The Tapestry Book Part 15

Besides this, were not the materials for the industry found best within the confines of the kingdom? What sheep in all the world produced such even, l.u.s.trous wool as the muttons huddling or wandering on the undulating _pres sales_ of Kent; and was not wool, par excellence, the ideal material for picture-weaving, better than silk or glittering gold?

The hangings made then were superb. Thanks to destiny, we have some left on which to lavish our enthusiasm. The cartoons preferred came from Italy's great dead masters. First was Raphael. The Mortlake would try its hand at nothing less than the great series made to finish and soften the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. And so the _Acts of the Apostles_ were woven, and in such manner as was worthy of them. They can be seen now in the Garde Meuble. Van Dyck, the great Hollander, made court painter to the king, drew borders for them, and was proud to do it, too. Van Dyck's other work here was a portrait of Sir Francis Crane and one of himself.

Rubens likewise a.s.sociated his great decorative genius with the factory and gave to it his suite of six designs for the _Story of Achilles_. Cleyn, the Mortlake art-director, furnished a _History of Hero and Leander_, which found home among the marvellous tapestries of the King of Sweden.

There were other cla.s.sic subjects, and the months as well, but of especial interest to us is the _Story of Vulcan_. Several pieces of this series have been lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by their owners, Mrs. von Zedlitz, and Philip Hiss, Esq. Thus, without going far from home, thousands have been able to see these delightful examples of the highest period of England's tapestry production. The series was woven for Charles I when he was Prince of Wales, from cartoons by Francis Cleyn, and woven by the master, Philip de Maecht. The borders are especially interesting, and carry the emblematic three feathers of the prince, as well as his monogram, in Mrs. von Zedlitz's example, _The Expulsion of Vulcan_. (Coloured plate facing page 170.)

It was this same series of _Vulcan_ that was used as a text by Crane's enemy to prove to the king, in 1630, that Crane was profiting unduly and dishonestly from the land grants given him in payment for arrears.

The plaintiff speaks of this set as being "the foundation of all good tapestries in England." We are fortunate in having pieces from it in America.

Only by actual contact with the tapestry itself can the beauty of the colour and the work be known. We well believe the superior quality of the English wool when it lies before us in smooth expanse of subtle colour. And as for even weaving, it is there unsurpa.s.sed. Every inch declares the talent and patience of the craftsman. As for colour, it is on a low scale that makes blues seem like remembrance of the sea, and reds like faint flushings planned in warm contrast, while over all is thrown a veil of delicate mist that may be of years, or may have been done with intent, but is there to give poetic value to the whole of the artist's scheme.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EXPULSION OF VULCAN FROM OLYMPUS]

Sir Francis Crane died in 1636, and Captain Richard Crane succeeded him. And then began the decline of a factory which should have lived to save us deep regret. This second Crane could not carry on the work, and besought the king to relieve him by taking over the factory, which was thenceforth known as King's Works.

But civil wars came on in 1642 and other matters were more urgent than the production of works of art. So evil days fell upon the weavers.

Then came the black day when Charles was beheaded. The Commonwealth, to do it justice, tried to keep alive the industry. They put at its head a n.o.bleman, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and, to inspire the workers, brought a new model for design.

They went to Hampton Court and took from there _The Triumph of Caesar_, by Mantegna, to serve as new models. Some hope, too, lay in the weavers of the hour, clever Hollanders taken prisoners in the war; and all this while Cleyn directed.

But there were too many circ.u.mstances in the way, too many hard knocks of fate. People were too poor to buy good tapestries, and loose-woven, cheaper ones were heavily imported--to the amount of $500,000 yearly--from France and the Low Countries. Anti-Catholic feeling displayed hatred toward the able Catholic weavers, who were forced out of the country by proclamation.

The sad end of this story is that in 1702 a pet.i.tion was placed before the king asking permission to discontinue the Mortlake works. It was granted in 1703, and thus ended the English royal venture in England.

CHAPTER XVIII

IDENTIFICATIONS

Identifying tapestries is like playing a game, like the solving of a piquant problem, like pursuing the elusive snark. I know of no keener pleasure than that of standing before a tapestry for the first time and giving its name and history from one's own knowledge, and not from a museum catalogue or a friend's recital. The latter sources of information may be faulty, but your own you can trust, for by delightful a.s.sociation with tapestries and their literature you have become expert. The catalogue is to be read, the friend is to be heard, in all humility, because these supply points that one may not know; but, who shall not say that an intensely human gratification is experienced when the owner of a tapestry with the Brussels mark tells you that it is a Gobelins, or one with the _History of Alexander_ tells you it is the only set of that series ever woven, and you know better.

The first thing that strikes the eye and the intelligence is the drawing, the general school to which it belongs. There is matter for placing the piece in its right cla.s.s. It might be said to place it in its right century or quarter century, but that tapestries were so often repeated in later times, the cartoon having no copyright and therefore open to all countries in all centuries. Next, then, to fix it better, comes a study of the border, for therein lies many a secret of ident.i.ty, and borders were of the epoch in which the weaving was done, even though the cartoon for the centre came from an earlier time.

Last, as a finishing touch, come the marks in the galloon. This is put last because so often they are absent, and so often unknown, the sign of some ancient weaver lost in the mists of years, although a well-known mark so instantly identifies, that study of other details is secondary.

But under these three generalising heads comes all the knowledge of the savant, for the truth about tapestries is most elusive. Knowledge is to be gained only by a lover of the objects, a lover willing to spend long hours in a.s.sociation with his love, prowling among collections, comparing, handling, studying designs, discerning colours, searching for details, and indulging withal a nice feeling for textures, a vision that feels them even without touch of the hand.

If the study of design has not given a keen scent for the vague quality which we call "feeling," the eye would better be trained still further, for herein lies the secret of success in difficult places, and not only that, but if he have not this sense he is deprived of one of the most subtile thrills that the arts can excite.

But this sense is not a matter of untrained intuition. It is the flower of erudition, the flame from a full heart, or whatever dainty thing you choose to call it. It has its origin primarily in keen observation of the various important schools of design that have interested the world for centuries. We unconsciously augment it even in following the side-path of history in this modest volume. Our studies here are but those of a summer morn or a winter eve, yet they are in vain if they have not set up a measuring standard or two within the mind.

GOTHIC DRAWING

First, and dearest to the lover of designs, comes the Gothic, the style practised by those conscientious romantic children-in-art, the Primitives. Their characteristics in tapestry are much the same as in painting, as in sculpture; for, weavers, painters, book-makers, sculptors, were all expressing the same matter, all following the same fashion. Therefore, to one's help comes any and every work of the primitive artists. Making allowance for the difference in medium, the same religious feeling is seen in the Burgundian set of _The Sacraments_ in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, as is found in stone carving of the time which decorated churches and tombs.

The figures in the Gothic tapestries show a dignified restraint, a solemnity of pose, recalling the deadly seriousness with which children play the game of grown-ups. The artists of that day had to keep to their traditions; to express without over-expression, was their difficult task (as it is ours), but they had behind them the rigidity of the Byzantine and Early Christian, so that every free line, every vigorous pose or energetic action, was forging ahead into a new country, a voyage of adventure for the daring artist. Quite another affair was this from modern restraint which consists in pruning down the voluptuous lines following the too high Renaissance.

Faces are serious, but not animated. Dress reveals charming matter concerning stuffs and modes in that far time. But apart from these characteristics is the one great feature of the arrangement of the figures, almost without perspective. And therein lies one immense superiority of the ancient designs of tapestries over the modern as pure decorative fabric. Men and women are placed with their accessories of furniture or architecture all in the foreground, and each man has as many cubits to his stature as his neighbour, not being dwarfed for perspective, but only for modesty, as in the case of the Lady's companion in the _Unicorn_ series--but that series is of a later Gothic time than the early works of Arras.

A noticeable feature is that the centre of vision is placed high on the tapestry. The eye must look to the top to find all the strength of the design. The lower part is covered with the sweeping robes or finished figures of the folk who are playing their silent parts for the delight of the eye. This covers well the s.p.a.ce with large and simple motive. No recourse is had to such artifice as distant lands seen in perspective, nor angles of rooms, but all is flat, brought frankly into intimate a.s.sociation with the room that is lived in, so that these people of other days seem really to enter into our very presence, to thrust vitally their quaint selves into our company. This feature of simple flatness is in so great contrast to later methods of drawing that one becomes keenly conscious of it, and deeply satisfied with its beauty. The purpose of decoration and of furnishing seems to be most adequately met when the attention is retained within the chamber and not led out of it by trick of background nor lure of perspective, no matter how enticing are the distant landscapes or how n.o.ble the far palace of royalty. Thus the Primitives struck a more intimately human note than the artists of later and more sophisticated times.

The more archaic the tapestry, the simpler the motive, is the rule.

The early weavers of Arras and of France were telling stories as naturally as possible, perhaps because the ways of their times were simple, and brushed aside all filigree with a directness almost brutal; but also, perhaps, because technique was not highly developed, either in him who drew with a pencil or him who copied that drawing in threads of silk and wool and gold. Whatever the cause, we can but rejoice at the result, which, alas, is shown to us by but lamentably few remnants outside of museums. These very archaic simple pieces are, for the most part, work of the latter part of the Fourteenth Century and the first part of the Fifteenth, and as the history of tapestry shows, were almost invariably woven in France or in Flanders. At the end of the time mentioned, designs, while retaining much the same characteristics already described, became more ambitious, more complicated, and introduced many scenes into one piece. This is easily proved by a comparison of the ill.u.s.tration of _The Baillee des Roses_, or _The Sacraments_, with _The Sack of Jerusalem_, all in the Metropolitan Museum.

The idea in the earliest Gothic cartoons--if the word may be allowed here, was to make a single picture, a unified group. Into the later cartoons came the fashion of multiplying these groups on one field, so that a tapestry had many points of interest, many scenes where tragedies or comedies were being enacted. Ingenious were the ways of the early artist to accomplish the separation between the various scenes, which were sometimes divided merely by their own att.i.tudes, as folk dispose themselves in groups in a large drawing-room; and sometimes were divided by natural obstructions, like brooks and trees, or by columns.

Later yet, all the antique eccentricities pa.s.sed away, and the laws of perspective and balance were fully developed in an art which has an unspeakable charm. All the things that modern art has decreed as crude or childish has pa.s.sed away, and the sweet flower of the Gothic perfection unfolded its exquisite beauty. This Gothic perfection was the Golden Age of tapestry.

ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL

The use of architecture in the old Gothic designs makes a pleasing necessity of fastening our attention upon it. In the very oldest drawing the sole use is to separate one scene from another, in the same hanging. For this purpose slender columns are used. It is intensely interesting to note that these are the same variety of column that meets us on every delightful prowl among old relics of North Europe, relics of the days when man's highest and holiest energy expressed itself at last in the cathedral. Those slender stems of the northern Gothic are verily the stems of plants or of aspiring young trees, strong when grouped, dainty when alone, and forming a refined division for the various scenes in a picture. It must be confessed that in the medium of aged wool they sometimes totter with the effect of imminent fall, but that they do not fall, only inspires the illusion that they belong to the marvellous age of fairy-tale and fancy.

The careful observer takes a keen look at these columns as a clue to dates. The shape of the shaft, whether round or hectagonal, the ornament on the capitals, are indications. It is not easy to know how long after a design is adopted its use continues, but it is entirely a simple matter to know that a tapestry bearing a capital designed in 1500 could not have been made prior to that time.

The columns, later on, took on a different character. They lifted slender shafts more ornamented. It is as though the restless men of Europe had come up from the South and had brought with them reminiscences of those tender models which shadowed the art of the Saracens, the art which flavoured so much the art of Southern Europe.

The columns of many a cloister in Italy bear just such lines of ornament, including the time when the brothers Cosmati were illuminating the pattern with their rich mosaic.

Then, later still, the columns burst into the exquisite bloom of the early Renaissance, their character profoundly different, but their use the same, that of dividing scenes from one another on the same woven picture. But as any allusion to the Renaissance seems to thrust us far out onto a radiant plain, let us scamper back into the mysterious wood of the Gothic and pick up a few more of its indicative pebbles, even as did Hans and Gretel of fairyland.

A use of Gothic architectural detail gives a religious look to tapestry, quite other than the later introduction of castles. These castle strongholds of the Middle Ages wasted no daintiness of construction, nor favoured light ornament, nor dainty hand. They were, par excellence, places of defence against the frequent enemy; so, in bastion and tower they were piled in curving ma.s.ses around the scenes of the later Gothic tapestries. Even more, they began to play an important part in the _mise en scene_, and were drawn on tiny scale as habitations of the actors in the play who thrust heads from windows no larger than their throats, or who gathered in gigantic groups on disproportioned tessellated roofs.

Occasionally a lovely lady in distress is seen in fine raiment praying high Heaven for deliverance from the top of a feudal pile not half as high as her stately figure. Laws of proportion are quite lost in this nave way of telling a story, and one wonders whether the wise old artist of other times, with his rigid solemnity was heroically overcoming difficulties of traditional technique, or whether he was smiling at the infantile taste of his wealthy patrons. The past fashion in history was to record only the lives and expressions of those great in power. The artist is ever the servant of such, but may he not have had his own private thoughts, unpurchaseable, unsold, and therefore only for our divining. There must have been a sense of humour then as now, and twinkling eyes with which to see it.

GOTHIC FLOWERS

Always, in studying a Gothic tapestry, we find flowers. The flowers of nature, they are, a simple nature at that, and never to be thought of in the same day as the gorgeous, expansive, proud flowers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century decoration. Those splendid later blossoms flaunt their richness with a.s.sured swagger and demand of man his homage, quite forgetting it is the flower's best part to give.

Botticelli had not outgrown the Gothic flowers when he sprinkled them on the ambient air and floating robe of his chaste and dreamy _Venus_, nor when he set them about the elastic tripping feet of the _Spring_.

He knew their simple power, and so do we. Scarce a Gothic tapestry is complete without them, happily for those bent on identification, for rarely can one discover them without the same thrill that accompanies the discovery of the first violets and snowdrops in the awakening woods.

The old weavers set them low in the picture, used them as s.p.a.ce-fillers wherever s.p.a.ce lay happily before them, and they never exaggerated their size, a virtue of which the full Renaissance cannot boast. They are the simplest sort of flowers, the corolla of petals turning as frankly toward the observer as the sunflower turns toward her G.o.d, and little bells hanging as regularly as a chime. These are their characteristics, easily recognisable and expressing the unsophisticated charm of the creations of honest childish hands.

Irrelevancy is theirs, too. They spring from stones or pavement as well as from turf or garden, and thus express the more ardently their love for man and for close a.s.sociation with him. When they are seen after this manner, it is sure that the early men have set them, just as Shakespeare, at the same epoch, set violets blue and daisies pied, cowslip, rosemary "for remembrance," and other familiar dainties, in the grim foundation stones of his tragedies.

A comparison of the different hangings available to the amateur, or of the pictured examples given in this book, will reveal more than can be well set down with the pen. The use of flowers in the set of _The Baillee des Roses_ is exceptional, in that here the flowers form a harmonious decorative scheme and are at the same time an important part of the story which is pictured.

In other earliest examples they playfully peep within the limits of the hanging. Important use is, however, made of them in that altogether entrancing set of _The Lady and the Unicorn_, where they indicate the beauties of a fascinating park in which the delicate lady and her attendant led a wondrous life guarded by two beasts as fabulous as faithful, and the whole region of leaves and petals but serving as a paradise for delectable white rabbits and piquant monkeys. Could any modern indicate by sophistry of brush or brain so intoxicating a fairyland, so gracious a field of dear delights?

COSTUMES

A minute study of all the details of costume and accessories is one of the measuring sticks with which we count the years of a tapestry's life. This applies more particularly to the work prior to the Renaissance, to the time when all characters were dressed in the mode of the day--another evidence of that ingenuousness that delights us who have pa.s.sed the period where it is possible.