In the collection at South Kensington there are examples of every kind of Genoese velvets; some with a smooth unbroken surface, some elaborately patterned and showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Some are raised or cut, the design being worked in a pile standing well up by itself out of a flat ground of silk, either of the same or of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold. No. 7795 is an example of a very costly kind; in which the ground is velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself but raised one pile higher than the other, so as to show its form and shape distinctly. No. 8323 shows how the design was worked in various coloured velvet. This last was a favourite in England and called motley; in his will, 1415, printed in Rymers Fœdera, Henry lord Scrope bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro; the other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, etc. Venice does not seem to have been at any time, like Sicily and Lucca, smitten with the taste of imitating in her looms the patterns which she saw abroad upon textile fabrics, but appears to have borrowed from the orientals only one kind of weaving cloth of gold: the yellow chasuble at Exeter cathedral in 1327, figured with beasts, is the only instance we know where she wove animals upon silks. Venice, however, set up for herself a new branch of textiles, and wrought for church use square webs of a crimson ground on which were figured, in gold or on yellow silk, subjects taken from the Scriptures or the persons of saints and angels. These square pieces were employed, sewed together, as frontals to altars, but when longwise more generally as orphreys to chasubles, copes, and other vestments. There is a remarkable similarity between the drawing of the figures upon old Venetian silks and the woodcuts in books published at Venice in the early part of the sixteenth century; such as the fine pontifical by Giunta, or the “Rosario” by Varisco. We find in both the same style and manner; the same broad fold and fall of drapery; the same plumpness and outline of the human face and figure. So near is the likeness in design that we may almost believe that the artists who supplied the blocks for the printers sketched also the drawings for the looms.