India sent to Europe more art in gold thread than has ever been produced amongst us from our own workshops.[217]
The people of Goa, mostly Arabs, embroidered for the Portuguese those wonderful fabrics, glittering with gold and radiant with colours, which cover the beds and hang the rooms throughout Portugal and Spain.[218] The precious metals (often forming the whole grounding) were employed without stint; the patterns being either embroidered in coloured silks and gold; or on velvets or satins, with gold alone or mixed with silver.
The fine gold threads for embroidery, which have preserved their brilliancy for so many centuries, such as we find worked in Charlemagne’s dalmatic, in Aelfled’s maniple, and in the mitres of Thomas à Becket, are certainly Oriental. To England they came in the bales of the merchants who brought us our silk, and even our needles, from India. Later we imported and copied the different ways of giving effect to inferior metals, and the Spaniard’s gilt parchment thread reached us from their Moorish manufactories.[219]
Designs were sometimes, in the sixteenth century, worked in gold twisted with coloured silks, sometimes only stitched down with them. The badges of the Order of the Dragon, instituted by the Emperor Sigismund, were thus embroidered, and placed on the cloaks of the knights. The work was so perfect that it resembled jewels of enamelled gold. Two ancient ones are in the Museum at Munich.
Gold or silver or base metal wire was, in the later Middle Ages and down to our own times, much employed in the form of what is called “purl,” i.e. coiled wire cut into short lengths, threaded on silk, and sewn down. German, Italian, and English embroideries were often enriched with this fabric. Sometimes the wire was twisted with coloured silks before it was coiled. There are beautiful specimens of this work of the days of Queen Elizabeth.
Still, throughout Europe the best works were carried out with the best materials, and these always came from the East. But we sometimes find that the pressure of circumstances has for a time caused the employment of adulterated metals that have perished; and thus many fine works of art have been spoiled.[220]
The use of bad materials has therefore been as unfortunate for art as that of pure gold, which has tempted so many ignorant persons to burn golden embroideries and tapestries, and melt down the ore they contain. How little of all that human skill and invention have carefully elaborated is now preserved to us! To gold and silver textiles their materials have been often a fatal dower.
It has sometimes puzzled any but the most experienced embroiderers to distinguish between the stuffs woven with the golden threads on the surface, and finely brocaded or patterned in the loom; and those other cloths, embroidered by hand, which have been so manipulated that hardly an atom of the gold can be detected at the back. This is done by a technical mode of treating the surface, which is more easily shown than described. The gold is really drawn into the spaces between the threads of the canvas or linen grounding, but never pulled through. For many reasons this is an advantage, and when executed cunningly, as it was in England in the twelfth century, it is rich, beautiful, lasting, and economical. It is a peculiar mark of the “opus Anglicanum,” and it is to be seen in the mitre at Munich, where this stitch is employed on a white satin ground;[221] also in the working of the two pluvials at San Giovanni Laterano at Rome, and at the Museum at Bologna, as well as that at Madrid, which are all three English of the thirteenth century, by design as well as by stitches.
I cannot close this chapter without naming the many schools of gold embroidery in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The King of Bavaria has an establishment for gold work, and this is very finely carried out, highly raised, and richly designed.[222] In Spain there is also a Royal School, where stately works are executed.
It is to be regretted that the modern designs are motiveless, and not so beautiful as the old ones, and it is very difficult to have any ancient piece of work copied exactly. Little modernisms creep in wherever the pattern has to be fitted into a new shape; for the accomplished needlewoman is seldom an artist.