In England alone, the peasantry do no white work for home use, and we must suppose it has never been a domestic occupation. Indeed, the love of the needle is by no means an English national tendency, in the lower classes. Nothing but the plainest work is taught in our schools. Anything approaching to decorative art, with us, has been the accomplishment of educated women, and not the employment of leisure moments in the houses of the poor.
Semper, in “Der Stil,”[324] gives rules for white embroidery, and the reasons from which he deduces them are good. He says, that allowing it as a maxim that each textile has its own uses and its own beauties, we should place nothing on linen which would militate against its inherent qualities and merits; and that, as the great beauty of flax is its smoothness and purity, all projections and roughnesses should be avoided which would catch dust or throw a shadow. Carrying out this idea, it would appear that satin, and not lace stitches are therefore, the most suitable for this kind of decoration. The accepted rule for selecting the stitch for each piece of work is this: on stout grounds the thread should be round and rich, whereas delicate materials carry best the most refined and shining thread work; and in embroidering the smooth surface of linen fabrics, the flattest stitches are the most appropriate.
Part 3.
Opus Phrygium (or gold work).
Gold embroideries were by the Romans attributed to the Phrygians. All gold work was vaguely supposed to be theirs, as all other embroidery was included in the craft of the Plumarii in Rome.
It has been disputed whether needlework in gold preceded the weaving of flat gold or thread into stuffs, or whether it was an after-thought, and an enrichment of such textiles. I imagine that the embroidery was the first, and that the after-thought was the art of weaving gold. Babylonian embroideries appear to be of gold wire, as we see them in the Ninevite marbles.
An instance of the way golden embroideries were displayed among the Greeks is that of the Athenian peplos, which, as I have already said (p. 32), was worked by embroideresses under the superintendence of two Arrhephoræ of noble birth. It was either scarlet or saffron colour, and blazed with golden representations of the battles of the giants, or local myths and events in the history of Athens.[325]
The art of the Phrygians, who gave their name in Rome to all golden thread-work, has come down to us through the classic “auriphrygium” and the “orphreys” of the Middle Ages. Semper thinks that the flat gold embroidery was the first invented.[326]
The Phrygians had attained to the utmost perfection in tissue ornament when the Romans conquered them, and finding their art congenial to the growing luxury of Rome, they imported and domesticated it; both the people and their work retaining their national designation. Pliny, ignorant of the claims of the Chinese, gave to the Phrygians the credit of being the inventors of all embroidery.[327] The garments they thus decorated were called “phrygionæ,” and the work itself “opus Phrygium.” The term “auriphrygium,” at first given to work in gold only, was in time applied to all embroidery that admitted gold into its composition; and hence the English mediæval term, “orphreys.”