Needlework As Art Part 43

To resume, let me once more urge that in church work neither time nor trouble be spared; nor yet money grudged, if possible. The design should be full of intention, the st.i.tching perfect, and the materials most carefully chosen for tints, for endurance and smoothness.

Remember that no inferior subst.i.tute will serve to give present effect, nor will it last into the future.

Design, as I have elsewhere said, is all the better for being to a certain degree circ.u.mscribed, relegated, and regulated by the laws of traditional usage, as well as those of good taste, and this applies especially to ecclesiastical design.

These laws serve as the frame which encloses the motive thought, and makes it a complete whole, that can admit of no amplifications.

New symbols should not be adopted except for the expression of new facts or altered circ.u.mstances, and these can but seldom enter into liturgical art.

There is so much already formulated and admitted, and the area in which we may gather our materials is so large, that we need not seek for more than we find under our hand, ready for use.

Besides the symbolism of dogma, we have all the heraldry of the Saints; and can repeat and vary the emblems of those to whom the church we are working for is dedicated. The keys of St. Peter, the sword of St. Paul, the lilies of the Virgin, the cross of St. Andrew, the eagle of St. John,--I need hardly enumerate all these legitimate sources of decoration. Then there is the lay heraldry which belongs to the history of each church, and which memorializes the reign of the monarch when it was begun, finished, or restored, and the pious work and care of the founder and benefactor, the architect, and sometimes that of the sculptor.

Now as our forefathers accepted all this material for ecclesiastical design, remodelling it to their own uses in different centuries, so we cannot ourselves do better than imitate them, and profit by their experience; never missing an opportunity of studying ancient embroideries; and while we admire in them all that is admirable, and appreciate their historical and archaeological value, we may yet extract greater benefit for ourselves, by criticizing what is imperfect, as well as what is possibly a descent and failure from a higher type.

We must make a judicious selection of what to imitate and what to avoid.

As a general rule, I should warn the young artist against the imitation of "navete" and so-called "quaintness;" especially in our designs for Church embroidery as it is hardly a n.o.ble quality in art, though we look on it with a tender pity, half-way between admiration and contempt, when we find it inevitably in mediaeval work; struggling to overcome the expression of something difficult, and expressing a difficulty only partly overcome. We find ourselves putting our minds into the att.i.tude of the artist who conceived those figures with arms conventionally growing out of the encasing garment; conventionally holding a book, and giving a blessing with a conventional twist, not entirely ungraceful, nor devoid of a certain dignity, rather felt than perceived. Yet we contemplate them with a smile of conscious superiority, appreciating our own refined sense of their merits and infantine progress towards something good, that time--a long time--would, and did evolve. But those efforts at last culminated in a Christian art, such as is seen in the splendid forms and adornments in stone, gold, silver, gla.s.s, and embroideries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Such splendours as the windows of Bourges, the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris, or those of the Cathedral of Toledo, or King's College Chapel at Cambridge. Such sculptures and traceries as those of the Puits de Moise at Dijon, and the Chapter House at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. Such embroideries as the Syon cope, and the Borghese triptych. These are types worthy of all praise, and they are full of instruction to the student of ecclesiastical art.

The Kensington Museum offers us endless help and suggestions in its very interesting collection of liturgical vestments of every date and school; and its textiles, ill.u.s.trated by the inventory of their learned collector, Dr. Rock, are most instructive.[553]

In the library of that museum are to be found many of the learned works on these subjects by French and German _savants_. The exhibitions in the English counties are never without a case or a room full of embroideries, collected from the treasure-chests of the neighbouring churches and country houses, and especially from those of the ancient Roman Catholic families. The colleges of Oscott and Stoneyhurst have collected, by purchase or by gift, many fine relics of the craft, which are most liberally granted for exhibition.

For those who can go further afield there is instruction in almost every Continental town. Rome, Florence, Milan, Toledo, Sens, Rheims, Aix-la-Chapelle, Berne, Vienna, Halberstadt, Berlin, and Munich--each and all have stores of beautiful liturgical objects carefully preserved; of many dates, and many styles, and showing endless varieties of design, which can be employed on new works by careful selection and adaptation. Most of these belong to the eleventh and succeeding centuries; any earlier examples are fragmentary, and have generally been taken from the tombs of kings and bishops.

It seems to savour of desecration, this opening of shrines and disturbing the ashes of the ill.u.s.trious dead, if only for the satisfaction of archaeological curiosity. But except where it has. .h.i.therto been protected by the sanct.i.ty of the tomb, there is so little that remains to us,--so few textiles have survived the friction of use, or even that of the air, through as many as a thousand years or more, that we may plead the hunger for truth, and the eager desire for proofs of ident.i.ty and verification of historical legends, which are to be extracted from the shape of a garment, from the pattern on the border, or the lettering on the web of which it is composed; whence we reverently cut a fragment, and preserve it under gla.s.s.

"If studious, copie fair what time hath blurr'd, Redeem truth from his jawes."[554]

Before closing this chapter, I would wish to observe that I have entered into the subject of church decoration in no ritualistic spirit; I do not treat it theologically, but as art; and if these decorations are to be carried out at all, I feel that I am rendering a service to those whose duty or pleasure it is to provide them, by pointing out where they may find the principles which have been the spring and life of mediaeval art, and the survivals which are now the best exponents of those principles to guide us in the works of our day.

FOOTNOTES:

[479] Figure-drawing in early Christian art was for nearly a thousand years primitively barbarous, with occasional exceptions. The rapid decline in Europe, through the art of the Catacombs and St. Clemente at Rome, and the frescoes and mosaics of Ravenna, down to the Bayeux tapestries, is very remarkable. In those inartistic compositions during the early Middle Ages, the figures were drawn facing the spectator, the head and feet in profile, differing in nothing from the Egyptian and a.s.syrian modes of representation. We can hardly account for this return to childish ways, from which Greece and Rome had so long been emanc.i.p.ated, except by supposing that they came from the imitations of Oriental textiles, which still retained very ancient forms; for instance, the motive of the sculptured lions over the gate of Mycenae. We cannot say that Greek art in Rome was quite extinct till the eighth century. About that time there was a remarkable revival in England.

[480] Till very lately we have been entirely dependent on the frescoes in the Catacombs and in the underground Church of St. Clemente at Rome, and on monumental art and illuminations, for our knowledge of the textiles of the earliest days of Christianity. But Herr Graf'schen's discoveries in Egypt will, when published, add greatly to our information on this subject.

[481] The book by Parker on the "Liturgical Use" says that only the five liturgical colours were permitted in the use of the Church of England. Before the Reformation the Norman and English liturgical colours were different. (Rock, "Church of our Fathers," ii. p. 268.) Perhaps nothing was originally worked departing from this rule, but votive offerings are inventoried as being of all colours, having been accepted and used as decoration and for vestments.

[482] I have already spoken of the custom of clothing the images of the G.o.ds as a cla.s.sical tradition. The Greeks draped their statues in precious garments, often the spoils of subjugated nations, offerings from the conquerors, or obsequious tribute from the conquered.

Newton (Appendix 1) tells us of inscriptions containing inventories of old clothes offered in the Greek Temples.

Ezekiel (xvi.) speaks of silk and linen embroideries given for covering the idols. The images of the saints in Roman Catholic churches are, we know, constantly draped in splendid embroideries, and hung with jewels.

[483] There is here an overlap of several centuries.

[484] Charlemagne's dalmatic, described hereafter, of which the pedigree is well ascertained, justifies Woltmann and Woermann's theory; as this eighth-century embroidery shows, by its design, that Greek art was still a living power.

[485] Of which we have yet examples on the Continent, here and there; for instance, in the Cathedral at Coire in the Grisons, and in the Romanesque church at Clermont in Auvergne (not the cathedral). I do not include in this statement of the rare occurrence of the ogee, the European countries which were subject to Moorish rule, i.e. Spain and Portugal.

[486] This, slightly modified, continued to prevail till the time of Louis XIV., when France took the lead, and gave a style to the world which entirely broke away from all mediaeval tradition.

[487] Rock's "Church of our Fathers," i. p. 409. Compare Wilkinson's "Ancient Egyptians," i. p. 332 (see fig. 1); and Bock's "Liturgische Gewander," taf. i., i. p. 130, fig. 6. Bock does not give his authority for the pattern on the ephod.

[488] Bock's "Liturgische Gewander," i. taf. i., iii., vi.

[489] Yates' "Textrinum Antiquorum," pp. 203, 376, -- 103. He quotes from Claudian the description of a trabea, said to have been woven by the G.o.ddess Roma herself, for the consul Stilicho. I give this as showing how forms and patterns become sacred by their being attributed to the inspiration of the G.o.ds. The name of Stilicho marks his tomb in Sant' Ambrogio's Church at Milan, on which is a curious moulding, carved with alternate roses and mystic crosses.

[490] Clapton Rolfe, "Ancient Use of Liturgical Colours."

[491] See the Book of Kells, Library, Dublin; also St.

Cuthbert's Durham Book, British Museum, and the Celtic MSS. in the Lambeth Palace Library.

[492] Celtic and Scandinavian designs are characterized by meandering, interlaced, and knotted lines, which are described and discussed in the chapter on patterns. The forms of the Celtic stone crosses are very beautiful.

See "L'Atlas de l'Archeologie du Nord, par la Societe Royale des Antiquaires du Nord" (Copenhagen, 1857), where the metal remains are shown by careful engravings; also George Stephen's "Old Northern Runic Monuments."

[493] See Bock's "Liturgische Gewander," i. p. 126, quoting Anastasius Bibliothecarius, pp. 153, 156, 189.

[494] Ibid. p. 189.

[495] The information here collected proves that these sovereign gifts to the great basilicas were by no means of costly materials, especially as compared with the preceding splendours of Rome, or the still more astounding luxury of Alexandria through the Greek conquests of the Eastern nations. To these rules of economical decoration, however, we find occasionally exceptions. We gather also from later lists that the embroideries of the Papal See were culled, in the thirteenth century, from France, Spain, Germany, and England.

[496] See also Bock's "Liturgische Gewander," vol. i.

pp. 9, 18, 56, 86, plate 2. At a later period the lion motive is supposed to have represented a Christian in the arena, and it certainly in time was symbolical of man struggling with the dominion of sin. However, Bock considers the design to have been originally cla.s.sical Greek, and it survived to the seventh and eighth centuries, and was reproduced as late as the sixteenth.

[497] The Code of Manu in India, which 2500 years ago regulated all the crafts and ruled their decorations, is still in full force, and Chinese art was crystallized in the reigns of the first emperors of the Hia dynasty, 2197 B.C.

[498] We cannot but respect the memory of Attila, who checked the spoliation of Rome by his troops.

[499] The collections of needlework in Germany are very rich. The treasury of the cathedral at Halberstadt, the Markt-Kirche of Brunswick, the sacristy of the Marien-Kirche of Dantzic, and that of the Kaland Brethren at Strahlsund are especially quoted by Bock. At Quedlinburg are the tapestries of its famous abbess; at the Pilgrim Church of Marie at Zell are fine remains of stuffs and embroideries by the ladies of the imperial house of Hapsburg, of the thirteenth century; at the Abbey of Goss (near Lieben, Steiermark) is to be seen the remarkable needlework of the Abbess Kunigunda, and in the cathedral treasury of Heidelberg the antipendium of the fourteenth century, made for the church at Tirna.

The museums of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna are very rich in textiles.

[500] See Bock's "Liturgische Gewander," p. 133.

[501] Helen Lwyddawc. See "Mabinogion," by Lady C.

Guest, pp. 279-284. This beautiful story is told in the language of the romance period, and yet has a certain Celtic colouring in it, which shows its origin. The ballad opens with a description of Helen watching a game of chess, clothed in white and gold, seated on a chair of gold, when Maxentius finds her in her father's palace.

[502] See Mrs. Palliser's "Lace," p. 4.

[503] See chapter on English embroidery, _post_.

[504] Early decorations of ecclesiastical dress are so thoroughly ill.u.s.trated by the ancient frescoes and mosaics in Italy, that we can form an idea of the embroidered vestments of each period by studying them, and the early illuminated books that are scattered over Europe. Dr. Bock gives authentic ill.u.s.trations as well as information about the finest Continental specimens.

[505] For the mosaics of Santa Pudenziana, see Woltmann and Woermann, i. p. 167, "History of Painting."

Translated by Sidney Colvin.

[506] Appendix 4. Lord Lindsay's "History of Ecclesiastical Art," i. p. 136. These gorgeous vestments are engraved by Sulpiz Boisseree in his "Kaiser Dalmatika in der St. Peterskirche," and far better by Dr. Rock, in his splendid work on the "Coronation Robes of the German Emperors."

[507] It is singular that we find the starry cross and the swastika filling alternate square s.p.a.ces on the mantle of Achilles--playing at dice with Ajax--on a celebrated Greek vase in the Etruscan Museum at the Vatican. I have referred to this design elsewhere.