CHAPTER VII.
FLANDERS.
"For lace, let Flanders bear away the belle."
—Sir C. Hanbury Williams.
"In French embroidery and in Flanders lace
I'll spend the income of a treasurer's place."
—The Man of Taste, Rev. W. Bramstone.
Flanders and Italy together dispute the invention of lace. In many towns of the Low Countries are pictures of the fifteenth century, in which are portrayed personages adorned with lace,[[317]] and Baron Reiffenberg, a Belgian writer, asserts that lace cornettes, or caps, were worn in that country as early as the fourteenth century. As evidence for the early origin of pillow-lace in the Low Countries, Baron Reiffenberg mentions an altar-piece, attributed to Quentin Matsys (in a side chapel of the choir of St. Peter's, at Louvain), in which a girl is represented making lace with bobbins on a pillow with a drawer, similar to that now in use.[[318]] There exists a series of engravings after Martin de Vos (1580-85), giving the occupations of the seven ages of life: in the third,[[319]] assigned to âge mûr, is seen a girl, sitting with a pillow on her knees, making lace (Fig. 50). The occupation must have been then common, or the artist would scarcely have chosen it to characterise the habits of his country.
Of the two paintings attributed to Matsys—that in St. Peter's, at Louvain, and that in Lierre, only the former is now assigned to the artist. Both pictures are said to be of the end of the fifteenth century or beginning of the sixteenth.
Fig. 50.