The most beautiful series now in the world is in the Vatican at Rome, and may be judged of by looking at a few of the original cartoons (at present in the S. K. museum). Duke Cosimo tried to set up tapestry work at Florence but did not succeed. Later, Rome produced some good things; among others, the fine copy of Da Vinci’s Last Supper still hung up on Maunday Thursday. England made several attempts to re-introduce the manufacture: first at Mortlake, then afterwards in London, at Soho. Works from these two establishments may be met with. At Northumberland house there was a room hung with large pieces of tapestry wrought at Soho, and for that mansion, in the year 1758. The designs were by Francesco Zuccherelli and consisted of landscapes composed of hills crowned here and there with the standing ruins of temples or strewed with broken columns, among which groups of country folks are wandering and amusing themselves. Mortlake and Soho were failures. Not so the Gobelins at Paris, as every one well knows.
In many English houses, especially in the country, good samples of late Flemish tapestry may be found. Close to London, Holland house is adorned with some curious specimens, particularly in the raised style. An earlier example (engraved on the next page) of the fifteenth century, representing the marriage of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany is in a foreign collection.
Imitated tapestry existed here long ago under the name of “stayned cloth,” and the workers of it were embodied into a London guild. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Exeter cathedral had several pieces of old painted or “stayned” cloth: “i front stayned cum crucifixo, Maria et Johanne, Petro et Paulo; viij panni linei stayned, etc.” The great use at that time of such articles in household furniture may be witnessed in the will, 1503, of Katherine lady Hastings who bequeaths, besides several other such pieces, “an old hangin of counterfeit arres of Knollys, which now hangeth in the hall and all such hangyings of old bawdekyn, or lynen paynted as now hang in the chappell.” We may also remember that Falstaff speaks of it as an illustration easily understood; he says that his troops are “as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth.”
Carpets are akin to tapestry, and though the use of them may perhaps be not so ancient yet is very old. Here, again, we must look to the people of Asia for the finest as well as the earliest examples of this textile. Mediæval specimens are rare anywhere, and we are glad to recommend attention to two pieces of that period fortunately in the collection at South Kensington, no. 8649, of the fourteenth century, and no. 8357, of the sixteenth, both of Spanish make.
Marriage of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany.
The chambers of our royal palaces and the chancels of our parish churches used to be strewed with rushes. When however they could afford it the authorities of our cathedrals, even in very early times, spread the sanctuary with carpets; and at last old tapestry came to be so employed, as now in Italy. Among such coverings for the floor before the altar Exeter had a large piece of Arras cloth figured with the life of the duke of Burgundy, the gift of one of its bishops, Edmund Lacy, in 1420; besides two large carpets, one bestowed by bishop Nevill in 1456, the other, of a chequered pattern, by lady Elizabeth Courtney: “carpet et panni coram altari sternendi; i pannus de Arys de historia ducis Burgundie; i larga carpeta, etc.” In an earlier inventory we find that among the “bancaria” or bench-coverings in the choir of the same cathedral, one was a large piece of English-made tapestry with a fretted pattern. It is very probable that as the work of the Record Commission goes on, and our ancient historians are printed, evidence may be found that the looms at work in all our great monasteries among other webs wrought carpets. From existing testimony we believe that such must have been the practice at Croyland, where abbot Egelric (the second of the name) gave to that church, before the year 992, “two large foot-cloths [so carpets were then called] woven with lions to be laid out before the high altar on great festivals, and two shorter ones trailed all over with flowers, for the feast days of the apostles.” The quantity of carpeting in our palaces may be seen by the way in which Leland tells us that “my lady the queen’s rooms” were strewed with them “when she took her chamber.”
CHAPTER XI.
The value of such a collection of textile fabrics as that at South Kensington can scarcely be overrated. Without such aid it is not possible for the painter or the historian to bring before his own mind, much less bring before another’s, a true representation of ancient ceremonies and pageants. Whether his subject be a coronation or a royal marriage, a queen’s “taking her chamber,” a progress, or a funeral, he cannot correctly set forth the splendour or the details of the occasion, unless he can refer to existing examples of the cloths of gold, the figured velvets, the rich embroidery, or the splendid silks, which used to be worn of old. Take for example nos. 1310 and 8624. Upon these are figured stags with tall branching horns, couchant, chained, upturning their antlered heads to sunbeams darting down upon them amid a shower of rain; and beneath the stags are eagles. This Sicilian textile, woven about the end of the fourteenth century, brings to one’s mind the bronze recumbent figure of a king in Westminster abbey. It is that of Richard the second; made for him before his downfall, and by two coppersmiths of London, Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest. This effigy, once finely gilt, is as remarkable for its beautiful workmanship as for the elaborate manner in which the cloak and kirtle worn by the king are diapered all over with a pattern, copied from the silken stuff out of which those garments must have been cut for his personal wear while living. The pattern consists of a sprig of the planta genesta, the humble broom plant—the haughty Plantagenet’s device—along with a couchant hart chained and gazing straight forwards, and above it a cloud with rays darting up from behind. These were Richard’s favourite cognizances: the one from his grandfather Edward the third; the other from his mother Joan of Kent. It is very probable that the king’s dress was of the same kind of silk Sicilian textile as the examples just referred to: and that those very examples are portions of pieces wrought, perhaps at Palermo, for the court of Richard. They are of the same date and they show his devices; the chained hart and the sunbeams issuing from a cloud.