Gothic verdures are in reality coloured drawings in flat outline of
trees and flowers with birds and animals. Renaissance verdures have more
heavily shaded leaves and look more true to nature.
The majority of Gothic tapestries are anonymous as regards both maker
and designer. With the Renaissance began the custom in Brussels and
other Flemish cities of weaving the mark of the city into the bottom
selvage, and the monogram of the weaver into the side selvage on the
right. This custom was established by a city ordinance of Brussels in
1528. An edict of Charles V made it uniform, in 1544, for the whole of
the Netherlands. After another century, weavers began to sign their full
names or their initials in Roman letters, and monograms were discarded.
When the weavers of Arras took refuge in other countries, after the
capture of that town by Louis XI, they went by thousands to England and
France. In this way the French looms at Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubusson
were started, and those at Mortlake, in England.
As early as the fourteenth century, there was at least one eminent
master weaver in Paris, Nicolas Bataille, in whose factory part of the
remarkable Apocalypse set of the cathedral of Angers was woven. But even
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, French tapestries were far
from equaling those of Flanders. In 1667, Colbert "established in the
buildings of the Gobelins the furniture factory of the Crown under the
direction of Charles Lebrun."
The great establishment of "Les Gobelins," by the way, has an
interesting history. Jean and Philibert Gobelin built a dyehouse in the
fifteenth century by the little stream of the Bièvre, in the Faubourg,
whose waters had peculiar qualities that gave special excellence to
their dyes. The family found dyeing so profitable that they were able to
become bankers, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century they
sold the establishment, which, however, still kept their name. Here
Comans and Planche, tapestry weavers from Flanders, opened a factory in
1601. The edict of Henri Quatre by which they were incorporated gave
them important privileges, but also obliged them to train apprentices
and to establish the craft in the provinces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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