Textile Fabrics: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Church-vestments, Dresses, Silk Stuffs, Needlework and Tapestries, forming that Section of the MuseumRock, Daniel
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Textile Fabrics: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Church-vestments, Dresses, Silk Stuffs, Needlework and Tapestries, forming that Section of the Museum
Rock, Daniel
Art objects -- England -- London -- Catalogs; Textile fabrics
From among these examples a few will show the reader how the goldsmith
had been tasked to work upon them as jeweller also, and gem the
liturgical garments to which these shreds belong, with real or imitated
precious stones. In the orphrey upon the back of that very rich fine
crimson velvet chasuble, No. 1375, pp. 81-2, the crossed nimb about
our Lord’s head is gemmed with stones set in silver gilt; and the
sockets still left on the piece of crimson velvet, No. 8334, p. 199,
unmistakably speak for themselves.
Besides precious stones, coral, and seed-pearls,
GLASS,
coloured and wrought into small beads and bugles, is another of those
hard materials, the presence of which we find in this collection. As
now, so far back during the mediæval period, the Venetians, at the
island of Murano, wrought small glass beads and bugles of all colours,
as well as pastes--smalti--in every tint for mosaics, and imitations of
jewels. This art, which they had learned from the Greeks, they followed
with signal success; and likely is it that from Venice came the several
specimens of glass--blue, like lapis lazuli--which we still see on
that beautiful frontal in Westminster Abbey,[334]--the work of our
countryman Peter de Ispagna,[335] the member of an old Essex family.
At No. 8276, pp. 168-9, is a piece of an orphrey for a chasuble,
plentifully embroidered with glass beads and bugles, which shows how
much such a style of ornament was used towards the latter end of the
twelfth century, at least in Lower Germany, and some of the Italian
provinces. Belonging to St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, among many other
amices, there was one having glass stones upon it; “amictus ... ornatus
lapidibus vitreis magnis et parvis per totum in capsis argenteis
deauratis, &c.”[336]
[334] Church of our Fathers, 1, p. 235.
[335] Monumenta Vetusta, vi. p. 26.
[336] Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 318.
ENAMEL.
Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper--enamel,
the invention neither of Egypt, Greece, nor Italy, but of our own old
Britons,[337] was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles.
Besides the examples we have given,[338] that gorgeous “chesable of red
cloth of gold with orphreys before and behind set with pearls, blue,
white and red, with plates of gold enamelled, wanting fifteen plates,
&c.”[339] bestowed by John of Gaunt’s duchess of Lancaster, upon
Lincoln Cathedral, is another instance to show how such a kind of rich
ornamentation was sewed to garments, especially for church use, in such
large quantities.
[337] Philostratus, Icon. L. 1. cap. 528.
[338] Church of our Fathers, t. i. p. 469.
[339] Dugdale’s Mon. Anglic. t. VIII. p. 1281.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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