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| Life's Rich Tapestries |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
27 October 2007
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Five years ago, there was an amazing Renaissance
tapestry exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Now the museum is staging an equally amazing sequel, Tapestry
in the Baroque (at the Met until January 6, then on to Madrid
in March). Many people might doubt that there could be such
a thing as an amazing tapestry exhibition. We are accustomed
to seeing old tapestries, if we notice them at all, as backgrounds
to a decor. Most of the examples we see tend to be of inferior
quality, faded, often dirty (it is very expensive to get tapestries
cleaned and restored) and fragmentary.
As if in anticipation of this, the philosophy
behind both Met shows has been to choose nothing but the best,
and to make sure, somehow, that everything chosen is in comparably
good condition. It is not possible to avoid faded tapestries
altogether, because certain of the dye-stuffs are simply not
permanent. But it has proved possible to bring together a large
selection of tapestries of very high quality indeed, so that
they all sing.
They mostly come from very grand state collections
in Europe. There are very few American loans. There are no private
lenders, unless you count the Duke of Marlborough as private,
and one gets the impression - since this is clearly a show for
which no expense was spared - that wealthy Americans, although
they liked incorporating tapestries into the decor, didn't succeed
in buying much of the very best quality. (For an earlier period,
of course, they did: the Unicorn series in the Met's Cloisters
Museum being a case in point.)
Tapestries are by nature both bulky and vulnerable.
When properly cared for they were displayed in winter, stored
in summer, covered with cloths when the establishment was not
in use, protected (I suppose) from moths, kept out of the way
of candles, and otherwise kept clean. They cost vast sums -
much more than paintings - and they went on being valued in
the centuries after their manufacture. The grandest monarchs
(Henry VIII included) had enormous collections of them, and
right through to the 18th century, when a really important public
event such as a coronation or state funeral was being staged,
tapestries were brought out to adorn a cathedral and to line
the streets and squares where a procession was going to pass.
The most valuable tapestries had gold or silver
thread, and some were burnt in the French revolution for their
value as scrap metal. (Or that was the pretext given - one can
hardly imagine it was worth the effort involved.) When cities
were sacked, they were looted. During the Reformation, they
were removed from churches. When silk was used in a mixture
with wool, it was prone to deteriorate over the years. A common
practice (going back at least to the 16th century) of hanging
paintings on tapestry backgrounds can't have helped the tapestries
very much.
The worst modern indignity inflicted on fragmentary
tapestries is to turn them into tasselled cushions, but their
use as upholstery fabrics must also be quite old. In one of
those "time capsule" properties taken over by the
National Trust, Canons Ashby, tapestries were found lining the
dogs' baskets. Presumably they were also cut up for a rich variety
of household uses: jerkins, winter warmers, oven gloves, lagging
for pipes.
The Bodleian recently bought a fragment of
a 16th-century tapestry map, showing villages and estates in
Gloucestershire. What surprised me about this object was its
place of manufacture: a village near Shipston-on-Stour. Tapestry-weaving
was extremely labour-intensive. One weaver, according to the
Met catalogue, could produce about one square yard of medium-quality
tapestry in a month, but the rate would be slower for the really
fine work. It follows that, for any large-scale commission,
a considerable number of people would have to be employed. It
seemed odd to find this scale of activity in rural Warwickshire.
Part of the answer can be found in the Met
catalogue. In the wake of Spanish King Philip II's repressive
measures in the Low Countries at the end of the 1560s, many
Protestants and many weavers fled persecution. Among the places
where Flemish weavers eventually turned up were Barcheston and
Weston in Warwickshire, where they made a series of tapestry
maps for a certain Ralph Sheldon. Some of the surviving parts
of the series are now being reunited.
Naturally, it is a long way from such maps
to the most sophisticated pieces in the New York show, although
topography plays a part there as well, in the tapestries illustrating
sieges and military campaigns. The most vivid designs in the
period were produced by Rubens (just as, in the Renaissance,
Raphael had painted his series of cartoons, now in the V&A),
first as small oil sketches and then as full-sized cartoons.
Thomas Campbell, who put the show together
and wrote much of the catalogue, emphasises the high esteem
in which tapestries were held. From the point of view of monarchs
and members of ruling households, tapestry offered a form of
magnificence, a proof of wealth, on a scale with jewels and
plate, perhaps, but far exceeding the monetary value of what
we think of as great works of art - paintings and sculpture
predominantly.
Yet it does not follow (nor is it argued) that
the master-weaver or cartoonist was respected or revered in
the way that Raphael and Rubens were respected and revered.
A distinction must have operated between the monetary value
of an object (or the cost price) and its value as a work of
art.
Clearly we are less aware of the order of values
of the baroque era than we ought to be, when we fail to be staggered
by some exquisite display of tapestries. We need something to
remind us. And it is a good principle that the best way to attain
that sense is to look at the very best examples available.
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