_Florence_, always so industrious and art-loving, got for its loom, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a place in the foremost rank amid the weavers of northern Italy. Specimens of her earliest handicraft are yet few--only two--here; but one sample of the able way in which she knew how to diaper, well shows her ability: No. 8563, p. 215, woven in the fifteenth century, will prove this with reference to her secular silks. The pieces described at pp. 202, 264, witness the boldness of her design during the sixteenth century. In her webs, expressly woven for church-use, is it that she displays her great taste in design, and wonderful power--at least for that time, the fourteenth century--in gearing the loom: the violet silk damask, No. 1265, p. 36, and another like piece, No. 7072, p. 133, figured with angels swinging thuribles, or bearing crowns of thorns in the hands, or holding a cross, will warrant our remarks. The style of doing the face and hands in white of those otherwise yellow angels, is a peculiarity of the Tuscan loom. The orphrey-webs of Florence are equally conspicuous for drawing and skill in weaving as her vestment textiles, and in beauty come up to those done at Venice, and far surpass anything of the kind ever wrought at Cologne; specimens of this sort of Florentine work may be seen at Nos. 4059, p. 89; 7080, p. 136; 7674, p. 142; 7791, p. 143; 197, p. 291. Along with these may be classed the hood of a cope, described at No. 8692, p. 260, as well as the apparels to the dalmatic and tunicle, p. 143, where the cherubic heads have white faces. But it was of her velvets that Florence might be so warrantably proud. Our Henry VII. in his will, “Testamenta Vetusta,”[236] bequeathed “to God and St. Peter, and to the abbot and prior and convent of our monastery of Westminster, the whole suit of vestments to be made at Florence in Italy.” Gorgeous and artistically designed was this textile, as we may yet see in one of these Westminster Abbey copes still in existence, and belonging to Stonyhurst college. The golden ground is trailed all over with leaf-bearing boughs of a bold type, in raised or cut ruby-toned velvet of a rich soft pile, which is freckled with gold thread sprouting up like loops. Though nothing so rich in material, nor so beauteous in pattern, there are here, pp. 144, 145, two specimens of Florentine cut, crimson velvet on a golden ground, quite like in sort to the royal vestments, and having too that strong peculiarity upon them--the little gold thread loop shooting out of the velvet pile. Though a full century later than the splendid cope at Stonyhurst, and the two pieces Nos. 7792, 7799, these illustrate the peculiar style of Tuscan velvets.