Needlework As Art Part 14

(Aristophanes, "The Frogs," v. 939-944). The Persian carpets, which are the legitimate descendants of Babylonian art, are curiously fragmentary. In a modern design are to be seen birds, indicated by a head, bill, and eyes; little coffee-pots, and flowers broken off at the stalks, and small quadrupeds without any particular form; also the prehistoric cross, the Tau, and bits of broken-up wave and key patterns. All these, repeated into a pattern, remind us of sc.r.a.ps in a kaleidoscope, thrown together accidentally, or else taken up by chance where history and art have dropped them.

[110] "Soma" or "Homa" ("Sarcostemma Viminale vel Brevistigma"), from Cashmere and the Hindu Cush, still used by the Brahmins, and the juice of which was the first intoxicant of the human race. See Birdwood's "Indian Art," vol. ii. pp. 336, 337.

[111] "The Hom, the sacred Persian tree, is constantly placed between two animals, chained to it." See Pl. 23, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

[112] The Hom or Homa, the sacred tree of a.s.syrian and Persian sculpture and textiles, is accounted for as a pattern by Dr. Rock, who says: "From the earliest antiquity a tradition came down through middle Asia, of some holy tree, perhaps the tree of life spoken of as growing in Paradise." It is always represented as something like a shrub, and is a conventional portrait of a palm; but Rock says it has every look of having belonged to the family of the Asclepiadeae. For its last transformation into a vine, see Pl. 24.

[113] Rock's "Introduction," p. cx.x.xi.

[114] Sir George Birdwood says: "The intimate absorption of Hindu life in the unseen realities of man's spiritual consciousness is seldom sufficiently acknowledged by Europeans, and, indeed, cannot be fully comprehended by men whose belief in the supernatural has been destroyed by the prevailing material ideas of modern society.

Every thought, wish, and deed of the Hindu belongs to the world of the unseen as well as the seen; and nothing shows this more strikingly than the traditionary works of India. Everything that is made has a direct religious use, or some religious symbolism. The materials of which different articles are fashioned, their weight, and the colours with which they are painted, are fixed by religious rule. An obscured symbolism of material and colour is to be traced also in the forms of things, even for the most domestic uses. Every detail of Indian decoration, Aryan or Turanian, has a religious meaning, and the arts of India will never be rightly understood until there are brought to their study, a familiar acquaintance with the character and subjects of the religious poetry, national legends, and mythological scriptures that have always been their inspiration, and of which they are the perfected imagery." See Sir George Birdwood's "Indian Arts," part i. p. 2.

[115] The Persian tree of life was not alien to the worship of the Zoroastrian religion of the Sa.s.sanides, and is said to have been the origin of the worship of Bacchus. It was introduced by Oriental weavers into Sicilian and Spanish stuffs.

[116] Sir G. Birdwood suggests that the honeysuckle pattern is derived from the Tree of Life, cone, and palm, refashioned and combined with the graceful ingenuity of Greek art, and covering a mixture of sacred traditional emblems.

[117] Haug, in his "Essays on the Sacred Writings of the Pa.r.s.ees" (pp. 132, 239), tells us that these people still hold the homa to be sacred, and from it squeeze a juice used by them in their religious ceremonies.

[118] See Perrot et Chipiez, "Histoire de l'Art," vol.

ii. pp. 260, 267, Pl. xiv.

[119] See Appendix, No. 1.

[120] India, in return, afterwards influenced Persia, the successor of Babylon.

[121] In India, the elephant is a very common element in a pattern; in Egypt, the serpent; in Persia, the lion.

In animal patterns, certain emblems were grouped together. The lion and the goose represent strength and prudence; the lion and eagle, strength and dominion; the lion and dove, strength and gentleness. We may see these double emblems on Sicilian textiles.

[122] Chinese art is crowded with symbolisms.

[123] The double-headed eagle was the badge of Saladin, as well as that of the Holy Roman Empire.

[124] Ezekiel xvii.

[125] In the earliest days of Christianity.

[126] "A cloud pattern from which issue two clasped hands is the device of Guizot Marchand or Guido Mercator, printer, in 1498. He lived at the College of Navarre."--Dibdin's "Decameron," ii. pp. 33-36.

[127] See Gori (tom. iii. pp. 20, 84), as cited by Rock, Introduction, p. liii. The same netted pattern was found in the grave of an Archbishop of York of about the end of the thirteenth century. Its name, _fundata_, is derived from _funda_, the fisherman's net; also, in later times, it was called _laqueata_. See Rock's Introduction (p. liv.). See also M. Ch. Clermont Ganneau's "L'Imagerie Phenicienne," Coupe de Palestrina; and Chaldee et a.s.syrie, in Perrot and Chipiez, ii. p.

736. Another instance is shown here of the fundata occurring in the bronze flat bowl copied from Layard's "Monuments," 2nd series, plate 62. The whole design of the bowl is Babylonian, consisting of a rich border of repet.i.tions of the tree of life; each has the peculiar ornament of little k.n.o.bs often seen on their head-dresses.

[128] See Bock's "L. Gewander," p. 129; Gori, "Thes.

Dipt." ii. pp. 20, 275; Marquardt, "Handbuch Rom. Alt."

vii. pp. 527-31 (Eng. Trans.). Authorities differ in describing the Chrysoclavus. Sir G. Birdwood calls it a b.u.t.ton pattern ("Indian Arts," vol. ii. p. 241). The "Chrysoclavus" was the name given to the palmated or triumphal pattern with which the consular robes are invariably embroidered in the Roman Consular ivories at Zurich, Halberstadt, and in the South Kensington Museum.

The tenacious life of this pattern is curiously shown in the way it appears in the fifteenth century on Italian playing-cards. (See "Cartes a Jouer," an anonymous French book in the print-room of the British Museum.) The kings and knaves wear the Byzantine humeral, and the Chrysoclavus pattern is carved on their chairs. Till lately English playing-cards showed the same dress-pattern. I shall discuss the Latin Clavus and the Chrysoclavus amongst ecclesiastical embroideries, pp.

308, 336 (_post_).

[129] See Wilkinson's "Ancient Egyptians," i. p. 125.

The date of these mural paintings may, however, be even as late as the time of Alexander the Great.

CHAPTER IV.

MATERIALS.

1. RAW MATERIALS.

The history of an art must, more or less, include that of its raw material.

This is too true to be disputed, but in the art of embroidery it opens out such endless avenues, through such vast regions of technical study, that we must acknowledge the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of including in one volume even a t.i.the of the information already collected.

I shall, therefore, only dedicate a few pages to the history of those fibres which have always been most important in the different phases of our civilization.

Among books on textile materials, I must again name the "Textrinum Antiquorum," by Yates. His premature death, and the loss that the world of art and manufacture has sustained by the chain of his invaluable researches being broken, cannot be appreciated but through the study of the first and only volume of this already rare book, from which I venture to quote largely.

Semper's "Der Stil" is a work of reference on this subject, so valuable that it should, by a good translation, be placed within the reach of non-German scholars.

From Colonel Yule's "Marco Polo," and his abundant notes, we learn much of Asiatic textile art in the thirteenth century, and its early traditions in the immutable East, and Sir G. Birdwood's books on this Indian art are most instructive.

Egyptian textiles are splendidly ill.u.s.trated by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson. All these modern writers quote Pliny and the Periplus;[130]

and Pliny quotes all the cla.s.sic authors, from Homer to his day. Here is a wide field for gathering information regarding the materials for embroidery in past ages.

When we use the phrase "raw material" so glibly, with an aesthetic contempt for that which the art of man has neither manipulated nor reorganized, we show our own coa.r.s.e appreciation, if not ignorance, of the wonderful inherent beauty and microscopic delicacy of form, colour, and substance of those materials which we fashion for our own uses.

Few know the structure of the tender filaments of wool, flax, cotton, and silk; or that each has its peculiar form and attributes, and its individual capabilities for the purposes for which they appear to us to have been created, i.e. the clothing and adornment of man's dress and his home.

I should like to draw attention to these well-attested facts.

Seen through a microscope, the forms of these raw materials differ greatly.

Flax is difficult to describe, as it varies according to the soil and climate it comes from. Its fibre, however, has always a shiny outer surface, and is transparent, cylindrical, and pipe-like; apparently with breaks or joints like those of a cane.

Cotton also varies so much in its own kind, that every description is different and somewhat puzzling. Semper says that it approaches the ribbon form, with thickened edges, and is like a half-cylinder twisted spirally; but when wetted with oil, it swells into a complete cylinder.[131]

Wool and hair are hollow pipes without joints. Woollen fibres look like cylindrical snakes with a scaly surface. This roughness gives wool a clinging power which exceeds that of any other material, except the hair of some few animals.[132]

Silk threads consist of twin pipes laid parallel, and held together by the varnish with which they are glazed. Silk is tough and elastic.

The qualities needed for textile materials may be thus enumerated: Pliability, toughness (i.e. tensile strength), and intrinsic durability.

Of course, the material must to a certain degree influence the style of the fabric, and its selection must be according to the effect intended to be produced.[133] The fashions of the day, and the needs of the special manufacture, must greatly modify the choice of materials, which fluctuate, often disappear, and sometimes revive again.

Certain materials which have been, at one period, much admired, have been entirely lost; and indeed we may say that the only permanently employed textiles are wool, flax, cotton, and silk, which apparently never can be superseded. With them, all domestic requirements can be satisfied, and all artistic and decorative fabrics produced, varied, and perfected; and these, from all time recorded in history, have been enriched and glorified with gold, either inwoven or embroidered.

The game of "animal, vegetable, or mineral" might well be played with textiles only. Nothing has been alien to the crafts which from time immemorial have spun, woven, felted, netted, and embroidered.