To the monasteries must be given the honour of preserving this as
many other arts, and of stimulating the laity which had wealth and
power to present to religious institutions the best products of the
day. The subjects executed inside the monastery were perforce
religious, many revelling in the horrors of martyrology, and those
intended as gifts or those ordered by the clergy were religious in
subject for the sake of appropriateness. It is interesting to note the
sweet childlike attitude of all lower Europe toward the church in
these years, a sort of infantile way of leaving everything in its
hands, all knowledge, all wisdom, all power. It was not even necessary
to read or write, as the clergy conveniently concerned themselves with
literacy. As late as the beginning of the Fifteenth Century Philip the
Hardy, the great Duke of Burgundy, in ordering a tapestry, signed the
order, not with his autograph, for he could not, but with his mark,
for he, too, left pen-work to the clerks of the church.
That pile of concentrated royal history, the old abbey of St. Denis,
received, late in the Tenth Century, one of the evidences of royal
patronage that every abbey must have envied. It was a woven
representation of the world, as scientists of that day imagined our
half-discovered planet, and was presented by Queen Adelaide, the wife
of Hugh Capet, whose descendants reigned for three hundred years.[3]
While dealing with records rather than with objects on which the eye
can gaze and the hand can rest, note must be made of an order of a
Count of Poitou, William V, to a factory for tapestries then existing
in Poitiers, showing that the art of weaving had in that spot jumped
the monastery walls in 1025.[4] The order was for a large hanging with
subjects taken from the Scriptures, but given the then modern touch by
introducing portraits of kings and emperors and their favourite
animals transfixed in ways peculiar to the nature of the day.
A century later, another Abbot of St. Florent in Saumur had hangings
made important enough to be recorded. One of these represented the
four and twenty elders of the Apocalypse with musical instruments, and
other subjects taken from the Revelation of John. This subject was one
of unending interest to the artists of that time who seemed to find in
its depicting a serving of both God and imagination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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