ITALY
FIFTEENTH THROUGH SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
The history of tapestry in Italy is the story of the great families,
their romances and achievements. These families were those which
furnished rulers of provinces--kings, almost--which supplied popes as
well, and folk who thought a powerful man's pleasurable duty was to
interest himself seriously in the arts.
With the fine arts all held within her hand, it was but logical that
Italy should herself begin to produce the tapestries she was importing
from the land of the barbarians as those beyond her northern borders
were arrogantly called. First among the records is found the name of
the Gonzaga family which called important Flemish weavers down to
Mantua, and there wove designs of Mantegna, in the highest day of
their factory's production, about 1450.
Duke Frederick of Urbino is one of the early Italian patrons of
tapestry whose name is made unforgettable in this connexion by the
product of the factory he established toward the end of the Fifteenth
Century, at his court in the little duchy which included only the
space reaching from the Apennines to the Adriatic and from Rimini to
Ancona. The chief work of this factory was the _History of Troy_ which
cost the generous and enthusiastic duke a hundred thousand dollars.
The great d'Este family was one to follow persistently the art,
possibly because it habited the northern part of the peninsula and was
therefore nearer Flanders, but more probably because the great Duke of
Ferrara was animated by that superb pride of race that chafes at
rivalry; this, added to a wish to encourage art, and the lust of
possession which characterised the great men of that day.
It was the middle of the Sixteenth Century that Ercole II, the head of
the d'Este family, revived at Ferrara the factory of his family which
had suffered from the wars. The master-weavers were brought from
Flanders, not only to produce tapestries almost unequalled for
technical perfection, but to instruct local weavers. These two
important weavers were Nicholas and John Karcher or Carcher as it is
sometimes spelled, names of great renown--for a weaver might be almost
as well known and as highly esteemed as the artist of the cartoons in
those days when artisan's labour had not been despised by even the
great Leonardo. The foremost artist of the Ferrara works was chosen
from that city, Battista Dosso, but also active as designer was the
Fleming, Lucas Cornelisz. In Dosso's work is seen that exquisite and
dainty touch that characterises the artists of Northern Italy in their
most perfect period, before voluptuous masses and heavy scroll-like
curves prevailed even in the drawing of the human figure.
[Illustration: THE ANNUNCIATION
Italian Tapestry. Fifteenth Century. Collection of Martin A.
Ryerson, Esq., Chicago]
The House of Este had a part to play in the visit of the Emperor
Charles V when he elected to be crowned with Lombardy's Iron Crown, in
1530, at Bologna instead of in the cathedral at Monza where the relic
has its home. "Crowns run after me; I do not run after them," he
said, with the arrogance of success. At this reception at Bologna
we catch a glimpse of the brilliant Isabella d'Este amid all the
magnificence of the occasion. It takes very little imagination to
picture the effect of the public square at Bologna--the same buildings
that stand to-day--the square of the Palazzo Publico and the
Cathedral--to fancy these all hung with the immense woven pictures
with high lights of silk and gold glowing in the sun, and through this
magnificent scene the procession of mounted guards, of beautiful
ladies, of church dignitaries, with Charles V as the central object of
pomp, wearing as a clasp to the cope of state the great diamond found
on the field of Marat after the defeat of the Duke of Burgundy. The
members of the House of Este were there with their courts and their
proteges, their artists and their literati, as well as with their
display of riches and gaiety.
The manufactory at Ferrara was now allowed to sell to the public, so
great was its success, and to it is owed the first impetus given to
the weaving in Italy and the production of some of the finest hangings
which time has left for us to enjoy to-day. It is a sad commentary on
man's lust of novelty that the factory at Ferrara was ultimately
abandoned by reason of the introduction into the country of the
brilliant metal-illuminated leathers of Cordova. The factory's life
was comprised within the space of the years 1534 to 1597, the years in
which lived Ercole II and Alfonso II, the two dukes of the House of
Este who established and continued it.
It was but little wonder that the great family of the Medici looked
with envious eyes on any innovation or success which distinguished a
family which so nearly approached in importance its own. When Ercole
d'Este had fully proved the perfection of his new industry, the
weaving of tapestry, one of the Medici established for himself a
factory whereby he, too, might produce this form of art, not only for
the furtherance of the art, but to supply his own insatiable desires
for possession.
The _Arazzeria Medicea_ was the direct result of the jealousy of
Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1537-1574. It was established in
Florence with a success to be anticipated under such powerful
protection, and it endured until that patronage was removed by the
extinction of the family in 1737.
It was to be expected that the artists employed were those of note,
yet in the general result, outside of delicate grotesques, the drawing
is more or less the far-away echo of greater masters whose faults are
reproduced, but whose inspiration is not obtainable. After Michael
Angelo, came a passion for over-delineation of over-developed muscles;
after Raphael--came the debased followers of his favourite pupil,
Giulio Romano, who had himself seized all there was of the carnal in
Raphael's genius. But if there is something to be desired in the
composition and line of the cartoons of the Florentine factory, there
is nothing lacking in the consummate skill of the weavers.
[Illustration: ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by Nicholas Karcher]
[Illustration: ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by G. Rost]
The same Nicholas Karcher who set the standard in the d'Este works,
gave of his wonderful skill to the Florentines, and with him was
associated John Rost. These were both from Flanders, and although
trade regulations for tapestry workers did not exist in Italy, Duke
Cosimo granted each of these men a sufficient salary, a habitat, as
well as permission to work for outsiders, and in addition paid them
for all work executed for himself.
The subjects for the set of tapestries had entirely left the old
method of pious interpretation and of mediaeval allegory and revelled
in pictured tales of the Scriptures and of the gods and heroes of
mystical Parnassus and of bellicose Greece, not forgetting those
dainty exquisite impossibilities called grotesques. It was about the
time of the death of Cosimo I (1574), the founder of the Medicean
factory, that a new and unfortunate influence came into the
directorship of the designs. This was the appointment of Stradano or
Johan van der Straaten, to give his Flemish name, as dominating
artist.
He was a man without fine artistic feeling, one of those whose eye
delighted in the exaggerations of decadence rather than in the
restraint of perfect art. He was inspired, not by past perfection of
the Italians among whom he came to live, but by those of the decline,
and on this he grafted a bit of Northern philistinism. His brush was
unfortunately prolific, and at this time the fine examples of weaving
set by Rost and Karcher had been replaced by quicker methods so that
after 1600 the tapestries poured out were lamentably inferior.
Florentine tapestry had at this time much pretence, much vulgar
display in its drawing, missing the fine virtues of the time when
Cosimo I dictated its taste, the fine virtues of "grace, gaiety and
reflectiveness."
Leo X, the great Medicean pope, was elected in 1513, he who ordered
the great Raphael set of the _Acts of the Apostles_, but it was before
the establishment of important looms in Italy, so to Flanders and Van
Aelst are due the glory of first producing this series which afterward
was repeated many times, in the great looms of Europe. Leo X emulated
in the patronage of the arts his father Lorenzo, well-named
Magnificent. What Lorenzo did in Florence, Leo X endeavoured to do in
Rome; make of his time and of his city the highest expression of
culture. His record, however, is so mixed with the corruption of the
time that its golden glory is half-dimmed. It was from the
licentiousness of cardinals and the wanton revels of the Vatican in
Leo's time that young Luther the "barbarian" fled with horror to nail
up his theses on the doors of the churches in Wittenberg.
The history of tapestry in Italy at the Seventeenth Century was all in
the hands of the great families. Italy was not united under a single
royal head, but was a heterogeneous mass of dukedoms, of foreign
invaders, with the popes as the head of all. But Italy had experienced
a time of papal corruption, which had, as its effect, wars of
disintegration, the retarding of that unity of state which has only
recently been accomplished. State patronage for the factories was not
known, that steady beneficent influence, changeless through changing
reigns. Popes and great families regulated art in all its
manifestations, and who shall say that envy and rivalry did not act
for its advancement.
[Illustration: ITALIAN VERDURE. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
The desire to imitate the cultivation and elegance of Italy was
what made returning invaders carry the Renaissance into the rest of
Europe; and in a lesser degree the process was reversed when, in the
Seventeenth Century, a cardinal of the House of Barberini visited
France and, on viewing in the royal residences a superb display of
tapestries, his envy and ambition were aroused to the extent of
emulation. He could not, with all his power, possess himself of the
hangings that he saw, but he could, and did, arrange to supply himself
generously from another source. He was the powerful Francesco
Barberini, the son of the pope's brother (Pope Urban VIII, 1623-1644),
and it was he who established the Barberini Library and built from the
ruins of Rome's amphitheatres and baths the great palace which to-day
still dominates the street winding up to its aristocratic elegance. It
was to adorn this palace that Cardinal Francesco established ateliers
and looms and set artists and weavers to work. This tapestry factory
is of especial interest to America, for some of its chief hangings
have come to rest with us. _The Mysteries of the Life and Death of
Jesus Christ_, one set is called, and is the property of the Cathedral
of St. John, the Divine, in New York, donated by Mrs. Clarke.
Cardinal Francesco Barberini chose as his artists those of the school
of Pietro di Cortona with Giovanni Francesco Romanelli as the head
master. The director of the factory was Giacomo della Riviera allied
with M. Wauters, the Fleming.[13] The former was especially concerned
with the pieces now owned by the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine,
in New York, and which are signed with his name. Romanelli was the
artist of the cartoons, and his fame is almost too well known to dwell
upon. His portrait, in tapestry, hangs in the Louvre, for in Paris he
gained much fame at the Court of Louis XIV, where he painted portraits
of the Grand Monarch, who never wearied of seeing his own magnificence
fixed on canvas.
It was the hard fate of the Barberini family to lose power and wealth
after the death of their powerful member, Pope Urban VIII, in 1644.
Their wealth and influence were the shining mark for the arrows of
envy, so it was to be expected that when the next pope, Innocent X,
was elected, they were robbed of riches and driven out of the country
into France. This ended for a time the work of the tapestry factory,
but later the family returned and work was resumed to the extent of
weaving a superb series picturing scenes especially connected with the
glory of the family, and entitled _History of Urban VIII_.
Although Italy is growing daily in power and riches under her new
policy of political unity, there were dreary years of heavy expense
and light income for many of her famous families, and it was during
such an era that the Barberini family consented to let their
tapestries pass out from the doors of the palace they were woven to
decorate. In 1889, the late Charles M. Ffoulke, Esq., became the
possessor of all the Barberini hangings, and added them to his famous
collection. Thus through the enterprise and the fine artistic
appreciation of Mr. Ffoulke, is America able to enjoy the best
expression of Italian tapestry of the Seventeenth Century.
The part that Venice ever played in the history of tapestry is the
splendid one of consumer. In her Oriental magnificence she exhibited
in palace and pageant the superb products of labour which others had
executed. Without tapestries her big stone palaces would have lacked
the note of soft luxury, without coloured hangings her balconies would
have been but dull settings for languid ladies, and her water-parades
would have missed the wondrous colour that the Venetian loves. Yet to
her rich market flowed the product of Europe in such exhaustless
stream that she became connoisseur-consumer only, nor felt the need of
serious producing. Workshops there were, from time to time, but they
were as easily abandoned as they were initiated, and they have left
little either to history or to museums. Venice was, in the Sixteenth
Century, not only a buyer of tapestries for her own use, but one of
the largest markets for the sale of hangings to all Europe. Men and
monarchs from all Christendom went there to purchase. The same may be
said of Genoa, so that although these two cities had occasional
unimportant looms, their position was that of middleman--vendors of
the works of others. In addition to this they were repairers and had
ateliers for restoring, even in those days.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] E. Muentz, "La Tapisserie."