Catalogue of the Retrospective Loan Exhibition of European Tapestries

by San Francisco Museum of Art; Phyllis Ackerman

INTRODUCTION
AN HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL SURVEY
OF THE ART OF TAPESTRY
WEAVING

Tapestry is a compound art. It stands at the meeting-point of three other arts, and so is beset by the problems of all three. In the first place, it is illustrative, for while there are tapestries that show only a sprinkling of flowers, a conventionalized landscape, or an armorial shield, the finest and most typical pieces are those with personnages that represent some episode from history, myth, or romance, or give a glimpse of the current usages of daily life. In the second place, tapestry is a mural decoration. It is part of the architectural setting of the rooms, really one with the wall. And, in the third place, it is a woven material—a solid fabric of wool or silk in the simplest of all techniques.

Since a tapestry is an illustration, it must be realistic and convincing, accurate in details and clearly indicative of the story. Because it is also a wall decoration, it cannot be too realistic, but must be structural in feeling and design, and the details must fall into broad masses that carry a strong effect from a distance. And since it is a woven material, even if it be structural, it must be flexible, and must have a fullness of ornament that will enrich the whole surface so that none of it will fall to the level of mere cloth.

But if the tapestry designer have a difficult problem in resolving these conflicting demands of the different aspects of his art, he has also wider opportunities to realize within those limitations. As an illustration, if he handle it with skill, he can make the design convey all the fascination of romance and narrative. As a mural decoration his design can attain a dignity and noble reserve denied to smaller illustrations, splendid in itself, and valuable for counterbalancing the disproportionate literary interest that the subject sometimes arouses. And the thick material, with its soft, uneven surface, lends, even to a trivial design, a richness and mellowness that the painter can achieve only in the greatest moments of his work.

The designer of tapestry can steer his way among the difficulties of the three phases of his art, and win the advantages of them all only if he have a fine and sensitive feeling for the qualities that he must seek. A realism flattened to the requirement of mural decoration and formalized to the needs of the technique of weaving, that still retains the informality and charm of the illustration, can best be won by considering the design as a pattern of silhouettes; for a silhouette is flat, and so does not violate the structural flatness of the wall by bulging out in high modeling. Moreover, it does give a broad, strong effect that can carry across a large room. And, finally, it permits both of adaptation in attitude and gesture to the needs of the story and of easy-flowing lines that can reshape themselves to the changing folds of a textile. So, to make good silhouettes, the figures in a good tapestry design will be arranged in the widest, largest planes possible, as they are in a fine Greek relief, and they will be outlined with clear, decisive, continuous lines, definitive of character, expressive and vivacious.

The strength and vivacity of the outline is of prime significance in tapestry design, even though in its final effect it appears not primarily as a linear art, but rather as a color art. The outlines have to be both clearly drawn in the cartoon and forcefully presented in the weave; for they bear the burden both of the illustrative expressiveness and of the decorative definition. If they are weakened in delineation or submerged by the glow of the colors, the tapestry becomes confused in import, weak in emphasis, and blurred in all its relations, while the charm and interest of detail is quite lost. The too heavy lines of some of the primitive tapestries are less a defect than the too delicate lines of the later pieces designed by those who were primarily painters, and which were too much adapted to the painting technique. The outlines in the best tapestries are not only indicated with a good deal of force, but these lines themselves have unflagging energy, unambiguous direction, diversified movement, and unfaltering control.

In order to complete and establish the silhouette effect, the color in the best tapestries is laid on in broad flat areas, each containing only a limited number of tones. A gradual transition of tone through many shades is undesirable, because such modulations convey an impression of relief modeling, which is inappropriate and superfluous in an art of silhouette. Then, again, these gradations at a little distance tend to fuse, and thus somewhat blur the force and purity of the color; and, finally, a considerable number of color transitions are ill-adapted to the character of a textile, as they tend to make it appear too much like painting. Nor are fluctuating tones and minute value-gradations necessary for a soft and varied effect. The very quality of tapestry material accomplishes that—first, because the ribbed surface breaks up the flatness of any color area and gives it shimmering variations of light and shade, and, second, because the wide folds natural to the material throw the flat tones now into dark and now into light, thus by direct light and shade differentiating values that in the dyes themselves are identical. Color in tapestry can thus be used in purer, more saturated masses than in any form of painting, not excepting even the greatest murals.

Flat silhouetted figures cannot of course be set in a three-dimensional world. They would not fit. So the landscape, too, must be flattened out into artificially simplified stages. This is also necessary both for the architectural and the decorative effect of tapestry, for otherwise the remote vistas tend to give the effect of holes in the wall, and the distance, dimmed by atmosphere, is too pallid and empty to be interesting as textile design. Yet the fact of perspective cannot be altogether denied. Often the designer can avoid or limit the problem by cutting off the farther views with a close screen of trees and buildings, and this has also the advantage of giving a strong backdrop against which the figures stand out firm and clear. But there are occasions in which a wider field is essential for the purposes of illustration. The problem is how to show a stretch of country and still keep it flat and full of detail. In the most skillful periods of tapestry design the difficulty was met by reducing the perspective to three or four sharply stepped levels of distance, laid one above the other in informal horizontal strips. Aerial perspective was disregarded, each strip being filled with details, all sharply drawn but diminishing in size. The scene was thus kept relatively flat, was adapted to flat figures, and was also filled with interesting details.

This fullness of detail is important in tapestries and is the source of much of their richness and charm. The great periods of weaving made lavish use of an amazing variety of incidents and effects: the pattern of a gown, jewels, the chasing or relief on a piece of armor, bits of decorative architecture, carved furniture, and the numerous household utensils, quaint in shape or suddenly vivid in color—all these, with the innumerable flowers, the veritable menagerie of beasts, real and imaginary, gayly patterned birds, as well as rivers, groves, and mountains, make up the properties with which the designer fills his spaces and creates a composition of inexhaustible resource and delight.