Fig. 19.
Spangles.
Enamel was soon added to the enrichment of these golden spangles, plates, or discs, which were enlarged to receive a design.[213] Of this style of embellishment we know none so striking as the saddle in the Museum at Munich, said to have been taken from a Turkish general in the fifteenth century. This is Italian of the finest cinque-cento style: blue velvet, covered with beautiful gold embroidery, and every vacant space filled with spangles of endless forms, and of precious goldsmiths’ and enamellers’ work. The Persian stirrups attached to it are of a totally different style of enamelling and jewellery, and speak for themselves, and for the school they came from.[214]
Pl. 33.
Window Hanging, by Gentil Bellini, from a Portrait of Mahomet II., property of Sir H. Layard.
Dr. Rock describes part of a chasuble wrought by Isabella of Spain and her maids of honour, in which the flowing design is worked out in small moulded spangles of gold and silver, set so as to overlap each other and give the effect of scales.
To a late period, gold and silver embroideries, enriched with spangles, have been lavished on the head-dresses and stomachers of the peasantry throughout the north of Europe and Switzerland.[215]
Pearls and gems, either threaded like beads, or in golden settings, are to be studied in the early pictures of the German and French schools; and the Anglo-Saxons excelled in such enrichments.
Sir Henry Layard has a portrait of the fifteenth century, of the Sultan Mahomet II., by Gentil Bellini, from which has been copied the accompanying beautiful embroidered design of a window-hanging.[216] The grace of the lines, and the delicate taste with which the gems are set in the work, are a lesson in art (pl. [33]).