The Meeting of Abraham and Mlchizedek , a tapestry cartoon by Sir Peter Paul Rubens
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A LOOK AT TAPESTRY
What is a tapestry? It is a woven fabric made from threads of different colors to form a picture or an ornamental design. The most spectacular examples of tapestry are large pictorial wall hangings, but it has been used for many purposes, including covers, cushions and upholstery for furniture, carpets and articles of dress. In the process of manufacture it is made in precisely the same way, but fine pictures tapestries are much more elaborate and costlier than carpets.
The most commonly used material for tapestry is wool, though silk has historically been used in China and Japan. Linen, cotton and even gold and silver have also been employed.
Tapestry designs usually picture scenes from history, legend, battles or mythology, events from the bible, flowers, conventional design and heraldic devices or coat of arms. Many of the best tapestry designs are flat and decorative. Flowers, shrubs and trees are often a major part of design.
From the earliest times tapestry played a role in decorative and domestic usage. The ceremonies of the courts and the Church were often very grand with the use of tapestry, yet the flexibility of the woven pictures meant easy storage and transportation for such ceremonies. Records show that tapestry was used for royal occasions, as temporary chambers, during religious celebrations and simply as hangings for protection from drafts within the cold stone halls of the medieval European castles and chateau.
When nobility traveled they took tapestries with them, often of huge size, that could be arranged as mobile partitions to form a chamber. Frequently these mobile partitions were made as matching sets, but the fortunes of war have resulted in sets becoming widely scattered.
One of the tragedies that have befallen these fine works of art is that many have been cut into fragments. Centuries may pass before all the sections are recombined. Another type of deliberate destruction that has cost us, the viewing public, many splendid examples of the weavers art has been the burning of such tapestries to recover the gold and silver threads in them.
Let me touch on a bit of history. Tapestry, which requires a simple loom, is of a very early origin. Knowledge of its early history is based chiefly on finds from the dry soil of Egypt. Various clothes and articles of dress from the tombs of Thutmose IV and Tutankhamen (15th-14th century BC) have patterns of hieroglyphics, lotus flowers and other ornaments woven in linen thread of various colors. For instance, bands of woolen tapestry from about the 4th century BC, found at Pazyryk in Inner Asia (China and Outer Mongolia), show human figures and lions in a Persian style. Although there are no examples left, writers of antiquity proclaim the magnificence of Babylonian and Assyrian tapestries.
Tapestry weaving continued to flourish in western Asia in the first millennium before Christ. From the 3rd century A.D. remains of tapestry have been found in great abundance in Coptic graves in Egypt and in smaller numbers at various Middle Eastern and Inner Asian sites.
Occasionally silk and gold threads was used, but the tapestries are made chiefly of wool. Most of the examples we have are ornamental bands and panels from articles of dress, but there are also some large scale pictorial hangings exist, such as one depicting Nereids, and another showing the Virgin and Child with Saints. From the 4th century, fine silk tapestry hangings and church vestments were produced in Byantium. If the climate conditions for textile preservation in the Near East had been more favorable, it might have been possible to theorize today that Syria was a great center of tapestry weaving, especially at the start of the Christian era.
There are literary descriptions of the weaving of tapestry in ancient Greece and Rome. In the Odyssey, Homer (6th century B.C.) describes Penelope working on a tapestry that was unraveled each night as she waited for Ulysses. The Roman poet, Ovid (43 BC-AD 17), in the Metamorphoses describes the tapestry looms used by Minerva and Arachne in their mythological weaving contest. During the time of the Empire, the Romans seemed to import quite a number of tapestry from Greece.
I will not touch on the Chinese, Japanese and Pre-Columbian tapestry history, but there are many fine examples of tapestries produced by these countries.
Tapestry weaving was done by Egyptian Christians from the 3rd to the 12th century A.D. Their tapestries bridged the art of the ancient world and art of the middle ages. Like the art of stained glass, western European tapestry flourished largely from the beginnings of the Gothic period in the 13th century until now. Few pre-Gothic tapestries have survived, although numerous documents, dating from as early as the 8th century, describe tapestries with figurative ornamentation that decorated churches and monasteries in western Europe. Excluding the Bayeux tapestry of 1083, which was embroidered instead of woven, the oldest preserved wall tapestry woven in medieval Europe is hanging in Cologne, Germany in the church of St. Gereon. This seven-colored wool tapestry was though to have been made in Cologne in the early 11th century.
In the Middle Ages, much tapestry weaving was done in convents and monasteries. As the demand for tapestries grew, workshops, or "ateliers," were started.
Professional workshops produced sets for castles and churches. One of the most famous medieval tapestry sets is the seven piece set; Angers Apocalypse, begun in 1377 in Paris. A set can be any number of tapestry woven on the same theme.
Several centers were famed for their tapestry. A few included Paris, Arras, Burgundy, Antwerp, Brussels, Tournai and Lille. Sometimes the tapestry will take the name of the city where it was made. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, Hamlet drives his dagger through the Arras(tapestry) and kills Polonius, who was hiding behind it.
The tapestries, during this period, were very elaborate with floral backgrounds, such as The Hunt of the Unicorn series. They were known as millefleurs, a French word that means a thousand flowers.
In 1422 Paris was taken by King Henry V of England, and the tapestry art was discouraged. The town Arras was destroyed by the English in 1435 and the tapestry industry was destroyed.
By the 16th century, the Flemish weavers had set up workshops throughout Europe and took the art as far afield as Spain, Italy and England. By the 17th century, an important tapestry industry was established with the aid of imported Flemish weavers. The two most famous factories were the Gobelins in Paris and the manufactory at Beauvais is also found in Franch.
Tapestry are made on two types of hand looms: the high warp in which the warp threads run vertical; and the low warp, or table loom, in which they run horizontally. The high warp looms are the ones used to produce the elaborate pictorial tapestry, the low warp looms are used to produce the still life and the non-pictorial decorative compositions. As they are still done today.
Medieval weavers used plants and insects to make their dyes. Because of the they only had about twenty colors to use for their tapestries. For example, yellow came from Saffron and woad produced blue.
Craftsmen produce the tapestry by a special process of weaving with an implement called a broche. They do all they work by hand. They weave the design into the fabric itself by winding the weft or woof (horizontal) threads around the warp (vertical) threads. They press the stitches tightly together against each other so that the colored woof yarns entirely cover the undyed warp yarns. Unlike the rug maker, the tapestry weaver faces the back of the fabric as he works. A mirror on the opposite side of the warp allows him to see the right side of the cloth as he weaves the design. The weaver follows a full size pattern called a cartoon, which is drawn and colored by an artist. Such famous painters as Rubens, Goya, Boucher, Raphael and the Van Eycks have designed cartoons for tapestry. The high warp weaver usually has the cartoon hanging beside or behind him after he has drawn it on the warp. More than one tapestry can be woven from a single cartoon.
A border of a cartoon was often redesigned every time it was commissioned, since each patron would have a different heraldic device or a personal preference for ornamental design.
Borders were frequently designed by an artist different from the one who conceived the cartoon for the central narrative or principal image.
Go to The Full Bayeux Tapestry"The celebrated Bayeux Tapestry in Bayeux, France, however, is really an example of elaborate embroidery. It is made up of a series of scenes from the life of Harold and of the invasion and conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. Besides being an outstanding example of medieval art, the work has preserved the knowledge of medieval costumes, military equipment and tactics. It can be studied by students of armour, fortifications, ships, architecture and even astronomy (the tapestry includes a representation of Haley's comet of April 24-30, 1066). Because of comparison with written works of the time, this tapestry is accurate for displaying life and manners of the 11th century.
The tapestry is a band of linen 231 feet long and 20 inches wide, now a light brown with age, on which are embroidered more than 70 scenes. Along the top and bottom run decorative borders and through the pictured story is stitched a latin narrative. The pictures, borders and latin are embroidered in worsted wools of eight colors. There has been much controversy as to when and where it was made and for whom, but there is now general agreement it was commissioned by Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, William the Conqueror's half brother.
Created for more practical than just aesthetic reasons, tapestry is still another example of man's ability to create beautiful ageless works of art.
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