we can never turn away. And so when a Gothic tapestry is found that frankly omits Biblical folk and gives us a true picture of men and women of the almost impenetrable time back of the fifteen hundreds, tells us what they wore, in what manner they comported themselves, that tapestry has a sure and peculiar value. The surviving art of the Middle Ages smacks strong of saints, paints at full length the people of Moses’ time, but unhappily gives only a bust of their contemporaries.