IDENTIFICATIONS
Identifying tapestries is like playing a game, like the solving of a
piquant problem, like pursuing the elusive snark. I know of no keener
pleasure than that of standing before a tapestry for the first time
and giving its name and history from one's own knowledge, and not from
a museum catalogue or a friend's recital. The latter sources of
information may be faulty, but your own you can trust, for by
delightful association with tapestries and their literature you have
become expert. The catalogue is to be read, the friend is to be heard,
in all humility, because these supply points that one may not know;
but, who shall not say that an intensely human gratification is
experienced when the owner of a tapestry with the Brussels mark tells
you that it is a Gobelins, or one with the _History of Alexander_
tells you it is the only set of that series ever woven, and you know
better.
The first thing that strikes the eye and the intelligence is the
drawing, the general school to which it belongs. There is matter for
placing the piece in its right class. It might be said to place it in
its right century or quarter century, but that tapestries were so
often repeated in later times, the cartoon having no copyright and
therefore open to all countries in all centuries. Next, then, to fix
it better, comes a study of the border, for therein lies many a
secret of identity, and borders were of the epoch in which the weaving
was done, even though the cartoon for the centre came from an earlier
time.
Last, as a finishing touch, come the marks in the galloon. This is put
last because so often they are absent, and so often unknown, the sign
of some ancient weaver lost in the mists of years, although a
well-known mark so instantly identifies, that study of other details
is secondary.
But under these three generalising heads comes all the knowledge of
the savant, for the truth about tapestries is most elusive. Knowledge
is to be gained only by a lover of the objects, a lover willing to
spend long hours in association with his love, prowling among
collections, comparing, handling, studying designs, discerning
colours, searching for details, and indulging withal a nice feeling
for textures, a vision that feels them even without touch of the hand.
If the study of design has not given a keen scent for the vague
quality which we call "feeling," the eye would better be trained still
further, for herein lies the secret of success in difficult places,
and not only that, but if he have not this sense he is deprived of one
of the most subtile thrills that the arts can excite.
But this sense is not a matter of untrained intuition. It is the
flower of erudition, the flame from a full heart, or whatever dainty
thing you choose to call it. It has its origin primarily in keen
observation of the various important schools of design that have
interested the world for centuries. We unconsciously augment it even
in following the side-path of history in this modest volume. Our
studies here are but those of a summer morn or a winter eve, yet they
are in vain if they have not set up a measuring standard or two within
the mind.
GOTHIC DRAWING
First, and dearest to the lover of designs, comes the Gothic, the
style practised by those conscientious romantic children-in-art, the
Primitives. Their characteristics in tapestry are much the same as in
painting, as in sculpture; for, weavers, painters, book-makers,
sculptors, were all expressing the same matter, all following the same
fashion. Therefore, to one's help comes any and every work of the
primitive artists. Making allowance for the difference in medium, the
same religious feeling is seen in the Burgundian set of _The
Sacraments_ in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, as is found
in stone carving of the time which decorated churches and tombs.
The figures in the Gothic tapestries show a dignified restraint, a
solemnity of pose, recalling the deadly seriousness with which
children play the game of grown-ups. The artists of that day had to
keep to their traditions; to express without over-expression, was
their difficult task (as it is ours), but they had behind them the
rigidity of the Byzantine and Early Christian, so that every free
line, every vigorous pose or energetic action, was forging ahead into
a new country, a voyage of adventure for the daring artist. Quite
another affair was this from modern restraint which consists in
pruning down the voluptuous lines following the too high Renaissance.
Faces are serious, but not animated. Dress reveals charming matter
concerning stuffs and modes in that far time. But apart from these
characteristics is the one great feature of the arrangement of the
figures, almost without perspective. And therein lies one immense
superiority of the ancient designs of tapestries over the modern as
pure decorative fabric. Men and women are placed with their
accessories of furniture or architecture all in the foreground, and
each man has as many cubits to his stature as his neighbour, not being
dwarfed for perspective, but only for modesty, as in the case of the
Lady's companion in the _Unicorn_ series--but that series is of a
later Gothic time than the early works of Arras.
A noticeable feature is that the centre of vision is placed high on
the tapestry. The eye must look to the top to find all the strength of
the design. The lower part is covered with the sweeping robes or
finished figures of the folk who are playing their silent parts for
the delight of the eye. This covers well the space with large and
simple motive. No recourse is had to such artifice as distant lands
seen in perspective, nor angles of rooms, but all is flat, brought
frankly into intimate association with the room that is lived in, so
that these people of other days seem really to enter into our very
presence, to thrust vitally their quaint selves into our company. This
feature of simple flatness is in so great contrast to later methods of
drawing that one becomes keenly conscious of it, and deeply satisfied
with its beauty. The purpose of decoration and of furnishing seems to
be most adequately met when the attention is retained within the
chamber and not led out of it by trick of background nor lure of
perspective, no matter how enticing are the distant landscapes or how
noble the far palace of royalty. Thus the Primitives struck a more
intimately human note than the artists of later and more sophisticated
times.
The more archaic the tapestry, the simpler the motive, is the rule.
The early weavers of Arras and of France were telling stories as
naturally as possible, perhaps because the ways of their times were
simple, and brushed aside all filigree with a directness almost
brutal; but also, perhaps, because technique was not highly developed,
either in him who drew with a pencil or him who copied that drawing in
threads of silk and wool and gold. Whatever the cause, we can but
rejoice at the result, which, alas, is shown to us by but lamentably
few remnants outside of museums. These very archaic simple pieces are,
for the most part, work of the latter part of the Fourteenth Century
and the first part of the Fifteenth, and as the history of tapestry
shows, were almost invariably woven in France or in Flanders. At the
end of the time mentioned, designs, while retaining much the same
characteristics already described, became more ambitious, more
complicated, and introduced many scenes into one piece. This is easily
proved by a comparison of the illustration of _The Baillee des Roses_,
or _The Sacraments_, with _The Sack of Jerusalem_, all in the
Metropolitan Museum.
The idea in the earliest Gothic cartoons--if the word may be allowed
here, was to make a single picture, a unified group. Into the later
cartoons came the fashion of multiplying these groups on one field, so
that a tapestry had many points of interest, many scenes where
tragedies or comedies were being enacted. Ingenious were the ways of
the early artist to accomplish the separation between the various
scenes, which were sometimes divided merely by their own attitudes, as
folk dispose themselves in groups in a large drawing-room; and
sometimes were divided by natural obstructions, like brooks and trees,
or by columns.
Later yet, all the antique eccentricities passed away, and the laws of
perspective and balance were fully developed in an art which has an
unspeakable charm. All the things that modern art has decreed as crude
or childish has passed away, and the sweet flower of the Gothic
perfection unfolded its exquisite beauty. This Gothic perfection was
the Golden Age of tapestry.
ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL
The use of architecture in the old Gothic designs makes a pleasing
necessity of fastening our attention upon it. In the very oldest
drawing the sole use is to separate one scene from another, in the
same hanging. For this purpose slender columns are used. It is
intensely interesting to note that these are the same variety of
column that meets us on every delightful prowl among old relics of
North Europe, relics of the days when man's highest and holiest energy
expressed itself at last in the cathedral. Those slender stems of the
northern Gothic are verily the stems of plants or of aspiring young
trees, strong when grouped, dainty when alone, and forming a refined
division for the various scenes in a picture. It must be confessed
that in the medium of aged wool they sometimes totter with the effect
of imminent fall, but that they do not fall, only inspires the
illusion that they belong to the marvellous age of fairy-tale and
fancy.
The careful observer takes a keen look at these columns as a clue to
dates. The shape of the shaft, whether round or hectagonal, the
ornament on the capitals, are indications. It is not easy to know how
long after a design is adopted its use continues, but it is entirely a
simple matter to know that a tapestry bearing a capital designed in
1500 could not have been made prior to that time.
The columns, later on, took on a different character. They lifted
slender shafts more ornamented. It is as though the restless men of
Europe had come up from the South and had brought with them
reminiscences of those tender models which shadowed the art of the
Saracens, the art which flavoured so much the art of Southern Europe.
The columns of many a cloister in Italy bear just such lines of
ornament, including the time when the brothers Cosmati were
illuminating the pattern with their rich mosaic.
Then, later still, the columns burst into the exquisite bloom of the
early Renaissance, their character profoundly different, but their use
the same, that of dividing scenes from one another on the same woven
picture. But as any allusion to the Renaissance seems to thrust us far
out onto a radiant plain, let us scamper back into the mysterious wood
of the Gothic and pick up a few more of its indicative pebbles, even
as did Hans and Gretel of fairyland.
A use of Gothic architectural detail gives a religious look to
tapestry, quite other than the later introduction of castles. These
castle strongholds of the Middle Ages wasted no daintiness of
construction, nor favoured light ornament, nor dainty hand. They were,
par excellence, places of defence against the frequent enemy; so, in
bastion and tower they were piled in curving masses around the scenes
of the later Gothic tapestries. Even more, they began to play an
important part in the _mise en scene_, and were drawn on tiny scale as
habitations of the actors in the play who thrust heads from windows no
larger than their throats, or who gathered in gigantic groups on
disproportioned tessellated roofs.
Occasionally a lovely lady in distress is seen in fine raiment praying
high Heaven for deliverance from the top of a feudal pile not half as
high as her stately figure. Laws of proportion are quite lost in this
naive way of telling a story, and one wonders whether the wise old
artist of other times, with his rigid solemnity was heroically
overcoming difficulties of traditional technique, or whether he was
smiling at the infantile taste of his wealthy patrons. The past
fashion in history was to record only the lives and expressions of
those great in power. The artist is ever the servant of such, but may
he not have had his own private thoughts, unpurchaseable, unsold, and
therefore only for our divining. There must have been a sense of
humour then as now, and twinkling eyes with which to see it.
GOTHIC FLOWERS
Always, in studying a Gothic tapestry, we find flowers. The flowers of
nature, they are, a simple nature at that, and never to be thought of
in the same day as the gorgeous, expansive, proud flowers of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century decoration. Those splendid later
blossoms flaunt their richness with assured swagger and demand of man
his homage, quite forgetting it is the flower's best part to give.
Botticelli had not outgrown the Gothic flowers when he sprinkled them
on the ambient air and floating robe of his chaste and dreamy _Venus_,
nor when he set them about the elastic tripping feet of the _Spring_.
He knew their simple power, and so do we. Scarce a Gothic tapestry is
complete without them, happily for those bent on identification, for
rarely can one discover them without the same thrill that accompanies
the discovery of the first violets and snowdrops in the awakening
woods.
The old weavers set them low in the picture, used them as
space-fillers wherever space lay happily before them, and they never
exaggerated their size, a virtue of which the full Renaissance cannot
boast. They are the simplest sort of flowers, the corolla of petals
turning as frankly toward the observer as the sunflower turns toward
her god, and little bells hanging as regularly as a chime. These are
their characteristics, easily recognisable and expressing the
unsophisticated charm of the creations of honest childish hands.
Irrelevancy is theirs, too. They spring from stones or pavement as
well as from turf or garden, and thus express the more ardently their
love for man and for close association with him. When they are seen
after this manner, it is sure that the early men have set them, just
as Shakespeare, at the same epoch, set violets blue and daisies pied,
cowslip, rosemary "for remembrance," and other familiar dainties, in
the grim foundation stones of his tragedies.
A comparison of the different hangings available to the amateur, or of
the pictured examples given in this book, will reveal more than can be
well set down with the pen. The use of flowers in the set of _The
Baillee des Roses_ is exceptional, in that here the flowers form a
harmonious decorative scheme and are at the same time an important
part of the story which is pictured.
In other earliest examples they playfully peep within the limits of
the hanging. Important use is, however, made of them in that
altogether entrancing set of _The Lady and the Unicorn_, where they
indicate the beauties of a fascinating park in which the delicate lady
and her attendant led a wondrous life guarded by two beasts as
fabulous as faithful, and the whole region of leaves and petals but
serving as a paradise for delectable white rabbits and piquant
monkeys. Could any modern indicate by sophistry of brush or brain so
intoxicating a fairyland, so gracious a field of dear delights?
COSTUMES
A minute study of all the details of costume and accessories is one of
the measuring sticks with which we count the years of a tapestry's
life. This applies more particularly to the work prior to the
Renaissance, to the time when all characters were dressed in the mode
of the day--another evidence of that ingenuousness that delights us
who have passed the period where it is possible.
As we have noted before, a costume cannot be used before its time, so,
as much as anything can, the study of its details prevents us from
going too far back with its date. When one has reached the point of
identifying a Gothic tapestry to where the exact decade is questioned,
the century having been ascertained, a careful study of costumes
outside the region of tapestries is necessary. This leads one into a
department all by itself and means delightful hours in libraries
poring over illustrated books on costume. It means to learn in what
manner our gods and heroes of fact and fancy habited themselves, how
Berengaria wore her head-dress and Jehane de Bourgogne her brocades,
and how the eternally various sleeve differed in its fashioning for
both men and women.
Head-dresses were of such size and variety that they form a study in
themselves, and dates have been fixed by these alone. The turban in
its evolution is an interesting study, and makes one wonder if that,
too, did not wander north from the Moorish occupancy of Spain and the
wave of inspiration which flowed unceasingly from the Orient in the
years when Europe created little without inspiration from outside.
A patriarchal bearded man in sacerdotal robes of costly elegance
seriously impresses his fellows all through the Gothic tapestries, and
his rival is a swaggering, important person, clean-shaven, in full
brocaded skirt, fur-bound, whose attitude declares him royal or near
it. The first of these is the model nowadays for stage kings, and even
a woman's toilet must vaunt itself to get notice beside his gorgeous
array. He wears about his waist a jewelled girdle of great splendour,
and on his head some impressive matter of either jewels or draping.
His face is usually full-bearded, but even when smooth, youth is not
expressed upon him. Youths of the same time are more _debonnaire_, are
springing about, clean-faced, clad in short, belted pelisse, showing
sprightly legs equally ready to step quickly towards a lovely lady or
to a field of battle.
Soldiers--let a woman hesitate to speak of their dress and arms in any
tone but that of self-depreciating humility. Suffice it to say that in
the early work they wore the armour of the time, whether the scene
depicted were an event of history cotemporaneous, or of the time of
Moses. Fashions in dress changed with deliberation then, and it is to
the arms carried by the men that we must sometimes look for exactness
of date.
LETTERING
The presence of letters is often noticed in hangings of the
Fourteenth, Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries. It was a fashion
eminently satisfactory, a great assistance to the observer. It helped
tell the story, and, as these old pictures had always a story to tell,
it was entirely excusable--at least, so it seems to one who has stood
confounded before a modern painting without a catalogue or other
indication as to the why of certain agitated figures.
The lettering was, in the older Gothic, explicit and unstinted, in
double or quadruple lines, in which case it counts as decoration
banded across top or bottom. Again, it is as trifling as a word or two
affixed to the persons of the play to designate them. This lettering
may be French or Latin.
EARLY BACKGROUNDS
Backgrounds of the early Fifteenth Century deal much in
conventionalised, flat patterns, but fifty or sixty years later, when
figures began to be more crowded, there was but little space left
unoccupied by the participants in the allegory, and this was filled by
the artifices of architecture or herbage that formed the divisions
into the various scenes. Later the designing artists decided to let
into the picture the light of distant fields and skies, and thus was
introduced the suggestion of space outside the limit of the canvas.
LATER DRAWING
After the Gothic drawing, came the avalanche of the Renaissance. That
altered all. The Italian taste took precedence, and from that time on
the cartoons of tapestries represent modern art, trailing through its
various fashions or modes of the hour. The purest Renaissance is
direct from the Italian artist, in tapestry as well as in painting,
but it is interesting to see the maladroitness of the Flemish hand
when left to draw cartoons for himself after the new manner.
After the Renaissance came exaggeration and lack of sincerity; then
the improvement of the Seventeenth Century, notably in France, and
after that the dainty fancies of the Eighteenth Century, and here we
are dealing with art so modern that it needs no elucidation. The
drawing in tapestries is a subject as fascinating as it is
inexhaustible, but, however much one may read on it, nothing equals
actual association with as many tapestries as are available, for the
eye must be trained by vision and not by intellectual process alone.