Tapestries: An Introduction

In the Novo Dizionario Scolastico, which was compiled as long ago as 1892, tapestry was described as ‘an ornamental cloth, woven with wool and gold thread, telling a story’. The definition is more provocative than precise; the words ‘cloth’ and ‘gold thread’ conjure up a vision of something opulent, highly decorated and unusual. The modern definition in the Universal Encyclopaedia of Art is a narrative woven in to a fabric with technical devices and detailed figures which are different and distinct from the normal methods used in fabrics for materials and carpets. How prosaic is this second version! They differ probably because tapestries, produced all over the world today, are familiar objects, whereas when Petrocchi penned his definition, the manufacture had, as a living art, clearly declined, and although still of great value, had become primarily the preserve of aesthetics and scholars.

Between the end of the 18th and the early years of the 19th centuries, tapestry workshops gradually disappeared; those that survived could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Paradoxically, it was only then that the first documentary, historical and critical studies about tapestries appeared, beginning with those of Jubinal (1838, 1840). These were followed in quick succession by those of Barbier de Montualt, Pinchart, Wauters, Muntz, and Guiffrey. Italy contributed Conti, Campori, Braghirolli, Urbani de Gheltof, and Minieri Riccio. The avalanche of learned tracts, books and pamphlets which stimulated this interest appears directly related to the obsolescence of the craft itself.

We are told by writers like D’Annunzio that tapestries particularly excited the ‘aesthetic sense…most subtle and powerful’ of his hero Andrea Sperelli in his novel 11 Piacere. His house overflowed with them – ‘the ancient tapestry that Giusto brought back from Flanders in 1508’-‘the small Flemish tapestry woven with gold thread from Cyprus’-‘the tapestries with the noble quartering of the House of Sperelli’-‘the finely spun Neapolitan tapestries’ with ‘Bacchic episodes of love’. There are pages more about it; nor is 11 Piacere the only example. This theme occurs not only in D’Annunzio’s; in the restrained manner of an Edoardo Calandra, we find a great panel of tapestry covering the whole wall’, evoking the atmosphere and setting of a tale like Le Masse Cristiane (published the same year as 11 Piacere, 1889) with admirable subtlety.

If antique objects d’art are really as D’ Annunzio wrote, comparable to a phial, which after long years retains the essence of the perfume it once contained’, then tapestries must exhale a particularly heady scent, evoking tournaments, ‘joyous entrees’, famous battles, conquering kings, rich merchants and great patrons of the arts – as well as depicting everything from overwheening ambition to passionate love and dissolute gallantry. We may ask why such a variety of subjects came within the scope of this woven art. Perhaps the answer is that in few other forms of aesthetic expression is there such a close association between the decorative and the social, the idealised or the stylised and purely mundane. Perhaps, too, because tapestries, owing to their cost and size, were essentially for the aristocracy, the ‘fortunate few’. And so they have remained, no more than a sign of their owner’s wealth, had they not, with changing society and the collapse of values and shibboleths, taken on a distinct cultural significance, so that today an old tapestry seems to belong to a completely alien, vanished, yet fabulous era

  

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