Textile Fabrics

by Daniel Rock

The whole sea-board of that part of Asia minor, as well as far inland, was inhabited by a mixture of Jews, Christians, and Saracens; and all were workers in silk. The reputation of the neighbouring Persia had of old stood high for the beauty and durability of her silken textiles, which caused them to be sought for by the European traders. Persia’s outlet to the west for her goods lay through the great commercial ports on the coast of Syria. Persia was accustomed to set her own peculiar seal upon her figured webs, by mingling in her designs the mystic “homa:” and, naturally, this part of the pattern became in the eyes of Europeans, at first, a sort of assurance that those goods had been made in Persian looms. By one of the tricks of imitation followed in that day, as well as now, the Syrian designers threw the “homa” into their patterns. Borrowed perhaps originally from Hebrew tradition, this symbol of “the tree of life” had in it nothing objectionable either to the Christian, the Jew, or the Moslem: all three, therefore, took it and made it a leading portion of design in the patterns of their silks; and hence it is that we meet with it so often. Though at the beginning, it may be, done with a fraudulent intention of palming on the world Syrian for Persian silks, the Syrians usually put also into their fabrics a something which declared the real workmanship. Mixed with the “homa,” the “cheetah,” and other elements of Persian patterns, the discordant two-handled vase or the badly-imitated Arabic sentence betrays the textile to be not Persian but Syrian. No. 8359 exemplifies this. Furthermore, probably in ignorance about Persia’s superstitious use of the “homa” in her old religious services, the Christian weavers of Syria put the sign of the cross by the side of the “tree of life:” as we find upon the piece of silk, no. 7094. Another remarkable specimen of the Syrian loom is no. 7034, whereon the Nineveh lions come forth conspicuously. As good examples of well-wrought “diaspron” or diaper, no. 8233 and no. 7052 may be mentioned.

Saracenic weaving, as shown by the design upon the web, is exemplified in several specimens at South Kensington.

However much against what looks like a heedlessness of the teaching of the Koran, it is certain that the Saracens, those of the upper classes in particular, felt no difficulty in wearing robes upon which animals and the likenesses of created things were woven; with the strictest of their princes a double-headed eagle, possibly borrowed from the crusaders, was a royal heraldic device. Stuffs figured with birds and beasts, with trees and flowers, were not the less on that account of Saracenic workmanship, and meant for Moslem wear. What, however, may be chiefly looked for upon Saracenic textures is a pattern consisting of longitudinal stripes of blue, red, green, and other colour; some of them charged with animals, small in form; some written, in large Arabic letters, with a word or sentence.

Moresco-Spanish or Saracenic textiles wrought in Spain, though partaking of the striped pattern and bearing words in real or imitated Arabic, had some distinctions of their own. The designs shown upon these stuffs are almost always drawn out of strap-work, reticulations, or some combination of geometrical lines, amid which are occasionally to be found different forms of conventional flowers. Sometimes, but very rarely, the crescent moon is figured as in the curious piece, no. 8639. The colours of these silks are usually either a fine crimson or a deep blue with almost always a fine toned yellow as a ground. But one remarkable feature in these Moresco-Spanish textiles is the presence of the ingenious imitation (before spoken of) of gold; for which shreds of gilded parchment cut up into narrow flat strips are substituted and woven with the silk. This, when fresh, must have looked very bright, and have given the web all the appearance of the favourite stuffs called here in England “tissues.” The fraud, as already explained, if fraud it were, is not easily discovered without a magnifying glass. A guide may be found in the blackness of the gold. Nos. 7095, 8590, and 8639, are examples of this gilded vellum.

The Sicilian school strongly marked wide differences between itself and all the others which had lived before; and the history of its loom is as interesting as it is varied.

The first to teach the natives of Sicily how to rear the silkworm and spin its silk were, as it would seem, the Mahomedans, who coming over from Africa brought with them, besides the art of weaving silken textiles, a knowledge of the fauna of that vast continent—its giraffes, its antelopes, its gazelles, its lions, its elephants. These invaders told them also of the parrots of India and the hunting sort of leopard,—the cheetahs; and when the stuff was wrought for European wear both beast and bird were imaged upon the web, and at the same time a word in Arabic was woven in. Like all other Saracens, those in Sicily loved to mingle gold in their tissues; and, to spare the silk, cotton thread was not unfrequently worked up in the warp. When, therefore, we meet with beasts taken from the fauna of Africa, such, especially, as the giraffe and the several classes of the antelope family, with perhaps also an Arabic motto, and part of the pattern wrought in gold, as well as cotton in the warp, we may fairly take the specimen as a piece of Sicily’s work in its first period of weaving silk.

The second epoch was when 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. 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. In this second period of the island’s loom we discover what traces the Byzantine school impressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much to alter the type of their first designs. On one silk, the pattern is a grotesque mask amid the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might have been then found upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture; this may be seen on no. 8241; on another, a sovereign on horseback wearing the royal crown and carrying a hawk upon his wrist, as in no. 8589; on a third, no. 8234, is the Greek cross, with a pattern much like the old netted or “de fundato” kind which has been described, p. 38.

But Sicily’s third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century she struck into an untried path. Without throwing aside the old elements employed by the Mahomedans Sicily put with them the emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some occasions with the letter V. four times repeated.

From the 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 Africans, 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 sculpture of the Greeks and Romans the Sicilians could have easily copied the fabled griffin and the centaur; but it was left for their own wild imaginings to figure such an odd compound in one being as the animal—half elephant, half griffin—which we see in no. 1288. Their daring flights of fancy in coupling the difficult with the beautiful are curious; in one piece large eagles are perched in pairs with a radiating sun between them, and beneath are dogs, in pairs, running with heads turned back; in another, 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 are harts, the letter M floriated, winged lions, crosses floriated, crosses sprouting out on two sides with fleurs-de-lis, and four-legged monsters, some like winged lions, some biting their tails. 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; or harts lodged under green trees in a park with paling about it. The hawk, the eagle, double and single headed, or the parrot, may be found on stuffs all over the east; not so, however, the swan, which was a favourite with Sicilians and may be seen often drawn with much gracefulness.

The Sicilians showed their strong affection for certain plants and flowers. On a great many of the silks in the South Kensington collection from Palermitan looms we see figured upon a tawny coloured grounding beautifully drawn foliage in green; sometimes vine leaves, sometimes what looks like parsley, so curled, crispy, and serrated are its leaves. Another peculiarity is the introduction of the letter U, repeated so as to mark the feathering upon the tails of birds; or to fall into the shape of an O; as in nos. 8591, 8599.