8590.
Piece of Silk Tissue; ground, green; pattern, a so-called pomegranate of elaborate form, amid flowers of white and light purple, now faded, both largely wrought in gold. Spanish, 15th century. 1 foot 11 inches by 1 foot 2 inches.
Not only is the design of the pattern very effective, but the gold, in which the far larger part of it is done, looks bright and rather rich; yet, by examining it with a powerful glass, we may discover an ingenious, not to say trickish, way for imitating gold-covered thread. Skins of thin vellum were gilt, and not very thickly; these were cut into very narrow filament-like shreds, and in this form—that is, flat with the shining side facing the eye—afterwards woven into the pattern as if they were thread, a trick in trade which the Spaniards learned from the Moors.
The warp is of a poor kind of silk not unlike jute, and the woof is partly of cotton, partly linen thread, so that with its mock gold filaments we have a showy textile out of cheap materials; a valuable specimen of the same sort of stuff from a Saracenic loom will be found under [No. 8639], &c.