Spanish Altar Frontal, Gold Embroidery XVII. Ceny
Gabrielle of Bourbon and Isabella, sister of Louis XI., spent their lives in preparing and overlooking fine works in their own apartments, and assembled around them noble damsels for this purpose. Anne of Brittany, who lived in an artistic atmosphere, had her own workshop of embroidery. Pictorial design now asserted its dominion over needlework, which accepted it, just as it had been influenced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by metal-work motives, and, before then, by the art of mosaic.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish plâteresque embroideries (adopted and modified in Flanders and in France), consisting of heavy gold and silver arabesques of mutilated vegetable forms, superseded the graceful Renaissance of the classical taste.[531] These Spanish embroideries forced their way by their gorgeousness, in spite of their want of real beauty. They varied their effects with pearls, corals, and precious stones[532] (plate [69]).
Spain, though she was much despoiled during the Peninsular War by her French invaders, yet still possesses some of the finest ecclesiastical work in the sacristies of Seville, Granada, Burgos, Toledo, Segovia, and Barcelona. Don Juan F. Riano[533] says that Toledo is a perfect museum of the work of the sixteenth century.
Sicilian and Neapolitan ecclesiastical needlework showed the Spanish taste of their masters, but not its perfection. The use of pearls, coral, and beads[534] prevailed, and we may in general affix its date and its origin to each specimen by the silver largely used in the two kingdoms of Sicily and rarely elsewhere; also by the extreme brilliancy or rather the gaudiness of its colouring.
English ecclesiastical work came suddenly to an end at the Reformation. What was not destroyed is to be found in the possession of the old Roman Catholic families who have religiously collected the residue, preserved by concealment or by being overlooked; and in the wardrobes of Continental sacristies.[535]
But the church decorations of France, Germany, Flanders, Spain, and Italy have meantime, for the last 300 years, gone through all the variations of lay styles, emanating from anything but ecclesiastical motives. First, the Renaissance’s semi-pagan (so-called) arabesques; then the Spanish plâteresque, which was a revolt against their own bastard Moorish-Gothic; next, the “Louis Quatorze,” followed by the “Louis Quinze” and the “Louis Seize,” light, frivolous, and elegant, essentially social, and not serious.[536] Then a return to the classical of the Empire; and finally, since the beginning of this century, to a conglomerate, lawless imitation of forms and styles, utterly meaningless and uninteresting, as well as wanting in ecclesiastical dignity and decorum. We are glad to believe that we are ourselves striving to reconstruct some sort of style that shall be able to express poetical and religious ideas, especially in our church decorations. At any rate, it must be of some use to understand the hidden springs which once raised ecclesiastical embroideries, and especially those of England, so high as objects of beauty, worthy to adorn the house of God, and to be for centuries valued as monuments of pious industry and thoughtful art.
One of these hidden springs and ancient underlying motives was the symbolism which gave a religious intention to the smallest design for the humblest use, provided that its purpose was the service of the Church.
Sacred symbolism is a subject to which I have alluded more than once; and it has played such an important part in the construction and growth of ecclesiastical art, that I cannot but give a short notice to the subject under this aspect.
Symbolism in art is what metaphor is in speech. It is the representation to the eye of an object which suggests something else besides itself.