The two principal personages occupy the centre of the foreground. Crowned as a king and wearing a costly sword, Melchizedek comes forth with outstretched right hand to welcome Abram, from whom he is separated by a highly ornamented tall vase full of wine. Behind this King of Salem one of his own serving men, who carries on his shoulders a basket full of food, is coming down the wide staircase from which his royal master has just issued, while outside a doorway, under an upper portico in the same palace, stand two men gazing on the scene below them. On the other side of the vase, Abram, holding a long staff in his right hand, is stepping forwards toward Melchizedek, whom he salutes with his lowered left hand, and behind him a second servant of Melchizedek has just set upon the ground a large hamper full of flat loaves of bread. A little higher in the piece, and somewhat to the left of this domestic, a group of soldiers are quenching their thirst gathered about an open tun of wine, which they drink out of a wide bowl; hastening towards the same spot, as if from an archway, flows a stream of other military men. Amid the far-off landscape may be seen banners flying, and beneath them all the turmoils of a battle raging at its height. To the right, the standard-bearers and some of the vanquished are seen in headlong flight.
The deep golden-grounded border is parted at bottom by classic monstrous hermæ, male and female, each wearing a pair of wings by its ears. The spaces between these grotesques are filled in with female figures, mostly symbolizing vices. “Violentia” is figured by a youthful woman, who, with a sheathed sword by her side, is driving before her a captive young man, whom she holds by the cords which tie his hands behind him, and whom she hurries onwards by the blows from a thick staff that she wields in her uplifted right hand. “Depredatio,” with her fingers ending at their tips in long sharp ravenous nails, is riding astride a lion. “Gratitudo” is a gentle young maiden, who is seated with a bird in her lap, a stork, which she seems to be fondling. “Pugna,” or brawling, is shown by two middle-aged women of the lower class. With their dishevelled hair hanging all about their shoulders, they are in the height of a fight, and the woman with a bunch of keys hanging from her girdle has overcome the other, and is tugging at one of her long locks. “Tyrannis” is an old haggish female with dog-like feet, and she brandishes a sword; almost every one of the other women on the border has, curiously enough, one foot resembling that of an animal. In several parts of the composition besides the border, in the warp and for shading, golden thread has been woven in, but so scantily employed, and the gold itself of such a debased bad quality, that the metal from being tarnished to quite a dull black tone is hardly discernible.
The costume, like the scenery and buildings, has nothing of an oriental character about it, but is fashioned after an imagined classic model.
Tapestry Wall-hanging; subject, the Progress of Avarice. Flemish, middle of the 17th century.
Up above within the border of this large piece is a tablet bearing this inscription:—
“Semper eget sitiens mediis ceu Tantalus undis
Inter anhelatas semper avarus opes.”
Beginning at the top left hand of the subject represented, we see a murky sort of vapour streaked by a flash of red lightning. Amid this brownish darkness, peopled with horrid little phantoms and small fantastic sprites, we discover a diminutive figure of Death wielding a long-handled curiously-headed scythe.
Just below is a man pointing with his right hand up to Death, and with his left hand to a little harpy before him; behind him stands a figure with two heads, one a woman’s, the other a man’s, set together Januswise. Lower down, and of a much larger size, are three male figures, one a youth well clad, were it not for his ragged pantaloons, the next an old man wearing sandals and bearing in his right hand what looks like a reliquary glazed and coloured red, while in his left he holds two unfolded scrolls, the upper one of which is illuminated with a building like a castle, by the side of which stands a man, over whose head is the tau or T, with a bell hanging under it—the symbols of St. Anthony of Egypt.