Whether it was that the crusaders made Sicily so often 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, it is certain that the Sicilians were particularly given to introduce many heraldic charges—wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins—into their designs. The occasions in which such elements of blazoning come in are so numerous that one of the features belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period is that, bating tinctures, it is decidedly heraldic.
Silk damask—Sicilian: fourteenth century.
All this beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, free, spirited drawing, were bestowed 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 wrought up with the silk.
Till within a few years past the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, no. 721, 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 for themselves a good repute and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, in the same way as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in speech, so also 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 workmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have thought themselves bound to follow the style brought by the Saracens of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even cheetahs, as we see in the specimens no. 8258 and no. 8616. But with these eastern animals she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white. She soon dropped what was oriental from her patterns which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner, 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 in much request in England during the fourteenth century. In all likelihood they were not of the deadened but the sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as “tissue.” Exeter cathedral, in 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca:—“de panno de Luk.” At a later date, belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles—one purple, the other red—of the same glittering stuff: “de purpyll panno.” York cathedral possessed 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,” making a distinction between tissue and the ordinary cloth of gold. In the wardrobe accounts of Edward the second the golden tissue, or Lucca cloth, is several times mentioned. Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay this glittering 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 was of Lucca cloth.
About the same time velvet became known, and came into use both for vestments and for personal wear; and Lucca probably was among the first places in Europe to weave it. The specimens at South Kensington of this fine textile from Lucchese looms, though few in comparison with those from Genoa, still have a certain historical value for the English workman: no. 1357, 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, 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.
Genoa, though in mediæval times not so conspicuous as she afterwards became for her textile industry, encouraged over her narrow territory the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we have found is in the inventory of vestments belonging to St. Paul’s cathedral, London, in 1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth that church had, of the same manufacture, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds. Though this first description be scant, we may reasonably gather that the Genoese cloths must have resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca. Genoa still keeps up her old reputation for beautiful velvets.
In the collection at South Kensington there are examples of every kind of Genoese velvets; some with a smooth unbroken surface, some elaborately patterned and showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Some are raised or cut, the design being worked in a pile standing well up by itself out of a flat ground of silk, either of the same or of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold. No. 7795 is an example of a very costly kind; in which the ground is velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself but raised one pile higher than the other, so as to show its form and shape distinctly. No. 8323 shows how the design was worked in various coloured velvet. This last was a favourite in England and called motley; in his will, 1415, printed in Rymers Fœdera, Henry lord Scrope bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro; the other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, etc.