Daniel Rock

“ As turnips grow in England, so do artichokes all over middle and south Italy, as well as Sicily, large fields are full of them. Put side by side with the pine-apple, and its narrow stiff leaves, the artichoke in bloom amid its graceful foliage, shows well; and every artistic eye will see that the Sicilian weaver, so fond of flowers and nice foliage for his patterns, must have chosen his own vegetable, unfolding its beauties to him at every step he took, and not a fruit of which he had never heard, and which he had never looked upon. ”

“ The garments worn by high personages in the embroidery, and meant to imitate a golden textile, were done in gold passing sometimes by itself, sometimes with coloured silk thread laid down alternately aside it, so as to lend a tinge of green, crimson, pink, or blue, to the imagined tissue of the robe, as if it were made of a golden stuff shot with the adopted tint. ”

“ About the evangelic emblems, as well as the Lamb in the centre, there is a freedom and boldness of design only equalled by the beauty and nicety of execution, making the piece altogether quite an art-work. The little dogs chasing the young harts, as well as the rampant unicorns, but especially the bird of the stork-kind preening its feathers, and the stag looking back at the hound behind, all so admirably placed amid the branches so gracefully twining over the whole field, show a master’s spirited hand in their design. ”

“ Those same feelings which quickened our doughty knights and high-born ladies to go and overspread the bier of each dead noble friend, with costly baudekins or cloths of gold, so the church whispered and she whispers us still to do, in due degree, the same to the coffin in which the poor man is being carried to the grave beneath a mantle of silk and velvet. ”

“ In the collection at South Kensington there are examples of every kind of Genoese velvets; some with a smooth unbroken surface, some elaborately patterned and showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Some are raised or cut, the design being worked in a pile standing well up by itself out of a flat ground of silk, either of the same or of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold. ”

“ Deeply smitten as the whole of Egypt must have been at the woe that befel them and theirs, the night before the great exode of the Israelites from among them, those Egyptians could not help seeing how all the Hebrews, their children, and their flocks had gone forth scatheless out of that death-stricken land. At peep of dawn, the blood upon the door-posts of every house where an Israelite had lately dwelt, told the secret; for the destroyer had not been there. From that hour, a Tau was thought by them to be the symbol of health and safety, of happiness, and future life. ”

“ To this same end, the black vestments worn at the services for the dead were, according to the old English rite, marked; the chasubles on the back with a green cross upon a red ground, the copes with a red orphrey at their sides, to remind those present that while they mourned their departed friend, they must believe that his soul could never enter heaven unless made clean and regenerated by the atoning blood shed for it on the cross. ”

“ As usual, so poor was the golden thread that the bird and animals now look almost black, but here and there, with a good glass, shimmerings of gold may be found upon them. To some eyes the sun may look like a rose surrounded by rays. ”

“ Our mediæval countrywomen were so quick at the needle that they could make their embroidery look as if it had been done in the loom—really woven. Not long ago, a shred of crimson cendal, figured in gold and silver thread with a knight on horseback, armed as of the latter time of Edward I., was shown us. At the moment we took the mounted warrior to have been, not hand-worked, but woven, so flat, so even was every thread. ”

“ Though the silk ground of this elegant stuff must have been once of a bright crimson tinge, almost the whole of the colour has flown; and the silver thread, of which the beautifully arranged tree is formed, has become so tarnished as to look as if it had been from first a dull olive-green. Such events give a warning to manufacturers about the quality of their dyes, and the purity as well as sort of the metals they may choose to employ. The manner in which the tree and its graceful branches are made to stand well out and above the red grounding is remarkably good ”

“ Not to name others one example, with its cloth of gold ground and its pattern in a dark blue deep-piled velvet, is not surpassed in gorgeousness even by that splendid stuff from Florence of which the Stonyhurst cope, just spoken of, was made.
Block-printed linen toward the end of the fourteenth century was another production of Flanders. Though existing examples to the eyes of many may look poor or mean, yet to men like the cotton-printers of Lancashire they will have a strong attraction; and to the scholar they will be deeply interesting as suggestive of the art of printing. ”

“ CHAPTER X. Tapestry is neither real weaving nor true embroidery, but in a manner unites in its working those two processes into one. Though wrought in a loom and upon a warp stretched out along its frame, it has no woof thrown across those threads with a shuttle or any like appliance but its weft is done with many short threads, all variously coloured and put in by a needle. It is not embroidery, though so very like it, for tapestry is not worked upon what is really a web, having both warp and woof, but upon a series of closely set fine strings. ”

“ TEXTILES. CHAPTER I. Under its widest acceptation the word “textile” means every kind of stuff, no matter its material, wrought in the loom. Whether, therefore, the threads are spun from the produce of the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom; whether of sheep’s wool, goats’ hair, camels’ wool, or camels’ hair; whether of flax, hemp, mallow, or the filaments drawn out of the leaves of plants of the lily and asphodel tribes of flowers, or the fibrous coating about pods, or cotton; whether of gold, silver, or of any other metal; the webs from all such materials are textiles. ”

“ The art of working with the needle flowers, fruits, human and animal forms, or any fanciful design, upon webs woven of silk, linen, cotton, wool, hemp, besides other kinds of stuff, is of the highest antiquity.
Those patterns, after so many fashions, which we see figured upon the garments worn by men and women on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, but especially on the burned-clay vases made and painted by the Greeks in their earliest as well as in later times, or which we read about in the writings of that people, were not wrought in the loom, but worked by the needle. ”

“ At great national festivities and solemn gatherings of the aristocracy, not the young knight alone then newly girt, but the grey-haired warrior would often, in that noble presence, bind himself by vow to do some deed of daring, and swore it to heaven, and the swan, the pheasant, or the peacock as the bird of his choice, was brought with a flourish of trumpets, and amid a crowd of stately knights waiting on a bevy of fair young ladies, and set before him. ”

“ Mary of Egypt is so well represented, it would be quite enough for her to claim for herself such a distinction. That like her neighbours, Venice wrought in velvet, there can be little or no doubt, and if she it was who made those deep piled stuffs, sometimes raised, sometimes pile upon pile, in which her painters loved to dress the personages, men especially, in their pictures, then, of a truth, Venetian velvets were beautiful. Of this, any one may satisfy himself by one visit to our National Gallery. ”

“ But yet the design well unfolds her story; the hand darting rays of light [Pg 55] signifies the revelation given her from heaven, and the blessing that followed it; while the two stars tell of Jerusalem, as also does the elaborately-fashioned cross that is standing on the altar, the frontal to which, in the upper border, seems ornamented in purple, with an inscription, now unreadable, but the last letters of which look as if they are R L I. The bird, perhaps a dove, has no part in the saint’s history, but is a fancy of the artist. ”

“ To carve well at table was one of the accomplishments of ancient chivalry; and our own King Arthur was so able in that gentle craft, that on one occasion he is said to have cut up a peacock so cleverly that every one among the one hundred and fifty guests had a morsel of the fowl. To show himself as good a knight at a feast as at a passage of arms, the lady bade him carve the bird. ”

“ The Bethlehem star overtopping the Islam badge of the crescent moon showed forth the wishes of every one who had been or meant to be a crusader, or rather more, not merely of our men at arms but of every true believer throughout Christendom whose untiring prayers were that the Holy Land might be wrested from the iron hand of the Mahometan. ”

“ Rhenish, 14th century. 83⁄4 inches by 33⁄4 inches.
So sadly has the whole of this embroidery suffered, apparently from damp, that the tints of its silk are gone, and the gold about it all become black. That this is but one of several figures in an orphrey is very likely; it gives us the saint with the palm-branch of martyrdom in one hand, a book in the other, and an arrow slicking in her neck, the instrument of her death; being of blood royal, she wears a crown; emblem of heaven and paradise, the ground she treads is all flowery. ”

“ A school of design sprung up among the Byzantine Greeks, from the time when in the sixth century they began to weave home-grown silk, which retained not a little of the beauty, breadth, and flowing outline of ancient art. Together with this, a strong feeling of Christianity showed itself as well in many of the subjects which they took out of holy writ as in the smaller elements of ornamentation. Figures, whether of the human form or of beasts, are given in a much larger and bolder size than on any other ancient stuffs. ”

“ The progress of Avarice is headed by Wickedness, who carries aloft her blood-stained flag, emblazoned with the monkey, the emblem of moral ugliness and mischief. Hard upon the heels of Wickedness comes a lecherous potentate, the type of immorality. The crowned heads, whether mounted or on foot, that come next have for their brother-companion Midas, the emblem of the sensual miser’s greed of gold, to remind us how kings, nay queens too, sometimes thirst for their subjects’ wealth to gratify their evil wishes ”

“ All the human figures, all the beasts, as well as the architecture, are outlined in thin leather or parchment once gilt, but now turned quite black. With the same leather, too, were studded the belts of the king and knight, and the spangles and golden enrichments of the ladies’ dress were of the same material. Saving here and there a few stitches of silk, everything else was of worsted, and that none of the finest texture. With such small means a good art-work was produced, as we see before us. ”

“ As we learn from the travels of Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia wandered among its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there, the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.
Like many cities of Middle Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. Cotton grew all around in plenty ”

“ Though the glitter of its golden material is gone for ever, its artistic beauty cannot ever fade. Much gracefulness in the attitudes, several happy foreshortenings, and a great deal of good drawing all about this design, show that the man who made the cartoon must have deeply studied the great masters of Italy, and, in an especial manner, those belonging to the Roman school: unfortunately, like all of them, he too had forgot to learn what was the real Oriental costume, and followed a classic style in dress, which, as he has given it, is often very incorrect. ”

“ They will, no doubt, congratulate themselves, as they fairly may, that their better knowledge of chemistry enables them to give to silk, wool, and cotton, tints and tones of tints, and shades, nay, entire colours quite unknown to the olden times, even to their elders of a few years ago: our new-found chemicals are carrying the dyeing art to a high point of beauty and perfection. ”

“ In that black silk chasuble with a red orphrey upon which our Lord is figured hanging upon a green cross—“cum crucifixo pendente in viridi cruce,” [441] it was for a particular reason that the colour of this wood for the cross is specified: as green is the tint of dress put on by the new-born budding year, which thus foretells of flowers and fruits in after months, so was this same colour the symbol of regeneration for mankind, and the promise of paradise hereafter. ”

“ Moreover, tapestry or Arras work, being thick and heavy, could never have been employed for such light use as that of apparels nor would it have been diapered like silk, yet we find “Areste” to have been so fashioned and so used.
Silks also were distinguished through their colours and shades of colours: and the men who drew up the mediæval inventories seem to have been gifted with a keen eye for varieties of shades and tints. For instance, a chasuble at St. Paul’s is set down, late in the thirteenth century, as made of samit dyed in a purple somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. ”

“ Though made in so many places round the Mediterranean, this silk took its name, at least in England, from Alexandria, because it was to be had in that Egyptian city, always celebrated for its silks, either better made or at a much lower price than elsewhere.
In all likelihood the curtains for the tabernacle, as well as the girdles for Aaron and his sons, of fine linen and violet and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, were wrought with this very pattern, so that in the “stragulata” or “burd Aliscaunder” we behold the oldest known design for any textile. ”

“ From the east this love for cloth of gold reached the southern end of Italy, and thence soon got to Rome; where, even under its early kings, garments made of it were worn. Pliny, speaking of this rich textile, says: “gold may be spun or woven like wool, without any wool being mixed with it.” We are told by Verrius that Tarquinius Priscus rode in triumph in a tunic of gold; and Agrippina the wife of the emperor Claudius, when he exhibited the spectacle of a naval combat, sat by him covered with a robe made entirely of gold woven without any other material. ”

“ This truly artistic and well-executed stuff displays a row of angels in girded albs, all flying one way, as with the left hand they swing thuribles, and another row kneeling, each with a crown of thorns in his hands, alternating, with a second set of angels, in another row, each bearing before him a cross. All the angels are done in yellow, but with face and hands white, and the whole ground is strewed with stars. It is likely that this fine stuff was woven expressly for the purple vestments worn in Passion time, at the end of Lent. ”