Venice does not seem to have been at any time, like Sicily and Lucca, smitten with the taste of imitating in her looms the patterns which she saw abroad upon textile fabrics, but appears to have borrowed from the orientals only one kind of weaving cloth of gold: the yellow chasuble at Exeter cathedral in 1327, figured with beasts, is the only instance we know where she wove animals upon silks. Venice, however, set up for herself a new branch of textiles, and wrought for church use square webs of a crimson ground on which were figured, in gold or on yellow silk, subjects taken from the Scriptures or the persons of saints and angels. These square pieces were employed, sewed together, as frontals to altars, but when longwise more generally as orphreys to chasubles, copes, and other vestments.
There is a remarkable similarity between the drawing of the figures upon old Venetian silks and the woodcuts in books published at Venice in the early part of the sixteenth century; such as the fine pontifical by Giunta, or the “Rosario” by Varisco. We find in both the same style and manner; the same broad fold and fall of drapery; the same plumpness and outline of the human face and figure. So near is the likeness in design that we may almost believe that the artists who supplied the blocks for the printers sketched also the drawings for the looms.
By the fifteenth century Venice knew how to produce good damasks in silk and gold: if we had nothing more than the specimen, no. 1311, where St. Mary of Egypt is so well represented, it would be quite enough for her to claim for herself such a distinction. Nor can there be much doubt that Venice wrought in velvet; and if those rich stuffs were made there, sometimes raised, sometimes pile upon pile, in which her painters loved to dress the personages, men especially, in their pictures, then Venetian velvets were certainly beautiful. Of this any one may satisfy himself by one visit to our National gallery. There, in the “Adoration of the magi” painted by Paulo Veronese, the second of the wise men is clad in a robe of crimson velvet, cut or raised after a design in keeping with the style of the period.
No insignificant article of Venetian textile workmanship were her laces wrought in every variety; in gold, in silk, in thread. The portrait of a Doge usually shows him clothed in his dress of state. His wide mantle, with large golden buttons, is made of some rich dull silver cloth; and on his head is the Phrygian-shaped ducal cap bound round with broad gold lace diapered, as we see in the bust portrait of Loredano, painted by John Bellini, in the National gallery. Not only was the gold in the thread particularly good but the lace itself in great favour at the English court at one time; bought, not by yard measure but by weight, “a pounde and a half of gold of Venys” was employed “aboute the making of a lace and botons for the king’s mantell of the garter.” This was for Henry the seventh. “Frenge of Venys gold” appears twice in the wardrobe accounts of Edward the fourth. Laces in worsted or in linen thread wrought by the bobbin at Venice, but more especially her point laces or such as were done with the needle, always had, as they still have, a great reputation.
Venetian linens, for fine towelling and napery in general, were in favourite use in France during a part of the fifteenth century. In the ‘Ducs de Bourgogne’ by Laborde, more than once we meet with such an entry as “une pièce de nappes, ouvraige de Venise.”
Silk damask—Florentine: fifteenth century.
Florence, about the middle of the fourteenth century, obtained a place in the foremost rank amid the weavers of northern Italy. Specimens of her earliest handicraft are rare; there are two at South Kensington. One of these, no. 8563, shows the excellence of her work in secular silks. Other pieces witness to the delicacy of her design at a later time, the sixteenth century. The orphrey-webs of Florence are equally conspicuous for drawing and skill in weaving, and in beauty come up to those made at Venice, far surpassing anything of the kind ever wrought at Cologne.
But it was of her velvets that Florence was warrantably proud. Henry the seventh bequeathed “to God and St. Peter, and to the abbot and prior and convent of our monastery of Westminster, the whole suit of vestments made at Florence in Italy.” We may yet see how gorgeous this textile was in one of these Westminster abbey copes still in existence, preserved at Stonyhurst college. The golden ground is trailed all over with leaf-bearing boughs of a bold type, in raised or cut ruby-toned velvet of a rich soft pile, which is freckled with gold thread sprouting up like loops. Though not so rich in material nor so splendid in pattern, there are at South Kensington, nos. 7792 and 7799, two specimens of Florentine cut crimson velvet on a golden ground, like the royal vestments in their kind and having the same peculiarity, the little gold thread loop shooting out of the velvet pile. These pieces are a full century later than the cope at Stonyhurst.
That peculiar sort of ornamentation—the little loop of gold thread standing well up and in single spots—upon some velvets, seems at times to have been replaced, perhaps with the needle, by small dots of solid metal, gold or silver gilt, upon the pile: of the gift of one of its bishops, John Grandisson, Exeter cathedral had a crimson velvet cope, the purple velvet orphrey of which was so wrought: “purpyll velvette worked with pynsheds” of pure gold.