Till within a few years the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, likely from that city itself, No. [721], p. 13, does credit to its loom, as it wove in the seventeenth century. Northern Italy was not idle; and the looms which she set up in several of her great cities, in Lucca, Florence, Genoa, Venice and Milan, earned apart for themselves a good repute in some particulars, and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, like as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in speech, so too had it a something often thrown into its designs and style of drawing which told of the place and province whence the textiles came.
Lucca at an early period made herself known in Europe for her textiles; but her draughtsmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have thought themselves bound to follow the style hitherto in use, brought by the Saracens, of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even cheetahs, as we behold in the specimens here No. [8258], p. 163, and No. [8616], p. 234. But, at the same time, along with these eastern animals, she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white, like in the example the last mentioned. She soon dropped what was oriental from her patterns, which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner, as we observe, under No. [8637], p. 243, No. [8640], p. 244, and showing an inclination for light blue, as a colour.
As in other places abroad, so at Lucca, cloths of gold and of silver were often wrought, and the Lucchese cloths of this costly sort were, here in England, during the fourteenth century, in particular request. In all likelihood they were, both of them, not of the deadened but sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as “tissue.” Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca:—“una capa alba de panno de Luk.”[226] At a later date, belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles—one purple, the other red—of the same glittering stuff, “casula de purpyll panno,” &c.,[227] where we find it specified that not only was the textile of gold, but of that especial sort called tissue. York cathedral was particularly furnished with a great many copes of tissue shot with every colour required by its ritual, and among them were—“a reade cope of clothe of tishewe with orphry of pearl, a cope with orphrey, a cope of raised clothe of goulde,”[228] making a distinction between tissue and the ordinary cloth of gold. But at the court of our Edward II. its favour would seem to have been the highest. In the Wardrobe Accounts of that king, we see the golden tissue, or Lucca cloth, several times mentioned. Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay, this glistening web was used; palls made of Lucca cloth were, at masses for the dead, strewed over the corpse; at marriages the care-cloth was made of the same stuff; thus when Richard de Arundell and Isabella, Hugh le Despenser’s daughter, had been wedded at the door of the royal chapel, the veil held spread out over their heads as they knelt inside the chancel during the nuptial mass, for the blessing, was of Lucca cloth.[229] Richard II.’s fondness for this cloth of gold was lately noticed, p. [xxx].
Just about Edward II.’s time was it that velvet became known, and got into use amongst our churchmen for vestments, and our nobles for personal wear, and the likelihood is that Lucca was among the first places in Europe to weave it. The specimens here of this fine textile from Lucchese looms, though in comparison with those from Genoa, they be few and mostly after one manner—the raised or cut—still have now a certain historical value for the English workman: No. [1357], p. 72, with its olive green plain silken ground, and trailed all over with flowers and leaves in a somewhat deeper tone, and the earlier example, No. [8322], p. 192, with its ovals and feathering stopped with graceful cusps and artichokes, afford us good instances of what Lucca could produce in the way of artistic velvets.
[226] Oliver, p. 315.
[227] P. 344.
[228] York Fabric Rolls, p. 308.
Genoa, though in far off mediæval times not so conspicuous as she afterwards became for her textile industry, still must have from a remote period, encouraged within her walls, and over her narrow territory, the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we anywhere find, is to be seen in the inventory of those costly vestments once belonging to our own St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in the year 1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth, that church had, from the same place, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds.[230] Though this first description be scant, we read in it quite enough to gather that these Genoese cloths must have entirely resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca, but, in particular, in Sicily. Perhaps they had been carried by trade from Palermo to the north-west shores of Italy, whence they were brought in the same way to England, so that they may be deemed to have reached us not so much from the looms themselves of Genoa, as those of some other place, but through her then great port.
Of Genoa’s own weaving of beautiful velvets there can be no doubt, a reputation she keeps to the present day as far as plain velvet is concerned.
In this collection we have samples in every kind of Genoese velvets, from those with a smooth unbroken surface to the elaborately patterned ones—art-wrought velvets in fact—showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Among the plain velvets in which we have nothing but great softness and depth of pile, along with clear bright luminous tones of colour, No. [540], p. 3, is a very fair specimen for its delicious richness of pile; and No. [8334], p. 199, not merely for this property, but as well for its lightsome mellow deep tint of crimson.