Small Piece of Embroidery; background, canvas diapered with lozenges in brown thread; foreground, once partly strewed with streaks of gold; design, two men bearded and clad in long garments, seemingly personages of the Old Law, talking to each other. Florentine, 15th century.
With quite an Italian and Florentine character about them, these two figures, both worked in silk, have no great merit; though there are some good folds in the brown mantle, shot with green, of the hooded individual standing on the left-hand. That it has been cut away from some larger piece is evident, but what the original served for, whether a sacred or secular purpose, it is impossible now to say.
1322.
Stole; ground, light blue silk; design, a thin bough roving along the stole’s whole length in an undulating line, and sprouting out into fan-like leaves, and small flowers, and in a white raised cord, narrowly edged with crimson silk and gold thread. At one expanded end is the Holy Lamb upon a golden ground; at the other, the dove, emblem of the Holy Ghost, alighting upon flowers. German, 15th century. 8 feet 6½ inches by 3¾ inches.
Though the work upon this stole is rather coarse, still from its raised style it must have been effective; but its chief value is from having been a liturgic ornament. The diapering at the end figured with the Holy Lamb, done upon a yellow canvas ground, with its thin golden threads worked into three circles, with their radiations not straight but wavy, is remarkable, and may be found upon another work wrought by a German needle in this collection. Not only the Lamb and the Dove, but the floriation, are thrown up into a sort of low relief.
1323.
Embroidered Linen; design, barbed quatrefoils filled in with armorial birds and beasts, and the spaces between wrought with vine-leaves. German, 15th century. 16 inches by 11¾ inches.
This is but a piece of a much larger work, the pattern of which, in its entire form, can only be guessed at from a few remains. One quatrefoil is occupied by a pair of eagles (as they seem to be) addorsed regardant; and the two legs of another three-toed creature remaining near them prove that other things besides the eagles were figured. The whole is coarsely done in coarse materials, and, in workmanship, far below very many specimens here. It appears to have served for household not for church use.