BORDERS
If the artists of tapestries had never drawn nor ever woven anything
but the borders that frame them, we would have in that department
alone sufficient matter for happy investigation and acutely refined
pleasure. I even go so far as to think that in certain epochs the
border is the whole matter, and the main design is but an enlargement
of one of the many motives of which it is composed. But that is in one
particularly rich era, and in good time we shall arrive at its joys.
First then--for the orderly mind grows stubborn and confused at any
beginning that begins in the middle--we must hark back to the earliest
tapestries. Tracing the growth of the border is a pleasant pastime, a
game of history in which amorini, grotesques and nymphs are the
personages, and garlands of flowers their perpetual accessories, but
first comes the time when there were no borders, the Middle Ages.
There were none, according to modern parlance, but it was usual to
edge each hanging with a tape of monotone, a woven galloon of quiet
hue, which had two purposes; one, to finish neatly the work, as the
housewife hems a napkin; the other, to provide space of simple
material for hanging on rude hooks the big pictured surface.
This latter consideration was one of no small importance, as we can
readily see by sending the thought back to the time when tapestries
led a very different life (so human they seem in their association
with men that the expression must be allowed) from that of to-day,
when they are secured to stretchers, or lined, or even framed behind
glass like an easel painting.
In those other times of romance and chivalry a great man's tapestries
were always en route. Like their owner, they were continually going on
long marches, nor were they allowed to rest long in one place. From
the familiar castle walls they were taken down to line the next
habitat of their owner, and that might be the castle of some other
lord, or it might be the tent of an encampment. Again, it might be
that an open-air exposition for a pageant, was the temporary use.
The tapestries thus bundled about, forever hung and unhung on hooks
well or ill-spaced, handled roughly by unknowing varlets or dull
soldiers, these tapestries suffered much, even to the point of
dilapidation, and thus arose the need for a tape border, and thus it
happens also that the relics of that time are found mainly among the
religious pieces. These last found safe asylum within convent walls or
in the sombre quiet of cathedral shades, and like all who dwell within
such precincts were protected from contact with a rude world.
One day, sitting solitary at his wools, it occurred to the weaver of
the early Fifteenth Century to spill some of his flowers out upon the
dark galloon that edged his work. The effect was charming. He
experimented further, went into the enchanted wood of such a design as
that of _The Lady and the Unicorn_ to pluck more flowers, and of them
wove a solid garland, symmetrical, strong, with which to frame the
picture. To keep from confounding this with the airy bells and starry
corollas of the tender inspiring blossoms of the work, he made them
bolder, trained them to their service in solid symmetric mass, and
edged the whole, both sides, with the accustomed two-inch line of
solid rich maroon or blue.
It is easy to see the process of mind. For a long time there had been
gropings, the feeling that some sort of border was needed, a division
line between the world of reality and the world of fable. Examine the
Arras work and see to what tricks the artist had recourse. The
architectural resource of columns, for example; where he could do so,
the artist decoyed one to the margin. Thus he slipped in a frame, and
broke none of the canons of his art, and no more beautiful frame could
have been devised, as we see by following up the development and use
of the column. Once out from its position in the edge of the picture
into its post in the border, it never stops in its beauty of growth
until it reaches such perfection as is seen in the twisted and
garlanded columns which flank the Rubens series, and those superb
shafts in _The Royal Residences_ of Lebrun at the Gobelins under Louis
XIV.
The other trick of framing in his subject which was open to the Arras
weaver whom we call Gothic, was to set verses, long lines of print in
French or Latin at top or bottom.
But his first real legitimate border was made of the same flowers and
leaves that made graceful the finials and capitals of Gothic carving.
Small clustered fruit, like grapes or berries, came naturally mixed
with these, as Nature herself gives both fruit and flowers upon the
earth in one fair month.
Simplicity was the thing, and a continued turning to Nature, not as to
a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother,
or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two
lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand
forever upright without help, the weaver gave probability to his
abundant mass by tying it here and there with a knot of ribbon and
letting the ribbon flaunt itself as ribbons have ever done to the
delight of the eye that loves a truant.
By this time--crawling over the top of the Fourteen Hundreds--the
border had grown wider, had left its meagre allowance of three or four
inches, and was fast acquiring a foot in width. This meant more
detail, a broader design, coarser flowers, bigger fruit, and these
spraying over the galloon, and all but invading the picture. It was
all in the way of development. The simplicity of former times was
lost, but design was groping for the great change, the change of the
Renaissance.
The border tells quickly when it dawned, and when its light put out
all candles like a glorious sun--not forgetting that some of those
candles would better have been left burning. By this time Brussels was
the centre of manufacture and the cartoonist had come to influence all
weavings. Just as carpenters and masons, who were the planners and
builders of our forefathers' homes, have now to submit to the
domination of the _Ecole des Beaux Arts_ graduates, so the man at the
loom came under the direction of Italian artists. And even the border
was not left to the mind of the weaver, but was carefully and
consistently planned by the artist to accompany his greater work, if
greater it was.
Raphael himself set that fashion. He was a born decorator, and in
laying out the borders of his tapestries unbridled his wonderful
invention and let it produce as many harmonies as could be crowded
into miniature. He set the fashion of dividing the border into as many
sections as symmetry would allow, dividing them so daintily that the
eye scarce notes the division, so purely is it of the intellect. In
the border for the _Acts of the Apostles_, this style of treatment is
the one he preferred. This set has no copy in America, but an almost
unrivalled example of this style of border is in the private
collection of George Blumenthal, Esq., the _Herse and Mercury_.[16]
Here picture follows picture in charming succession, in that purity
and perfection of design with which the early Renaissance delights us.
The classic note set by the subject of the hanging is never forgotten,
but on this key is played a varied harmony of line and colour. For
dainty invention, this sort of border reaches a very high expression
of art.
If Raphael set the fashion, others at least were not slow in seizing
the new idea and from that time on, until a period much later--that of
the Gobelins under Louis XV--it was the fashion to introduce great and
distracting interest into the border. Even the little galloon became a
twist of two ribbons around a repeated flower, or a small reciprocal
pattern, so covetous was design of all plain spaces.
Lesser artists than Raphael also divided the border into squares and
oblongs, and with charming effect. The sides were built up after the
same fashion, but instead of the delicate architectural divisions he
affected, partitions were made with massed fruit and flowers, vines
and trellises. The scenes were surprisingly dramatic, Flemish artists
showing a preference for such Biblical reminders as Samson with his
head being shorn in Delilah's lap, while Philistines just beyond
waited the enervating result of the barber's work; or, any of the
loves and conflicts of the Greek myths was used.
The colouring--too much cannot be seen of the warm, delicate
blendings. There is always the look of a flowerbed at dawn, before
Chanticleer's second call has brought the sun to sharpen outlines,
before dreams and night-mist have altogether quitted the place. Plenty
of warm wood colours are there, of lake blues, of smothered reds.
Precious they are to the eye, these scenes, but hard to find now
except in bits which some dealer has preserved by framing in a screen
or in the carved enclosure of some nut-wood chair.
For a time borders continued thus, all marked off without conscious
effort, into countless delicious scenes. Then a change begins. After
perfection, must come something less until the wave rises again. If in
Raphael's time the border claimed a two-foot strip for its imaginings,
it was slow in coming narrower again, and need required that it be
filled. But here is where the variance lay: Raphael had so much to
say that he begged space in which to portray it; his imitators had so
much space to fill that their heavy imagination bungled clumsily in
the effort. They filled it, then, with a heterogeneous mass of
foliage, fruit and flowers, trained occasionally to make a bower for a
woman, a stand for a warrior, but all out of scale, never keeping to
any standard, and lost absolutely in unintelligent confusion.
The Flemings in their decadence did this, and the Italians in the
Seventeenth Century did more, they introduced all manner of cartouche.
The cartouche plays an important part in the boasting of great
families and the sycophancy of those who cater to men of high estate,
for it served as a field whereon to blazon the arms of the patron, who
doubtless felt as man has from all time, that he must indeed be great
whose symbols or initials are permanently affixed to art or
architecture. The cartouche came to divide the border into medallions,
to apportion space for the various motives; but with a far less subtle
art than that of the older men who traced their airy arbours and
trailed their dainty vines and set their delicate grotesques, in a
manner half playful and wholly charming.
But when the cartouche appeared, what is the effect? It is as though a
boxful of old brooches had been at hand and these were set,
symmetrically balanced, around the frame, and the spaces between
filled with miscellaneous ornament on a scale of sumptuous size.
Confusing, this, and a far cry from harmony. Yet, such are the
seductions of tapestry in colour and texture, and so caressing is the
hand of time, that these borders of the Seventeenth Century given us
by Italy and Flanders, are full of interest and beauty.
The very bombast of them gives joy. Who can stand before the Barberini
set, _The Mysteries of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ_, bequeathed
to the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine, in New York, by Mrs. Clarke,
without being more than pleased to recognise in the border the
indefatigable Barberini bee? We are human enough to glance at the
pictures of sacred scenes as on a tale that is told, but that potent
insect makes us at once acquainted with a family of renown, puts us on
a friendly footing with a great cardinal of the house, reminds us of
sundry wanderings of our own in Rome; and then, suddenly flashes from
its wings a memory of the great conqueror of Europe, who after the
Italian campaign, set this bee among his own personal symbols and
called it Napoleonic. Yes, these things interest us enormously,
personally, for they pique imagination and help memory to fit together
neatly the wandering bits of history's jigsaw puzzle. Besides this,
they help the work of identifying old tapestries, a pleasure so keen
that every sense is enlivened thereby.
When decorative design deserts the Greek example, it strays on
dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the
Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all
their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality
took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so to
speak, replaced inspiration.
Amorini--the word can hardly be used without suggesting the gay babes
who tumble deliciously among Correggio's clouds or who snatch flowers
in ways of grace, on every sort of decoration. In these later
drawings, these tapestry borders of say 1650, they are monsters of
distortion, and resemble not at all the rosy child we know in the
flesh. They are overfed, self-indulgent, steeped in the wisdom of a
corrupt and licentious experience. I cannot feel that anyone should
like them, except as curiosities of a past century.
Heavy swags of fruit, searching for larger things, changed to
pumpkins, melons, in the gross fashion of enlarged designs for
borders. Almost they fell of their own weight. Cornucopias spilled
out, each one, the harvest of an acre. And thus paucity of imagination
was replaced by increase in the size of each object used in filling up
the border's allotted space.
After this riot had continued long enough in its inebriety, the
corrective came through the influence of Rubens in the North and of
Lebrun in France. These two geniuses knew how to gather into their
control the art strength of their age, and to train it into
intellectual results. Mere bulk, mere space-filling, had to give way
under the mind force of these two men, who by their superb invention
gave new standards to decorative art in Flanders and in France.
Drawings were made in scale again, and designs were built in harmony,
constructed not merely to catch the eye, but to gratify the logical
mind.
The day was for the grandiose in borders. The petite and _mignonne_ of
Raphael's grotesques was no longer suited to the people, or, to put
it otherwise, the people were not such as seek expression in
refinement, for all art is but the visible evidence of a state of mind
or soul.
The wish to be sumptuous and superb, then, was a force, and so the art
expressed it, but in a way that holds our admiration. A stroll in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows us better than words the
perfection of design at this grandiose era. There one sees _Antony and
Cleopatra_ of Rubens--probably. On these hangings the border has all
the evidences of genius. If there were no picture at all to enclose,
if there were but this decorative frame, a superb inspiration would be
flaunted. From substantial urns at right and left, springs the design
at the sides which mounts higher and higher, design on design, but
always with probability. That is the secret of its beauty, its
probability, yet we are cheated all the time and like it. No vase of
fruit could ever uphold a cupid's frolic, nor could an emblematic bird
support a chalice, yet the artist makes it seem so. Note how he hangs
his swags, and swings his amorini, from the horizontal borders. He
first sets a good strong architectural moulding of classic
egg-and-dart, and leaf, and into this able motive thrusts hooks and
rings. From these solid facts he hangs his happy weight of fruit and
flower and peachy flesh. Nothing could be more simple, nothing could
be more logical. The cartouche at the top, he had no choice but to put
it there, to hold the title of the picture, and at the bottom came a
tiny landscape to balance. So much for fashion well executed.
Colours were reformed, too, at this time, for we are now at the era
when tapestry had its last run of best days, that is to say, at the
time when France began her wondrous ascendency under Louis XIV. In
Italy colours had grown garish. Too much light in that country of the
sun, flooded and over-coloured its pictured scenes. Tints were too
strong, masses of blue and yellow and red glared all in tones purely
bright. They may have suited the twilight of the church, the gloom of
a palace closed in narrow streets, but they scourge the modern eye as
does a blasting light. The Gothic days gave borders the deep soft
tones of serious mood; the Renaissance played on a daintier scale; the
Seventeenth Century rushed into too frank a palette.
It remained for Rubens and Lebrun to find a scheme both rich and
subdued, to bring back the taste errant. Here let me note a
peculiarity of colour, noticeable in work of Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Century borders. The colour tone varies in different pieces
of the same set, and this is not the result of fading, but was done by
deliberate intent, one side border being light and another dark, or
one entire border being lighter than others of the same set.
Lest in speaking of borders, too much reference might be made to the
history of tapestry in general, I have left out Simon Vouet and Henri
Lerambert as inspired composers of the frame which enclosed their
cartoons; but it is well to say briefly that these men at least had
not followed false gods, and were not guilty of the flagrant offence
to taste that put a smirch on Italian art. These are the men who
preceded the establishment of State ateliers under Louis XIV and who
made productive the reign of Henri IV.
If Rubens kept to a style of large detail, that was a popular one and
had many followers in a grandiose age. Lebrun in borders harked back
to the classics of Greece and Rome, thus restoring the exquisite
quality of delicacy associated with a thousand designs of amphorae,
foliated scrolls and light grotesques. But he expressed himself more
individually and daringly in the series called _The Months_ and _The
Royal Residences_. This set is so celebrated, so delectable, so
grateful to the eye of the tapestry lover, that familiarity with it
must be assumed. You recollect it, once you have seen no more than a
photograph of one of its squares. But it cannot be pertinent here, for
it has no important border, say you. No, rather it is all border. Look
what the cunning artist has done. His problem was to picture twelve
country houses. To his mind it must have seemed like converting a room
into an architect's office, to hang it full of buildings. But genius
came to the front, his wonderful feeling for decoration, and lo, he
filled his canvas with glorious foreground, full of things man lives
with; columns, the size appropriate to the salon they are placed in;
urns, peacocks, all the ante-terrace frippery of the grand age,
arranged in the foreground. Garlands are fresh hung on the columns as
though our decorator had but just posed them, and beyond are clustered
trees--with a small opening for a vista. Way off in the light-bathed
distance stands the faithfully drawn chateau, but here, here where the
observer stands, is all elegance and grace and welcome shade, and
close friendship with luxury.
This work of Lebrun's is then the epitome of border. Greater than this
hath no man done, to make a tapestry all border which yet so
intensified the value of the small central design, that not even the
royal patron, jealous of his own conspicuousness, discovered that art
had replaced display.
After that a great change came. As the picture ever regulates the
border, that change was but logical. After the "Sun King" came the
regency of the effeminate Philippe, whom the Queen Mother had kept
more like a court page than a man. Artists lapped over from the
previous reign, and these were encouraged to develop the smaller,
daintier, more effeminate designs that had already begun to assert
their charm. Borders took on the new method. And as small space was
needed for the curves and shells and latticed bands, the border
narrower grew.
Like Alice, after the potent dose, the border shrank and shrank, until
in time it became a gold frame, like the _encadrement_ of any easel
picture. And that, too, was logical, for tapestries became at this
time like painted pictures, and lost their original significance of
undulating hangings.
The well-known motives of the Louis XV decoration rippled around the
edge of the tapestry, woven in shades of yellow silk and imitated well
the carved and gilded wood of other frames, those of chairs and
screens and paintings. There are those who deplore the mode, but at
least it seems appropriate to the style of picture it encloses.
And here let us consider a moment this matter of appropriateness. So
far we have thought only of tapestries and their borders as
inseparable, and as composed at the same time. But, alas, this is the
ideal; the fact is that in the habit which weavers had of repeating
their sets when a model proved a favourite among patrons, led them
into providing variety by setting up a different border around the
drawing. As this reproducing, this copying of old cartoons was
sometimes done one or two hundred years after the original was drawn,
we find an anachronism most disagreeable to one who has an orderly
mind, who hates to see a telephone in a Venus' shell, for instance.
The whole thing is thrown out of key. It is as though your old family
portrait of the Colonial Governor was framed in "art nouveau."
The big men, the almost divine Raphael, and later Rubens, felt so
keenly the necessity of harmony between picture and frame, that they
were not above drawing their own borders, and it is evident they
delighted in the work. But Raphael's cartoons went not only to
Brussels, but elsewhere, and somehow the borders got left behind; and
thus we see his celebrated suite of _Acts of the Apostles_ with a
different entourage in the Madrid set from what it bears in Rome.
There is another matter, and this has to do with commerce more than
art. An old tapestry is of such value that mere association with it
adds to the market price of newer work. So it is that sometimes a
whole border is cut off and transferred to an inferior tapestry, and
the tapestry thus denuded is surrounded with a border woven nowadays
in some atelier of repairs, copied from an old design.
Let such desecrators beware. The border of a tapestry must appertain,
must be an integral part of the whole design for the sake of artistic
harmony.
FOOTNOTE:
[16] Frontispiece.