While at war with the Byzantines, in the twelfth century, Roger, King of Sicily, took Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, from each of which cities he led away captives all the men and women he could find who knew how to weave silks, and carried them to Palermo. To the Norman tiraz there, these Grecian new comers brought fresh designs, which were adopted sometimes wholly, at others but in part and mixed up with the older Saracenic style, for silks wrought under the Normano-Sicilian dynasty. In this second period of the island’s loom we discover what traces the Byzantine school had impressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much to alter the type of their design. On one silk, a grotesque mask amid the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might have been then found by them upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture, was the pattern, as we witness, at [No. 8241], p. 158; on another, a sovereign on horseback wearing the royal crown, and carrying as he rides a hawk upon his wrist—token both of the love for lordly sports at the period, and the feudalism all over Italy and Christendom, shown in the piece, [No. 8589], p. 223; on a third, [No. 8234], p. 154, is the Greek cross, along with a pattern much like the old netted or “de fundato” kind which we have described, [p. liii].
But Sicily’s third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, she struck out of herself into quite an unknown path for design. Without throwing aside the old elements employed till then especially, all over the east, and among the rest, by the Mahomedans, Sicily put along with them the emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some occasions with the letter V. four times repeated, and so placed together as to fall into the shape of this symbol, like what we find at [No. 1245], p. 28; in other instances the cross is floriated, as at [No. 1293], p. 47.
From the far east to the uttermost western borders of the Mediterranean the weavers of every country had been in the habit of figuring upon their silks those beasts and birds they saw around them: the Tartar, the Indian, and the Persian gave us the parrot and the cheetah; the men of Africa the giraffe and the gazelle; the people of each continent the lions, the elephants, the eagles, and the other birds common to both. From the poetry and sculpture of the Greeks and Romans could the Sicilians have easily learned about the fabled griffin and the centaur; but it was left for their own wild imaginings to figure as they have, such an odd compound in one being as the animal—half elephant, half griffin—which we see in [No. 1288], p. 45. Their daring flights of fancy in coupling the difficult with the beautiful, are curious; in one place, [No. 1302], p. 50, large eagles are perched in pairs with a radiating sun between them, and beneath dogs, in pairs, running with heads turned back, &c.; in another, [No. 1304], p. 51, running harts have caught one of their hind legs in a cord tied to their collar, and an eagle swoops down upon them; and the same animal, in another place, on the same piece has switched its tail into the last link of a chain fastened to its neck; on a third sample, [No. 8588], p. 222, we behold figured, harts, the letter M floriated, winged lions, crosses floriated, crosses sprouting out on two sides with fleurs-de-lis, four-legged monsters, some like winged lions, some biting their tails. Exeter Cathedral had a cloth of gold purple cope, figured with “draconibus volantibus ac tenentibus caudas proprias in ore,”[225] doves in pairs upholding a cross, &c. Hardly elsewhere to be found are certain elements peculiar to the patterns upon silks from mediæval Sicily; such, for instance, as harts, and demi-dogs with very large wings, both animals having remarkably long manes streaming far behind them, [No. 1279], p. 41; harts again, but lodged beneath green trees, in a park with paling about it, as in [No. 1283], p. 43, and [No. 8710], p. 269; that oft-recurring sun shedding its beams with eagles pecking at them, or gazing undazzled at the luminary, pp. [48], [50], [137], but sometimes stags, as at pp. [54], [239], carrying their well attired heads upturned to a large pencil of those sunbeams as they dart down upon them amid a shower of rain-drops. Of birds, the hawk, the eagle, double and single headed, the parrot, may be found on stuffs all over the east; not so, however, with the swan, yet this majestic creature was a favourite with Sicilians, and may be seen here often drawn with great gracefulness, as at Nos. [1277], p. 41; [1299], p. 49; [8264], p. 166; [8610], p. 232, &c.
[225] Oliver, p. 345.
The Sicilians showed their strong affection for certain plants and flowers. On a great many of the silks in this collection, from Palermitan looms, we see figured upon a tawny-coloured grounding, beautifully drawn foliage in green; which, on a nearer inspection, bears the likeness of parsley, so curled, crispy and serrated are its leaves. Besides their cherished parsley along with the vine-leaf for foliage, they had their especial favourite among flowers; and it is the centaurea cyanus, our corn blue-bottle, shown among others in No. [1283], &c. p. 43, No. [1291], p. 47, No. [1308], p. 53.
Another peculiarity of theirs is the introduction of the letter U, repeated so as at times to mark the feathering upon the tails of birds; at others, to fall into the shape of an O, as we pointed out at pp. [40], [225], [227], [228].
Whether it was that, like our own Richard I., crusaders in after times often made Sicily the halting spot on their way to the Holy Land, or that knights crowded there for other purposes, and thus dazzled the eyes of the islanders with the bravery of their armorial bearings, figured on their cyclases and pennons, their flags and shields, certain is it that these Sicilians were particularly given to introduce a deal of heraldic charges—wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins—into their designs; and the very numerous occasions in which such elements of blazoning come in, are very noticeable, so that one of the features belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period, is that, bating tinctures, it is so decidedly heraldic.
Not the last among the peculiarities of the third period in the Sicilian school is the use, for many of its stuffs, of two certain colours—murrey, for the ground, and a bright green for the pattern. When the fawn-coloured ground is gracefully sprinkled with parsley leaves, and nicely trailed with branches of the vine, and shows beasts and birds disporting themselves between the boughs of lively joyous green; the effect is cheerful, as may be witnessed in those specimens No. [8594], p. 226, No. [8602], p. 229, No. [8607], p. 231, Nos. [8609], [8610], p. 232, all of which so admirably exemplify the style.
All their beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, free, spirited drawing, were bestowed, if not thrown away, too often upon stuffs of a very poor inferior quality, in which the gold, if not actually base, was always scanty, and a good deal of cotton was sure to be found wrought up along with the silk.
Though Palermo was, without doubt, the great workshop for weaving Sicilian silks, that trade used to be carried on not only in other cities of the island, but reached towns like Reggio and other such in Magna Græcia, northward up to Naples. We think that, as far as the two Sicilies are concerned, the growth of the cotton plant always went along with the rearing of the silkworm. Of the main-land loom we would specify No. [8256], p. 163, No. [8634], p. 242, No. [8638], p. 243.