Hitherto no attempt has been anywhere made to distribute olden silken textiles into various schools, and as the present is the first and only collection which has in any country been thrown open as yet to the public, the occasion seems a fitting one to warrant such an endeavour of classification.
With no other than the specimens here before us, we think we see them fall into these several groups—Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Oriental or Indian, Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian, Flemish, British, and French.
Chinese examples here are very few; but what they are, whether plain or figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we know of the people, we are led to believe their own way two thousand years ago is precisely theirs still, so that the web wrought by them this year or two hundred years ago, like [No. 1368], p. 75, would not differ hardly in a line from their textiles two thousand years gone by, when Dionysius Periegetes wrote that, the “Seres make precious figured garments, resembling in colour the flowers of the field, and rivalling in fineness the work of spiders.” In the stuffs, warp and woof are of silk, and both of the best kinds.
Persian textiles, even as we see them in this collection, must have been for many centuries just as they were ever figured, and may be, even now, described by the words of Quintus Curtius, with some little allowance for those influences exercised upon the mind of the weaver by his peculiar religious belief, which would not let the lowliest workman forget the “homa,” or tree of life. When Marco Polo travelled through those parts, in the thirteenth century, and our countryman, Sir John Mandeville, a hundred years later, the old love for hunting wild beasts still lived, and the princes of the country were as fond as ever of training the cheetah, a kind of small lion or leopard, for the chase, as we have noticed, [p. 178].
When the design is made up of various kinds of beasts and birds, real or imaginary, with the sporting cheetah nicely spotted among them; and the “homa” conspicuously set forth above all; sure may we be that the web was wrought by Persians, and on most occasions the textile will be found in all its parts to be woven from the richest materials.
As an illustration of the Persian type of style, [No. 8233], p. 154, may be taken as a specimen.
For trade purposes, and to make the textile pass in the European market as from Persia, the manner of its loom was often copied by the Jewish and the Christian weavers in Syria, as we shall have to notice just now.
The Byzantine Greeks, for their textiles from the time when in the sixth century they began to weave home-grown silk, made for themselves a school of design which kept up in their drawing not a little of the beauty, breadth, and flowing outline which had outlived among them the days of heathenish art. Along with this a strong feeling of their Christianity showed itself as well in many of the subjects which they took out of holy writ, as in the smaller elements of ornamentation. Figures, whether of the human form or of beasts, are given in a much larger and bolder size than on any other ancient stuffs. Though there be very few known specimens from the old looms of Constantinople, the one here, [No. 7036], p. 122, showing Samson wrestling with a lion, may serve as a type. In the year 1295 old St. Paul’s Cathedral, here in London, would seem to have possessed several splendid vestments made of Byzantine silk, as we note in the samples to be named infra under the head of Damask.
The way in which those Greeks gave a pattern to the stuff intended more especially for liturgical purposes is pointed out while speaking about “Stauracin” and the “Gammadion,” a form of the cross with which they powdered their silks; [p. lii.]
The world-wide fame of the Byzantine purple tint is attested by our Gerald Barry, whose words we quote further on. As a sample of the Byzantine loom in “diaspron,” or diapering, we would refer to [No. 1239], p. 26.