1. RAW MATERIALS.
The history of an art must, more or less, include that of its raw material.
This is too true to be disputed, but in the art of embroidery it opens out such endless avenues, through such vast regions of technical study, that we must acknowledge the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of including in one volume even a tithe of the information already collected.
I shall, therefore, only dedicate a few pages to the history of those fibres which have always been most important in the different phases of our civilization.
Among books on textile materials, I must again name the “Textrinum Antiquorum,” by Yates. His premature death, and the loss that the world of art and manufacture has sustained by the chain of his invaluable researches being broken, cannot be appreciated but through the study of the first and only volume of this already rare book, from which I venture to quote largely.
Semper’s “Der Stil” is a work of reference on this subject, so valuable that it should, by a good translation, be placed within the reach of non-German scholars.
From Colonel Yule’s “Marco Polo,” and his abundant notes, we learn much of Asiatic textile art in the thirteenth century, and its early traditions in the immutable East, and Sir G. Birdwood’s books on this Indian art are most instructive.
Egyptian textiles are splendidly illustrated by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson. All these modern writers quote Pliny and the Periplus;[130] and Pliny quotes all the classic authors, from Homer to his day. Here is a wide field for gathering information regarding the materials for embroidery in past ages.
When we use the phrase “raw material” so glibly, with an æsthetic contempt for that which the art of man has neither manipulated nor reorganized, we show our own coarse appreciation, if not ignorance, of the wonderful inherent beauty and microscopic delicacy of form, colour, and substance of those materials which we fashion for our own uses.
Few know the structure of the tender filaments of wool, flax, cotton, and silk; or that each has its peculiar form and attributes, and its individual capabilities for the purposes for which they appear to us to have been created, i.e. the clothing and adornment of man’s dress and his home.