8639.
Piece of Silk Damask; ground, gold; pattern, a circle showing, in its lower half, a crescent moon and an eight-petaled flower, in the round centre of which is an Arabic inscription, all in black, and the spaces filled in with a Saracenic scroll in light blue, light green, and crimson (now faded). Moresco-Spanish, 14th century. 1 foot 1¾ inches by 5¾ inches.
This unmistakeable specimen of a Saracenic loom would seem to have been wrought somewhere in the south of Spain, may be at Granada, Seville, or Cordova.
As a sample of its kind it is valuable, showing, as it does, that the same feelings which manifested themselves upon Moorish ornamentation for architecture were displayed in the patterns of textiles among that people. The fraud, so to say, of gilt shreds of parchment for threads covered with gold is exemplified here; and hence we may gather that the Spaniards of the mediæval period learned this trick from their Saracenic teachers in the arts of the loom. As in [No. 8590], &c., so here, the gold ground is wrought, not in thread twined with gold foil, but with gilt vellum cut into very narrow filaments, and worked into the warp so as to lie quite flat.