Textile Fabrics / A Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Church-vestments, Dresses, Silk Stuffs, Needlework and Tapestries, forming that Section of the Museum

by Daniel Rock

8345.

Fragment of an Ecclesiastical Vestment; ground, cloth of gold, diapered with an elaborate flower-pattern. French, middle of the 16th century. 2 feet 1¼ inches by 1 foot 9 inches.

This valuable specimen of cloth of gold is figured, in small red lines, with a free and well-designed pattern, and shows us how much above modern French and Italian toca and lama d’oro were those fine old cloth of gold stuffs which, in the 16th century, became so variously employed for secular purposes. Let the reader imagine a vast round royal tent of such a textile with the banner of a king fluttering over it, and then he may well conceive why the meadow upon which it stood was called “the field of the cloth of gold.”