IDENTIFICATIONS (_Continued_)
If the amateur can have the fortune to see in the same hour a tapestry
of the early Fifteenth Century, and one a hundred years later, and
then one about 1550, from Brussels, drawn by an Italian artist, he has
before him an exposition of tapestry weaving in its golden age when it
sweeps through its greatest periods and phases to marvellous
perfection. The earliest example gives acquaintance with that almost
fabled time of the Gothic primitives in art; the second shows the
highest development of that art under the influence of civilisation,
and the third shows the obsession of the new art of the Renaissance.
It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that after the revival of classic
art the power of producing spontaneous Gothic was lost forever. From
that time on, every drawing has had certain characteristics, certain
sophistications that the artist cannot escape except in a deliberate
copy.
Modern art, we call it. In tapestry it began with a freedom of drawing
in figures, and an adoption of classic ornament and architecture. In
this connexion it is interesting to note the introduction of Greek or
Roman detail in the columns that divide the scenes, to see saints
gathered by temples of classic form instead of Gothic. If Renaissance
details appear in a hanging called Gothic, it is easy to see that the
piece was woven after Europe was infected with modern art, and this is
an assistance in placing dates; at least, it checks the tendency to
slip back too far in antiquity, a tendency of which we in a new
country are entirely guilty.
Lest too long a lingering on the subject of design become wearisome, a
mention of later designs is made briefly. The simplicity of the early
Renaissance, the perfection of the high Renaissance, are both shown in
tapestry as well as in paintings, and so, too, is exemplified the
inflation that ended in tiresome exuberance.
After the fruit was ripe it fell into decay. After Sixteenth Century
perfection, Seventeenth Century designs fell of their own overweight,
figures were too exaggerated, draperies billowed out as in a perpetual
gale, architecture and landscapes were too important, and tapestries
became frankly pictures to attract the attention. To this class of
design belong all those monstrosities which reflected and distorted
the art of Raphael, and which have been intimately associated with
Scriptural subjects down to our own times.
After Raphael, Rubens. Familiarity with this heroic painter is the key
to placing all the magnificent designs similar to the set of _Antony
and Cleopatra_ (Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
Then came the easily recognisable designs of the French ateliers of
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently
brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The
earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual,
appealing to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and
in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly
personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in the _Life of
the King_; in the next reign, slipping into the pleasures of the
_Royal Hunts_, from which the descent was easy into depicting nothing
higher than the soft loveliness of the fantastic life of the time as
led by those of high estate. From Lebrun to Watteau one can trace the
gradual seductive decline, where heroic ideal lowers softly in
alluring decadence into a mere tickling of the senses. And at this
time the productions of great tapestries stopped.
Before leaving the review of drawing or design, it is well to recall
that the fleeting fashions of the day usually set the models, not in
the manner of treatment which we have been considering broadly, but in
the subject of designs. For example, the tendency to religious and
morality subjects in the Gothic, the love for Greek gods and heroes in
the Renaissance, the glorification of kings and warriors at all times,
and the portrayal of royal pleasures in modern times. The months of
the year were woven in innumerable designs and formed an endless theme
for artists' ingenuity during and after the Renaissance.
BORDERS
It is but natural that, with the expansion in drawing, the freedom
given the pencil, imagination leaped outside the pictured scene and
worked fantastically on the border, and it is to the border that we
turn for many a mark of identification. The subject being a full one,
it has longer consideration in a separate chapter. First there is the
simple outlying tape, then the designed border. The early Gothic was
but a narrow line of flowers and berries; the later more sophisticated
Gothic enlarged and elaborated this same motive without introducing
another. The blossoms grew larger, the fruit fuller and the modest
cluster of berries was crowded by pears, apples and larger fruit,
until a general air of full luxury was given. The design was at first
kept neatly within bordering lines of tape, but later, overleaped them
with a flaunting leaf or mutinous flower.
Ribbons appeared early, then came fragmentary glimpses of dainty
columns which gave nice reasons for the erect upstanding of so heavy a
decoration. These all were Gothic, but what came after shows the
riotous imagination of the Renaissance. It seemed in that fruitful
time, space itself were not large enough to hold the designs within
the artist's brain. Certainly no corner of a tapestry could be left
unfilled, and not that alone, but filled with perfect pictures instead
of with a simple repeated scheme of decoration. It was in this rich
time of production that the borders of tapestries grew to exceeding
width, and were divided into squares, each square containing a scene.
These scenes were often of sufficient importance in composition to
serve as models for the centre of a tapestry, each one of them, which
thought gives a little idea of the fertility of the artists in that
untired period.
It was the delight of the great Raphael himself to expend his talent
on the border of his cartoons. From this artist others took their cue
with varying skill, but with fine effect, and with unlimited interest
to us. Those who run have time to remark only the great central
picture in a hanging; but, to those who live with it, this added line
of exquisite panorama is an unceasing delight for the contemplative
hours of solitude. From this rich departure from Gothic simplicity the
artists grew into the same fulness of design that ended in decadence.
The border became almost obnoxious in its inflated importance and from
voluptuous elegance changed to coarse overweight; and by these signs
we know the early inspired work from its rank and monstrous
aftergrowth in the Eighteenth Century.
A quick glance at the plates showing the work of tapestry's next
highwater mark, the hundred years of the Gobelins' best work,
illustrates the difference between that time and others, and shows
also the gradual drop into the border which is merely a woven
representation of a gilded wood frame to enclose the woven picture as
a painted one would be framed. The plate of _Esther and Ahasuerus_
illustrates this sort of border in the unmistakable lines of Louis XV
ornament.
POINT OF INTEREST
Allusion has been made to the placing of the point of interest in a
tapestry, but this is a matter to be studied by much exercise of the
eye. Perhaps the amateur knows already much about it, an unconscious
knowledge, and needs only to be directed to his own store of
observations. As much as anything this change of design depended on
the uses the varying civilisation made of the hangings. So much
interest lies in this that I find myself ever prone to recapitulate
the very human facts of the past; the lining of rude stone walls and
the forming of interior doors, which was the office of the early
tapestries, and the loose full draping of the same; then the gradual
increase of luxury in the finish of dwellings themselves, until
tapestries were a decoration only; and then the minimising of grandeur
under Louis XV when everything fell into miniature and tapestries were
demanded only in small pieces that could be applied to screens or
chairs--a prostitution of art to the royal demand for prettiness.
Keeping these general ideas of the uses of tapestries in mind, it is
easy to reason out the course of the point of interest in the design.
The Gothic aim was to make warm and comfortable the austere apartment;
the Renaissance sought to produce big decorative pictures to hang in
place of frescoes; and the French idea--beginning with that same
ideal--fell at last into the production of something that should
accompany the other arts in making minutely ornate the home of man.
Therefore, the Gothic artist placed the point of interest high; the
artists of the Renaissance followed the rules of modern painting (even
to the point of becoming academic); and the last good period of the
Gobelins dropped into miniature and decoration.
COLOURS
Colours we have not yet considered, in this chapter of review for
identification's sake. They follow the same line, have the same
history, and this makes the beauty, the logic and the consistency of
our work, the work of tracing to their source the products of other
men and other times.
Colours in the early Gothic--of what do they remind one so strongly as
of the marvels of old stained glass, that rich, pure kaleidoscope
which has lived so long in the atmosphere of incense ascending from
censer and from heart. The same scale, rich and simple, unafraid of
unshaded colour, characterise both glass and tapestry.
The dyeing of colours in those days was a religion, a religion that
believed in holding fast to the forefathers' tenets. Red was known to
be a goodly colour, and blue an honest one; yellow was to conjure
with, and brown to shade; but beyond twelve or perhaps twenty colours,
the dyer never ventured. To these he gave the hours of his life, with
these he subjugated the white of Kentish wool, and gave it honest and
soft into the hand of the artist-weaver who, we must add, should have
been thankful for this brief gamut. To say the least, we of to-day are
grateful, for to this we owe the effect of cathedral glass seen in old
tapestries like that of _The Sacraments_. The Renaissance having more
sophisticated tales to tell, a higher intellectual development to
portray, demanded a longer scale of colour, so more were introduced to
paint in wool the pictures of the artists. At first we see them pure
and true, then muddy, uncertain, until a dull confusion comes, and the
hanging is depressing. When, at the last, it came that a tapestry was
but a painting in wool, with as many thousand differently united
threads as would reproduce the shading of brush-blended paint, the
whole thing fell of its own weight, and we of to-day value less the
unlimited pains of the elaborate dyer and weaver than we do the
simpler work. The reason is plain. Time fades a little even the
securest dyes, and that little is just enough to reduce to flat
monotones a work in which perhaps sixty thousand tones are set in
subtle shading.
HAUTE LISSE
The worker on tapestries, the modern restorer--to whom be much
honour--finds a sign of identification in the handling of old
tapestries that is scarcely within the province of the amateur, but is
worth mentioning. It is the black tracing on the warp with which
high-warp weavers assist their work of copying the artist's cartoon.
Where this is present, the work is of the prized haute lisse or
high-warp manufacture, instead of the basse lisse or low-warp. But the
latter is not to be spoken of disparagingly, for in the admirable time
of French production about the time of the formation of the Gobelins,
low-warp work was almost as well executed as high-warp, and as much
valued. Brussels made her fame by haute-lisse, but in France the
low-warp was dubbed "_a la facon de Flandres_"; and as Flanders stood
for perfection, the weavers did their best to make the low-warp
production approach in excellence the famed work of the ateliers to
the north, which had formerly so prospered.
To find this black line is to establish the fact that the tapestry was
woven on a high-warp loom, if nothing more. But that in itself means,
as is explained in the chapter on looms and _modus operandi_, that a
superior sort of weaver, an artist-artisan, did the work, and that he
had enormous difficulties to overcome in his patient task.
A black outline woven in the fabric is one which artists prior to the
Seventeenth Century used to give greater strength to figures. It was
the habit thus to trace the entire human form, to lift it clearly from
its background, after the "poster" manner of to-day. It is as though a
dark pencil had outlined each figure. This practice stopped in later
years, and is not seen at all in the softer methods of the Gobelins.
THE WEAVE
The materials of tapestries we know to be invariably wool, silk and
metal threads, yet the weaving of these varies with the talent of the
craftsman. The manner of the oldest weavers was to produce a fabric
not too thick, flexible rather--for was it not meant to hang in
folds?--and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet
had none of the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of
later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we
associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh
is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest
workmen who counted time well spent if spent in taking pains.
This ability, to take detail as a religion, has left us the precious
relics of the exquisite period immediately before the Italian artists
had their way in Brussels. Notice the weave here. See the pattern of
the fabrics worn by the personages of high estate. You could almost
pluck it from the tapestry, shake out its folds, measure it flat, by
the yard, and find its delicate, intelligent pattern neat and
unbroken. Wonderful weaver, magic hands, infinite pains, were those to
produce such an effect on our sated modern vision, all with a few
threads of silk and wool and gold.
Then there is the human face--it takes an artist to describe the
various faces with their beauty of modelling, their infinite variety
of type, their subtlety of expression. You can almost see the flushing
of the capillaries under the translucent skin, so fine are the mediums
of silk and wool under the magic handling of the talented weavers in
brilliant epochs. Not a detail in one of these older canvases of the
highest Gothic development has been neglected.
The modern places his point of interest, and, knowing the observer's
eye is to obediently linger there, he splashes the rest of his drawing
into careless subserviency. But these careful older drawings showed in
every inch of their execution a conscience that might put the Puritan
to shame. Note, even, the ring that is being handed to the lady in the
Mazarin tapestry of Mr. Morgan's (if yours is the happy chance to see
it). It was not sufficient for the weaver that it be a ring, but it
must be a ring set with a jewel, and that jewel must be the one
celebrated ever for its value; so in the canvas glows a carefully
rounded spot of pigeon-blood.
This exquisitely fine weaving of the period which trembled between the
Gothic and the Renaissance made possible the execution of the later
work--and yet, and yet, who shall say that the later is the superior
work? Vaunted as it is, one turns to it because one must, but with
entire fidelity of heart for the preceding manner.
In the high period of Brussels production, when the Renaissance was
well established there, through the cartoons of the Italian artists,
it is interesting to note the richness given to surfaces solidly
filled in with gold by throwing the thread in groups of four. The
light is thus caught and reflected, almost as though from a heap of
cut topaz. This characterises the tapestries of the _Mercury_ series
in the Blumenthal collection.
Naturally, the evenness of the weaving has much to do with the value
of the piece--otherwise the pains of the old weavers would have been
futile. The surface smooth, free from lumps or ridges, strong with the
even strength of well-matched threads, this is the beauty that
characterises the best work this side of the Fifteenth Century.
It is the especial prerogative of the merchant to touch with his own
hands a great number of tapestries. It is by this handling of the
fabric that he acquires a skill in determining the make of many a
tapestry. There is an indefinable quality about certain wools, and
about the manner of their weaving that is only revealed by the touch.
Not all hands are wise to detect, but only those of the sympathetic
lover of the materials they handle--and I have found many such among
the merchant collector. But even he finds identification a task as
difficult as it is interesting, and spends hours of thought and
research before arriving at a conclusion--and even then will retract
on new evidence.
COPIES
There are certain pitfalls into which one may so easily fall that they
must never be out of mind. The worst of these, the pit which has the
most engaging and innocent entrance, is that of the copy, the modern
tapestry copied from the old a few decades ago.
It is easy to find by reference to the huge volumes of French writers
on tapestry just when certain sets of cartoons were first woven. Take,
for example, the _Acts of the Apostles_ by Raphael; Brussels, 1519, is
the authentic date. But after that the Mortlake factory in England
wove a set, and others followed. This instance is too historic to be
entirely typical, but there are others less known. It was the habit of
factories that possessed a valuable set of cartoons to repeat the
production of these in their own factory, and also to make some
arrangement whereby other factories could also produce the same set of
hangings.
In the evil days that fell upon Brussels after her apogee, copying her
own works took the place of new matters. Also, in the French factories
in their prime, the same set was repeated on the same looms and on
different ones, _vide_ _The Months_, _The Royal Residences_, _History of
Alexander_, etc., and the gorgeous _Life of Marie de Medici_. If these
notable examples were copied it is safe to conclude that many others
were.
The study of marks is left for another chapter, for, by this time,
even the enthusiast is wearying. There seems so much to learn in this
matter of investigating and identifying, and, after all, everything is
uncertain. One looks about at identified pieces in museums and private
collections, even among the dealers, and the discouraging thought
comes that other people can tell at a glance. But this is very far
from being true.
Even the savant studies long and investigates much before he gives a
positive classification of a piece that is not "pedigreed." Here is a
Flemish piece, here is a French, he will declare, and for the life of
you you cannot see the ear-marks that tell the ancestry. And so in all
humility you ask, "How can you tell with a glance of the eye?" But he
does not. No one can do that in every case. He must spend days at it,
reflecting, reading, handling, if the piece is evidently one of value.
He will show you, perhaps, as an honest dealer-collector showed me, a
set of five fine pieces which he could not identify at all. "The
weave," said he, "is Mortlake, the design in part German, these are
Italian _putti_--yet when all is told, I put down the work as an
Eighteenth Century copy of decadent Renaissance. But I am far from
sure."
If a dealer, surrounded by experienced helpers, can thus be
nonplussed, there is little cause for humiliation on the part of the
amateur who hesitates. It is not expected that one can know at a
glance whether a piece of work was executed in France, or in Flanders
at a given epoch. But the more difficult the work of identification,
the keener the zest of the hunt. It is then that one calls into
requisition all the knowledge of art that the individual has been
unconsciously accumulating all the years of his life. The applied
arts reflect the art feeling of the age to which they belong, and the
diluted influence of the great artists directs them. This is true of
drawing and of colour.
History has ever its reflection on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has
in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate
piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn
exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some
hangings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative
scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the
tapestry was woven. And so history is given a grace, a delicate
meaning, a warm interest, which is one of the side-gardens of delight
that show from the long path of identification study.
This little book has as its aim the gentle purpose of pointing the way
to a knowledge that shall be a guide in knowing gold from--not from
dross, that is too simple, but gold from gold-plating let us say, for
the mad lover of tapestries will not admit that any hand-woven
tapestry is on the low level of dross. Any work which human hands have
touched and lingered on in execution is deserving of the respect of
the modern whose life must of necessity be lived in hasty execution.
Every chapter, then, is but a caution or a counsel, and this one but a
briefer statement of the same matter. If onto the fringe of the main
thought hangs much of history, it is history inseparable from it, for
history of nations gives the history of great men, and these regulate
the doings of all the lesser ones below them.
Identification, pure and simple, is for the rapt lover of art who
pursues his game in museums and has his quiet delights that others
little dream of. But in general, to the practical yet cultivated
American, it is a means to expend wisely the derided dollars that we
impress upon other nations to the artistic enrichment of our own
country.