IF the amateur can have the fortune to see in the same hour a tapestry of the early Fifteenth Century, and one a hundred years later, and then one about 1550, from Brussels, drawn by an Italian artist, he has before him an exposition of tapestry weaving in its golden age when it sweeps through its greatest periods and phases to marvellous perfection. The earliest example gives acquaintance with that almost fabled time of the Gothic primitives in art; the second shows the highest development of that art under the influence of civilisation, and the third shows the obsession of the new art of the Renaissance. It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that after the revival of classic art the power of producing spontaneous Gothic was lost forever. From that time on, every drawing has had certain characteristics, certain sophistications that the artist cannot escape except in a deliberate copy.
Modern art, we call it. In tapestry it began with a freedom of drawing in figures, and an adoption of classic ornament and architecture. In this connexion it is interesting to note the introduction of Greek or Roman detail in the columns that divide the scenes, to see saints gathered by temples of classic form instead of Gothic. If Renaissance details appear in a hanging called Gothic,it is easy to see that the piece was woven after Europe was infected with modern art, and this is an assistance in placing dates; at least, it checks the tendency to slip back too far in antiquity, a tendency of which we in a new country are entirely guilty.
Lest too long a lingering on the subject of design become wearisome, a mention of later designs is made briefly. The simplicity of the early Renaissance, the perfection of the high Renaissance, are both shown in tapestry as well as in paintings, and so, too, is exemplified the inflation that ended in tiresome exuberance.
After the fruit was ripe it fell into decay. After Sixteenth Century perfection, Seventeenth Century designs fell of their own overweight, figures were too exaggerated, draperies billowed out as in a perpetual gale, architecture and landscapes were too important, and tapestries became frankly pictures to attract the attention. To this class of design belong all those monstrosities which reflected and distorted the art of Raphael, and which have been intimately associated with Scriptural subjects down to our own times.
After Raphael, Rubens. Familiarity with this heroic painter is the key to placing all the magnificent designs similar to the set ofAntony and Cleopatra(Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
Then came the easily recognisable designs of the French ateliers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealingto the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in theLife of the King; in the next reign, slipping into the pleasures of theRoyal Hunts, from which the descent was easy into depicting nothing higher than the soft loveliness of the fantastic life of the time as led by those of high estate. From Lebrun to Watteau one can trace the gradual seductive decline, where heroic ideal lowers softly in alluring decadence into a mere tickling of the senses. And at this time the productions of great tapestries stopped.
Before leaving the review of drawing or design, it is well to recall that the fleeting fashions of the day usually set the models, not in the manner of treatment which we have been considering broadly, but in the subject of designs. For example, the tendency to religious and morality subjects in the Gothic, the love for Greek gods and heroes in the Renaissance, the glorification of kings and warriors at all times, and the portrayal of royal pleasures in modern times. The months of the year were woven in innumerable designs and formed an endless theme for artists’ ingenuity during and after the Renaissance.
It is but natural that, with the expansion in drawing, the freedom given the pencil, imagination leaped outside the pictured scene and worked fantastically on the border, and it is to the border that we turn for many a mark of identification. The subject being a full one, it has longerconsideration in a separate chapter. First there is the simple outlying tape, then the designed border. The early Gothic was but a narrow line of flowers and berries; the later more sophisticated Gothic enlarged and elaborated this same motive without introducing another. The blossoms grew larger, the fruit fuller and the modest cluster of berries was crowded by pears, apples and larger fruit, until a general air of full luxury was given. The design was at first kept neatly within bordering lines of tape, but later, overleaped them with a flaunting leaf or mutinous flower.
Ribbons appeared early, then came fragmentary glimpses of dainty columns which gave nice reasons for the erect upstanding of so heavy a decoration. These all were Gothic, but what came after shows the riotous imagination of the Renaissance. It seemed in that fruitful time, space itself were not large enough to hold the designs within the artist’s brain. Certainly no corner of a tapestry could be left unfilled, and not that alone, but filled with perfect pictures instead of with a simple repeated scheme of decoration. It was in this rich time of production that the borders of tapestries grew to exceeding width, and were divided into squares, each square containing a scene. These scenes were often of sufficient importance in composition to serve as models for the centre of a tapestry, each one of them, which thought gives a little idea of the fertility of the artists in that untired period.
It was the delight of the great Raphael himself to expend his talent on the border of his cartoons. From thisartist others took their cue with varying skill, but with fine effect, and with unlimited interest to us. Those who run have time to remark only the great central picture in a hanging; but, to those who live with it, this added line of exquisite panorama is an unceasing delight for the contemplative hours of solitude. From this rich departure from Gothic simplicity the artists grew into the same fulness of design that ended in decadence. The border became almost obnoxious in its inflated importance and from voluptuous elegance changed to coarse overweight; and by these signs we know the early inspired work from its rank and monstrous aftergrowth in the Eighteenth Century.
A quick glance at the plates showing the work of tapestry’s next highwater mark, the hundred years of the Gobelins’ best work, illustrates the difference between that time and others, and shows also the gradual drop into the border which is merely a woven representation of a gilded wood frame to enclose the woven picture as a painted one would be framed. TheplateofEsther and Ahasuerusillustrates this sort of border in the unmistakable lines of Louis XV ornament.
Allusion has been made to the placing of the point of interest in a tapestry, but this is a matter to be studied by much exercise of the eye. Perhaps the amateur knows already much about it, an unconscious knowledge, and needs only to be directed to his own store of observations. As much as anything this change of design depended onthe uses the varying civilisation made of the hangings. So much interest lies in this that I find myself ever prone to recapitulate the very human facts of the past; the lining of rude stone walls and the forming of interior doors, which was the office of the early tapestries, and the loose full draping of the same; then the gradual increase of luxury in the finish of dwellings themselves, until tapestries were a decoration only; and then the minimising of grandeur under Louis XV when everything fell into miniature and tapestries were demanded only in small pieces that could be applied to screens or chairs—a prostitution of art to the royal demand for prettiness.
Keeping these general ideas of the uses of tapestries in mind, it is easy to reason out the course of the point of interest in the design. The Gothic aim was to make warm and comfortable the austere apartment; the Renaissance sought to produce big decorative pictures to hang in place of frescoes; and the French idea—beginning with that same ideal—fell at last into the production of something that should accompany the other arts in making minutely ornate the home of man. Therefore, the Gothic artist placed the point of interest high; the artists of the Renaissance followed the rules of modern painting (even to the point of becoming academic); and the last good period of the Gobelins dropped into miniature and decoration.
Colours we have not yet considered, in this chapter of review for identification’s sake. They follow the sameline, have the same history, and this makes the beauty, the logic and the consistency of our work, the work of tracing to their source the products of other men and other times.
Colours in the early Gothic—of what do they remind one so strongly as of the marvels of old stained glass, that rich, pure kaleidoscope which has lived so long in the atmosphere of incense ascending from censer and from heart. The same scale, rich and simple, unafraid of unshaded colour, characterise both glass and tapestry.
The dyeing of colours in those days was a religion, a religion that believed in holding fast to the forefathers’ tenets. Red was known to be a goodly colour, and blue an honest one; yellow was to conjure with, and brown to shade; but beyond twelve or perhaps twenty colours, the dyer never ventured. To these he gave the hours of his life, with these he subjugated the white of Kentish wool, and gave it honest and soft into the hand of the artist-weaver who, we must add, should have been thankful for this brief gamut. To say the least, we of to-day are grateful, for to this we owe the effect of cathedral glass seen in old tapestries like that ofThe Sacraments. The Renaissance having more sophisticated tales to tell, a higher intellectual development to portray, demanded a longer scale of colour, so more were introduced to paint in wool the pictures of the artists. At first we see them pure and true, then muddy, uncertain, until a dull confusion comes, and the hanging is depressing. When, at the last, it came that a tapestry was but a painting in wool, with as many thousand differently united threads as would reproduce the shading of brush-blended paint, the whole thing fellof its own weight, and we of to-day value less the unlimited pains of the elaborate dyer and weaver than we do the simpler work. The reason is plain. Time fades a little even the securest dyes, and that little is just enough to reduce to flat monotones a work in which perhaps sixty thousand tones are set in subtle shading.
The worker on tapestries, the modern restorer—to whom be much honour—finds a sign of identification in the handling of old tapestries that is scarcely within the province of the amateur, but is worth mentioning. It is the black tracing on the warp with which high-warp weavers assist their work of copying the artist’s cartoon. Where this is present, the work is of the prized haute lisse or high-warp manufacture, instead of the basse lisse or low-warp. But the latter is not to be spoken of disparagingly, for in the admirable time of French production about the time of the formation of the Gobelins, low-warp work was almost as well executed as high-warp, and as much valued. Brussels made her fame by haute-lisse, but in France the low-warp was dubbed “á la façon de Flandres”; and as Flanders stood for perfection, the weavers did their best to make the low-warp production approach in excellence the famed work of the ateliers to the north, which had formerly so prospered.
To find this black line is to establish the fact that the tapestry was woven on a high-warp loom, if nothing more. But that in itself means, as is explained in the chapter on looms andmodus operandi, that a superior sort of weaver,an artist-artisan, did the work, and that he had enormous difficulties to overcome in his patient task.
A black outline woven in the fabric is one which artists prior to the Seventeenth Century used to give greater strength to figures. It was the habit thus to trace the entire human form, to lift it clearly from its background, after the “poster” manner of to-day. It is as though a dark pencil had outlined each figure. This practice stopped in later years, and is not seen at all in the softer methods of the Gobelins.
The materials of tapestries we know to be invariably wool, silk and metal threads, yet the weaving of these varies with the talent of the craftsman. The manner of the oldest weavers was to produce a fabric not too thick, flexible rather—for was it not meant to hang in folds?—and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet had none of the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest workmen who counted time well spent if spent in taking pains.
This ability, to take detail as a religion, has left us the precious relics of the exquisite period immediately before the Italian artists had their way in Brussels. Notice the weave here. See the pattern of the fabrics worn by the personages of high estate. You could almost pluck it from the tapestry, shake out its folds, measure it flat, bythe yard, and find its delicate, intelligent pattern neat and unbroken. Wonderful weaver, magic hands, infinite pains, were those to produce such an effect on our sated modern vision, all with a few threads of silk and wool and gold.
Then there is the human face—it takes an artist to describe the various faces with their beauty of modelling, their infinite variety of type, their subtlety of expression. You can almost see the flushing of the capillaries under the translucent skin, so fine are the mediums of silk and wool under the magic handling of the talented weavers in brilliant epochs. Not a detail in one of these older canvases of the highest Gothic development has been neglected.
The modern places his point of interest, and, knowing the observer’s eye is to obediently linger there, he splashes the rest of his drawing into careless subserviency. But these careful older drawings showed in every inch of their execution a conscience that might put the Puritan to shame. Note, even, the ring that is being handed to the lady in the Mazarin tapestry of Mr. Morgan’s (if yours is the happy chance to see it). It was not sufficient for the weaver that it be a ring, but it must be a ring set with a jewel, and that jewel must be the one celebrated ever for its value; so in the canvas glows a carefully rounded spot of pigeon-blood.
This exquisitely fine weaving of the period which trembled between the Gothic and the Renaissance made possible the execution of the later work—and yet, and yet, who shall say that the later is the superior work?Vaunted as it is, one turns to it because one must, but with entire fidelity of heart for the preceding manner.
In the high period of Brussels production, when the Renaissance was well established there, through the cartoons of the Italian artists, it is interesting to note the richness given to surfaces solidly filled in with gold by throwing the thread in groups of four. The light is thus caught and reflected, almost as though from a heap of cut topaz. This characterises the tapestries of theMercuryseries in the Blumenthal collection.
Naturally, the evenness of the weaving has much to do with the value of the piece—otherwise the pains of the old weavers would have been futile. The surface smooth, free from lumps or ridges, strong with the even strength of well-matched threads, this is the beauty that characterises the best work this side of the Fifteenth Century.
It is the especial prerogative of the merchant to touch with his own hands a great number of tapestries. It is by this handling of the fabric that he acquires a skill in determining the make of many a tapestry. There is an indefinable quality about certain wools, and about the manner of their weaving that is only revealed by the touch. Not all hands are wise to detect, but only those of the sympathetic lover of the materials they handle—and I have found many such among the merchant collector. But even he finds identification a task as difficult as it is interesting, and spends hours of thought and research before arriving at a conclusion—and even then will retract on new evidence.
There are certain pitfalls into which one may so easily fall that they must never be out of mind. The worst of these, the pit which has the most engaging and innocent entrance, is that of the copy, the modern tapestry copied from the old a few decades ago.
It is easy to find by reference to the huge volumes of French writers on tapestry just when certain sets of cartoons were first woven. Take, for example, theActs of the Apostlesby Raphael; Brussels, 1519, is the authentic date. But after that the Mortlake factory in England wove a set, and others followed. This instance is too historic to be entirely typical, but there are others less known. It was the habit of factories that possessed a valuable set of cartoons to repeat the production of these in their own factory, and also to make some arrangement whereby other factories could also produce the same set of hangings.
In the evil days that fell upon Brussels after her apogee, copying her own works took the place of new matters. Also, in the French factories in their prime, the same set was repeated on the same looms and on different ones,vide The Months,The Royal Residences,History of Alexander, etc., and the gorgeousLife of Marie de Medici. If these notable examples were copied it is safe to conclude that many others were.
The study of marks is left for another chapter, for, by this time, even the enthusiast is wearying. There seemsso much to learn in this matter of investigating and identifying, and, after all, everything is uncertain. One looks about at identified pieces in museums and private collections, even among the dealers, and the discouraging thought comes that other people can tell at a glance. But this is very far from being true.
Even the savant studies long and investigates much before he gives a positive classification of a piece that is not “pedigreed.” Here is a Flemish piece, here is a French, he will declare, and for the life of you you cannot see the ear-marks that tell the ancestry. And so in all humility you ask, “How can you tell with a glance of the eye?” But he does not. No one can do that in every case. He must spend days at it, reflecting, reading, handling, if the piece is evidently one of value. He will show you, perhaps, as an honest dealer-collector showed me, a set of five fine pieces which he could not identify at all. “The weave,” said he, “is Mortlake, the design in part German, these are Italianputti—yet when all is told, I put down the work as an Eighteenth Century copy of decadent Renaissance. But I am far from sure.”
If a dealer, surrounded by experienced helpers, can thus be nonplussed, there is little cause for humiliation on the part of the amateur who hesitates. It is not expected that one can know at a glance whether a piece of work was executed in France, or in Flanders at a given epoch. But the more difficult the work of identification, the keener the zest of the hunt. It is then that one calls into requisition all the knowledge of art that the individual has been unconsciously accumulating all the years of his life. Theapplied arts reflect the art feeling of the age to which they belong, and the diluted influence of the great artists directs them. This is true of drawing and of colour.
History has ever its reflection on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some hangings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the tapestry was woven. And so history is given a grace, a delicate meaning, a warm interest, which is one of the side-gardens of delight that show from the long path of identification study.
This little book has as its aim the gentle purpose of pointing the way to a knowledge that shall be a guide in knowing gold from—not from dross, that is too simple, but gold from gold-plating let us say, for the mad lover of tapestries will not admit that any hand-woven tapestry is on the low level of dross. Any work which human hands have touched and lingered on in execution is deserving of the respect of the modern whose life must of necessity be lived in hasty execution. Every chapter, then, is but a caution or a counsel, and this one but a briefer statement of the same matter. If onto the fringe of the main thought hangs much of history, it is history inseparable from it, for history of nations gives the history of great men, and these regulate the doings of all the lesser ones below them.
Identification, pure and simple, is for the rapt lover ofart who pursues his game in museums and has his quiet delights that others little dream of. But in general, to the practical yet cultivated American, it is a means to expend wisely the derided dollars that we impress upon other nations to the artistic enrichment of our own country.
IF the artists of tapestries had never drawn nor ever woven anything but the borders that frame them, we would have in that department alone sufficient matter for happy investigation and acutely refined pleasure. I even go so far as to think that in certain epochs the border is the whole matter, and the main design is but an enlargement of one of the many motives of which it is composed. But that is in one particularly rich era, and in good time we shall arrive at its joys.
First then—for the orderly mind grows stubborn and confused at any beginning that begins in the middle—we must hark back to the earliest tapestries. Tracing the growth of the border is a pleasant pastime, a game of history in which amorini, grotesques and nymphs are the personages, and garlands of flowers their perpetual accessories, but first comes the time when there were no borders, the Middle Ages.
There were none, according to modern parlance, but it was usual to edge each hanging with a tape of monotone, a woven galloon of quiet hue, which had two purposes; one, to finish neatly the work, as the housewife hems a napkin; the other, to provide space of simple material for hanging on rude hooks the big pictured surface.
This latter consideration was one of no small importance,as we can readily see by sending the thought back to the time when tapestries led a very different life (so human they seem in their association with men that the expression must be allowed) from that of to-day, when they are secured to stretchers, or lined, or even framed behind glass like an easel painting.
In those other times of romance and chivalry a great man’s tapestries were always en route. Like their owner, they were continually going on long marches, nor were they allowed to rest long in one place. From the familiar castle walls they were taken down to line the next habitat of their owner, and that might be the castle of some other lord, or it might be the tent of an encampment. Again, it might be that an open-air exposition for a pageant, was the temporary use.
The tapestries thus bundled about, forever hung and unhung on hooks well or ill-spaced, handled roughly by unknowing varlets or dull soldiers, these tapestries suffered much, even to the point of dilapidation, and thus arose the need for a tape border, and thus it happens also that the relics of that time are found mainly among the religious pieces. These last found safe asylum within convent walls or in the sombre quiet of cathedral shades, and like all who dwell within such precincts were protected from contact with a rude world.
One day, sitting solitary at his wools, it occurred to the weaver of the early Fifteenth Century to spill some of his flowers out upon the dark galloon that edged his work. The effect was charming. He experimented further, went into the enchanted wood of such a design as that ofThe Lady and the Unicornto pluck more flowers, and of them wove a solid garland, symmetrical, strong, with which to frame the picture. To keep from confounding this with the airy bells and starry corollas of the tender inspiring blossoms of the work, he made them bolder, trained them to their service in solid symmetric mass, and edged the whole, both sides, with the accustomed two-inch line of solid rich maroon or blue.
It is easy to see the process of mind. For a long time there had been gropings, the feeling that some sort of border was needed, a division line between the world of reality and the world of fable. Examine the Arras work and see to what tricks the artist had recourse. The architectural resource of columns, for example; where he could do so, the artist decoyed one to the margin. Thus he slipped in a frame, and broke none of the canons of his art, and no more beautiful frame could have been devised, as we see by following up the development and use of the column. Once out from its position in the edge of the picture into its post in the border, it never stops in its beauty of growth until it reaches such perfection as is seen in the twisted and garlanded columns which flank the Rubens series, and those superb shafts inThe Royal Residencesof Lebrun at the Gobelins under Louis XIV.
The other trick of framing in his subject which was open to the Arras weaver whom we call Gothic, was to set verses, long lines of print in French or Latin at top or bottom.
But his first real legitimate border was made of the same flowers and leaves that made graceful the finials andcapitals of Gothic carving. Small clustered fruit, like grapes or berries, came naturally mixed with these, as Nature herself gives both fruit and flowers upon the earth in one fair month.
Simplicity was the thing, and a continued turning to Nature, not as to a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother, or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand forever upright without help, the weaver gave probability to his abundant mass by tying it here and there with a knot of ribbon and letting the ribbon flaunt itself as ribbons have ever done to the delight of the eye that loves a truant.
By this time—crawling over the top of the Fourteen Hundreds—the border had grown wider, had left its meagre allowance of three or four inches, and was fast acquiring a foot in width. This meant more detail, a broader design, coarser flowers, bigger fruit, and these spraying over the galloon, and all but invading the picture. It was all in the way of development. The simplicity of former times was lost, but design was groping for the great change, the change of the Renaissance.
The border tells quickly when it dawned, and when its light put out all candles like a glorious sun—not forgetting that some of those candles would better have been left burning. By this time Brussels was the centre of manufacture and the cartoonist had come to influence all weavings. Just as carpenters and masons, who were the planners and builders of our forefathers’ homes, have now to submit to the domination of theÉcole des Beaux Artsgraduates, so the man at the loom came under the direction of Italian artists. And even the border was not left to the mind of the weaver, but was carefully and consistently planned by the artist to accompany his greater work, if greater it was.
Raphael himself set that fashion. He was a born decorator, and in laying out the borders of his tapestries unbridled his wonderful invention and let it produce as many harmonies as could be crowded into miniature. He set the fashion of dividing the border into as many sections as symmetry would allow, dividing them so daintily that the eye scarce notes the division, so purely is it of the intellect. In the border for theActs of the Apostles, this style of treatment is the one he preferred. This set has no copy in America, but an almost unrivalled example of this style of border is in the private collection of George Blumenthal, Esq., theHerse and Mercury.[16]Here picture follows picture in charming succession, in that purity and perfection of design with which the early Renaissance delights us. The classic note set by the subject of the hanging is never forgotten, but on this key is played a varied harmony of line and colour. For dainty invention, this sort of border reaches a very high expression of art.
If Raphael set the fashion, others at least were not slow in seizing the new idea and from that time on, until a period much later—that of the Gobelins under Louis XV—it was the fashion to introduce great and distracting interest into the border. Even the little galloon became a twist of two ribbons around a repeated flower, or asmall reciprocal pattern, so covetous was design of all plain spaces.
Lesser artists than Raphael also divided the border into squares and oblongs, and with charming effect. The sides were built up after the same fashion, but instead of the delicate architectural divisions he affected, partitions were made with massed fruit and flowers, vines and trellises. The scenes were surprisingly dramatic, Flemish artists showing a preference for such Biblical reminders as Samson with his head being shorn in Delilah’s lap, while Philistines just beyond waited the enervating result of the barber’s work; or, any of the loves and conflicts of the Greek myths was used.
The colouring—too much cannot be seen of the warm, delicate blendings. There is always the look of a flowerbed at dawn, before Chanticleer’s second call has brought the sun to sharpen outlines, before dreams and night-mist have altogether quitted the place. Plenty of warm wood colours are there, of lake blues, of smothered reds. Precious they are to the eye, these scenes, but hard to find now except in bits which some dealer has preserved by framing in a screen or in the carved enclosure of some nut-wood chair.
For a time borders continued thus, all marked off without conscious effort, into countless delicious scenes. Then a change begins. After perfection, must come something less until the wave rises again. If in Raphael’s time the border claimed a two-foot strip for its imaginings, it was slow in coming narrower again, and need required that it be filled. But here is where the variance lay: Raphaelhad so much to say that he begged space in which to portray it; his imitators had so much space to fill that their heavy imagination bungled clumsily in the effort. They filled it, then, with a heterogeneous mass of foliage, fruit and flowers, trained occasionally to make a bower for a woman, a stand for a warrior, but all out of scale, never keeping to any standard, and lost absolutely in unintelligent confusion.
The Flemings in their decadence did this, and the Italians in the Seventeenth Century did more, they introduced all manner of cartouche. The cartouche plays an important part in the boasting of great families and the sycophancy of those who cater to men of high estate, for it served as a field whereon to blazon the arms of the patron, who doubtless felt as man has from all time, that he must indeed be great whose symbols or initials are permanently affixed to art or architecture. The cartouche came to divide the border into medallions, to apportion space for the various motives; but with a far less subtle art than that of the older men who traced their airy arbours and trailed their dainty vines and set their delicate grotesques, in a manner half playful and wholly charming.
But when the cartouche appeared, what is the effect? It is as though a boxful of old brooches had been at hand and these were set, symmetrically balanced, around the frame, and the spaces between filled with miscellaneous ornament on a scale of sumptuous size. Confusing, this, and a far cry from harmony. Yet, such are the seductions of tapestry in colour and texture, and so caressing isthe hand of time, that these borders of the Seventeenth Century given us by Italy and Flanders, are full of interest and beauty.
The very bombast of them gives joy. Who can stand before the Barberini set,The Mysteries of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ, bequeathed to the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine, in New York, by Mrs. Clarke, without being more than pleased to recognise in the border the indefatigable Barberini bee? We are human enough to glance at the pictures of sacred scenes as on a tale that is told, but that potent insect makes us at once acquainted with a family of renown, puts us on a friendly footing with a great cardinal of the house, reminds us of sundry wanderings of our own in Rome; and then, suddenly flashes from its wings a memory of the great conqueror of Europe, who after the Italian campaign, set this bee among his own personal symbols and called it Napoleonic. Yes, these things interest us enormously, personally, for they pique imagination and help memory to fit together neatly the wandering bits of history’s jigsaw puzzle. Besides this, they help the work of identifying old tapestries, a pleasure so keen that every sense is enlivened thereby.
When decorative design deserts the Greek example, it strays on dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so to speak, replaced inspiration.
Amorini—the word can hardly be used without suggesting the gay babes who tumble deliciously among Correggio’s clouds or who snatch flowers in ways of grace, on every sort of decoration. In these later drawings, these tapestry borders of say 1650, they are monsters of distortion, and resemble not at all the rosy child we know in the flesh. They are overfed, self-indulgent, steeped in the wisdom of a corrupt and licentious experience. I cannot feel that anyone should like them, except as curiosities of a past century.
Heavy swags of fruit, searching for larger things, changed to pumpkins, melons, in the gross fashion of enlarged designs for borders. Almost they fell of their own weight. Cornucopias spilled out, each one, the harvest of an acre. And thus paucity of imagination was replaced by increase in the size of each object used in filling up the border’s allotted space.
After this riot had continued long enough in its inebriety, the corrective came through the influence of Rubens in the North and of Lebrun in France. These two geniuses knew how to gather into their control the art strength of their age, and to train it into intellectual results. Mere bulk, mere space-filling, had to give way under the mind force of these two men, who by their superb invention gave new standards to decorative art in Flanders and in France. Drawings were made in scale again, and designs were built in harmony, constructed not merely to catch the eye, but to gratify the logical mind.
The day was for the grandiose in borders. The petite andmignonneof Raphael’s grotesques was no longersuited to the people, or, to put it otherwise, the people were not such as seek expression in refinement, for all art is but the visible evidence of a state of mind or soul.
The wish to be sumptuous and superb, then, was a force, and so the art expressed it, but in a way that holds our admiration. A stroll in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows us better than words the perfection of design at this grandiose era. There one seesAntony and Cleopatraof Rubens—probably. On these hangings the border has all the evidences of genius. If there were no picture at all to enclose, if there were but this decorative frame, a superb inspiration would be flaunted. From substantial urns at right and left, springs the design at the sides which mounts higher and higher, design on design, but always with probability. That is the secret of its beauty, its probability, yet we are cheated all the time and like it. No vase of fruit could ever uphold a cupid’s frolic, nor could an emblematic bird support a chalice, yet the artist makes it seem so. Note how he hangs his swags, and swings his amorini, from the horizontal borders. He first sets a good strong architectural moulding of classic egg-and-dart, and leaf, and into this able motive thrusts hooks and rings. From these solid facts he hangs his happy weight of fruit and flower and peachy flesh. Nothing could be more simple, nothing could be more logical. The cartouche at the top, he had no choice but to put it there, to hold the title of the picture, and at the bottom came a tiny landscape to balance. So much for fashion well executed.
Colours were reformed, too, at this time, for we arenow at the era when tapestry had its last run of best days, that is to say, at the time when France began her wondrous ascendency under Louis XIV. In Italy colours had grown garish. Too much light in that country of the sun, flooded and over-coloured its pictured scenes. Tints were too strong, masses of blue and yellow and red glared all in tones purely bright. They may have suited the twilight of the church, the gloom of a palace closed in narrow streets, but they scourge the modern eye as does a blasting light. The Gothic days gave borders the deep soft tones of serious mood; the Renaissance played on a daintier scale; the Seventeenth Century rushed into too frank a palette.
It remained for Rubens and Lebrun to find a scheme both rich and subdued, to bring back the taste errant. Here let me note a peculiarity of colour, noticeable in work of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century borders. The colour tone varies in different pieces of the same set, and this is not the result of fading, but was done by deliberate intent, one side border being light and another dark, or one entire border being lighter than others of the same set.
Lest in speaking of borders, too much reference might be made to the history of tapestry in general, I have left out Simon Vouet and Henri Lerambert as inspired composers of the frame which enclosed their cartoons; but it is well to say briefly that these men at least had not followed false gods, and were not guilty of the flagrant offence to taste that put a smirch on Italian art. These are the men who preceded the establishment of Stateateliers under Louis XIV and who made productive the reign of Henri IV.
If Rubens kept to a style of large detail, that was a popular one and had many followers in a grandiose age. Lebrun in borders harked back to the classics of Greece and Rome, thus restoring the exquisite quality of delicacy associated with a thousand designs of amphoræ, foliated scrolls and light grotesques. But he expressed himself more individually and daringly in the series calledThe MonthsandThe Royal Residences. This set is so celebrated, so delectable, so grateful to the eye of the tapestry lover, that familiarity with it must be assumed. You recollect it, once you have seen no more than a photograph of one of its squares. But it cannot be pertinent here, for it has no important border, say you. No, rather it is all border. Look what the cunning artist has done. His problem was to picture twelve country houses. To his mind it must have seemed like converting a room into an architect’s office, to hang it full of buildings. But genius came to the front, his wonderful feeling for decoration, and lo, he filled his canvas with glorious foreground, full of things man lives with; columns, the size appropriate to the salon they are placed in; urns, peacocks, all the ante-terrace frippery of the grand age, arranged in the foreground. Garlands are fresh hung on the columns as though our decorator had but just posed them, and beyond are clustered trees—with a small opening for a vista. Way off in the light-bathed distance stands the faithfully drawn château, but here, here where the observer stands,is all elegance and grace and welcome shade, and close friendship with luxury.
This work of Lebrun’s is then the epitome of border. Greater than this hath no man done, to make a tapestry all border which yet so intensified the value of the small central design, that not even the royal patron, jealous of his own conspicuousness, discovered that art had replaced display.
After that a great change came. As the picture ever regulates the border, that change was but logical. After the “Sun King” came the regency of the effeminate Philippe, whom the Queen Mother had kept more like a court page than a man. Artists lapped over from the previous reign, and these were encouraged to develop the smaller, daintier, more effeminate designs that had already begun to assert their charm. Borders took on the new method. And as small space was needed for the curves and shells and latticed bands, the border narrower grew.
Like Alice, after the potent dose, the border shrank and shrank, until in time it became a gold frame, like theencadrementof any easel picture. And that, too, was logical, for tapestries became at this time like painted pictures, and lost their original significance of undulating hangings.
The well-known motives of the Louis XV decoration rippled around the edge of the tapestry, woven in shades of yellow silk and imitated well the carved and gilded wood of other frames, those of chairs and screens and paintings. There are those who deplore the mode, butat least it seems appropriate to the style of picture it encloses.
And here let us consider a moment this matter of appropriateness. So far we have thought only of tapestries and their borders as inseparable, and as composed at the same time. But, alas, this is the ideal; the fact is that in the habit which weavers had of repeating their sets when a model proved a favourite among patrons, led them into providing variety by setting up a different border around the drawing. As this reproducing, this copying of old cartoons was sometimes done one or two hundred years after the original was drawn, we find an anachronism most disagreeable to one who has an orderly mind, who hates to see a telephone in a Venus’ shell, for instance. The whole thing is thrown out of key. It is as though your old family portrait of the Colonial Governor was framed in “art nouveau.”
The big men, the almost divine Raphael, and later Rubens, felt so keenly the necessity of harmony between picture and frame, that they were not above drawing their own borders, and it is evident they delighted in the work. But Raphael’s cartoons went not only to Brussels, but elsewhere, and somehow the borders got left behind; and thus we see his celebrated suite ofActs of the Apostleswith a different entourage in the Madrid set from what it bears in Rome.
There is another matter, and this has to do with commerce more than art. An old tapestry is of such value that mere association with it adds to the market price of newer work. So it is that sometimes a whole border iscut off and transferred to an inferior tapestry, and the tapestry thus denuded is surrounded with a border woven nowadays in some atelier of repairs, copied from an old design.
Let such desecrators beware. The border of a tapestry must appertain, must be an integral part of the whole design for the sake of artistic harmony.