The Tapestry Book Part 18

The day was for the grandiose in borders. The pet.i.te and _mignonne_ of Raphael's grotesques was no longer suited to the people, or, to put it otherwise, the people were not such as seek expression in refinement, for all art is but the visible evidence of a state of mind or soul.

The wish to be sumptuous and superb, then, was a force, and so the art expressed it, but in a way that holds our admiration. A stroll in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows us better than words the perfection of design at this grandiose era. There one sees _Antony and Cleopatra_ of Rubens--probably. On these hangings the border has all the evidences of genius. If there were no picture at all to enclose, if there were but this decorative frame, a superb inspiration would be flaunted. From substantial urns at right and left, springs the design at the sides which mounts higher and higher, design on design, but always with probability. That is the secret of its beauty, its probability, yet we are cheated all the time and like it. No vase of fruit could ever uphold a cupid's frolic, nor could an emblematic bird support a chalice, yet the artist makes it seem so. Note how he hangs his swags, and swings his amorini, from the horizontal borders. He first sets a good strong architectural moulding of cla.s.sic egg-and-dart, and leaf, and into this able motive thrusts hooks and rings. From these solid facts he hangs his happy weight of fruit and flower and peachy flesh. Nothing could be more simple, nothing could be more logical. The cartouche at the top, he had no choice but to put it there, to hold the t.i.tle of the picture, and at the bottom came a tiny landscape to balance. So much for fashion well executed.

Colours were reformed, too, at this time, for we are now at the era when tapestry had its last run of best days, that is to say, at the time when France began her wondrous ascendency under Louis XIV. In Italy colours had grown garish. Too much light in that country of the sun, flooded and over-coloured its pictured scenes. Tints were too strong, ma.s.ses of blue and yellow and red glared all in tones purely bright. They may have suited the twilight of the church, the gloom of a palace closed in narrow streets, but they scourge the modern eye as does a blasting light. The Gothic days gave borders the deep soft tones of serious mood; the Renaissance played on a daintier scale; the Seventeenth Century rushed into too frank a palette.

It remained for Rubens and Lebrun to find a scheme both rich and subdued, to bring back the taste errant. Here let me note a peculiarity of colour, noticeable in work of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century borders. The colour tone varies in different pieces of the same set, and this is not the result of fading, but was done by deliberate intent, one side border being light and another dark, or one entire border being lighter than others of the same set.

Lest in speaking of borders, too much reference might be made to the history of tapestry in general, I have left out Simon Vouet and Henri Lerambert as inspired composers of the frame which enclosed their cartoons; but it is well to say briefly that these men at least had not followed false G.o.ds, and were not guilty of the flagrant offence to taste that put a smirch on Italian art. These are the men who preceded the establishment of State ateliers under Louis XIV and who made productive the reign of Henri IV.

If Rubens kept to a style of large detail, that was a popular one and had many followers in a grandiose age. Lebrun in borders harked back to the cla.s.sics of Greece and Rome, thus restoring the exquisite quality of delicacy a.s.sociated with a thousand designs of amphorae, foliated scrolls and light grotesques. But he expressed himself more individually and daringly in the series called _The Months_ and _The Royal Residences_. This set is so celebrated, so delectable, so grateful to the eye of the tapestry lover, that familiarity with it must be a.s.sumed. You recollect it, once you have seen no more than a photograph of one of its squares. But it cannot be pertinent here, for it has no important border, say you. No, rather it is all border. Look what the cunning artist has done. His problem was to picture twelve country houses. To his mind it must have seemed like converting a room into an architect's office, to hang it full of buildings. But genius came to the front, his wonderful feeling for decoration, and lo, he filled his canvas with glorious foreground, full of things man lives with; columns, the size appropriate to the salon they are placed in; urns, peac.o.c.ks, all the ante-terrace frippery of the grand age, arranged in the foreground. Garlands are fresh hung on the columns as though our decorator had but just posed them, and beyond are cl.u.s.tered trees--with a small opening for a vista. Way off in the light-bathed distance stands the faithfully drawn chateau, but here, here where the observer stands, is all elegance and grace and welcome shade, and close friendship with luxury.

This work of Lebrun's is then the epitome of border. Greater than this hath no man done, to make a tapestry all border which yet so intensified the value of the small central design, that not even the royal patron, jealous of his own conspicuousness, discovered that art had replaced display.

After that a great change came. As the picture ever regulates the border, that change was but logical. After the "Sun King" came the regency of the effeminate Philippe, whom the Queen Mother had kept more like a court page than a man. Artists lapped over from the previous reign, and these were encouraged to develop the smaller, daintier, more effeminate designs that had already begun to a.s.sert their charm. Borders took on the new method. And as small s.p.a.ce was needed for the curves and sh.e.l.ls and latticed bands, the border narrower grew.

Like Alice, after the potent dose, the border shrank and shrank, until in time it became a gold frame, like the _encadrement_ of any easel picture. And that, too, was logical, for tapestries became at this time like painted pictures, and lost their original significance of undulating hangings.

The well-known motives of the Louis XV decoration rippled around the edge of the tapestry, woven in shades of yellow silk and imitated well the carved and gilded wood of other frames, those of chairs and screens and paintings. There are those who deplore the mode, but at least it seems appropriate to the style of picture it encloses.

And here let us consider a moment this matter of appropriateness. So far we have thought only of tapestries and their borders as inseparable, and as composed at the same time. But, alas, this is the ideal; the fact is that in the habit which weavers had of repeating their sets when a model proved a favourite among patrons, led them into providing variety by setting up a different border around the drawing. As this reproducing, this copying of old cartoons was sometimes done one or two hundred years after the original was drawn, we find an anachronism most disagreeable to one who has an orderly mind, who hates to see a telephone in a Venus' sh.e.l.l, for instance.

The whole thing is thrown out of key. It is as though your old family portrait of the Colonial Governor was framed in "art nouveau."

The big men, the almost divine Raphael, and later Rubens, felt so keenly the necessity of harmony between picture and frame, that they were not above drawing their own borders, and it is evident they delighted in the work. But Raphael's cartoons went not only to Brussels, but elsewhere, and somehow the borders got left behind; and thus we see his celebrated suite of _Acts of the Apostles_ with a different entourage in the Madrid set from what it bears in Rome.

There is another matter, and this has to do with commerce more than art. An old tapestry is of such value that mere a.s.sociation with it adds to the market price of newer work. So it is that sometimes a whole border is cut off and transferred to an inferior tapestry, and the tapestry thus denuded is surrounded with a border woven nowadays in some atelier of repairs, copied from an old design.

Let such desecrators beware. The border of a tapestry must appertain, must be an integral part of the whole design for the sake of artistic harmony.

FOOTNOTE:

[16] Frontispiece.

CHAPTER XXI

TAPESTRY MARKS

Regardless of what a man's longing for fame may have been in the Middle Ages, he let his works pa.s.s into the world without a sign upon them that portrayed their author. This is as true of the lesser arts as of the greater. It was not the fashion in the days of Giotto, nor of Raphael, to sign a painting in vermillion with a flourished underscore. The artist was content to sink individuality in the general good, to work for art's sake, not for personal fame.

This was true of the lesser artists who wove or directed the weaving of the tapestries called Gothic, not only through the time of the simple earnest primitives, but through the brilliant high development of that style as shown at the studio of Jean de Rome, of the Brussels ateliers, through the years lying between the close of the Fifteenth Century and the Raphael invasion.

Even that important event brought no consequence of that sort. The freemasonry among celebrities in those days showed its perfection by this very lack of signed work. Everybody knew the man by his works, and the works by their excellence.

Tapestry marks were non-existent as a system until the Brussels edict of 1528 made them compulsory in that town. Doc.u.ments and history have been less unkind to those early workers, and to those of us who like to feel the thrill of human brotherhood as it connects the artist and craftsman centuries dead with our own strife for the ideal. Nicolas Bataille in 1379 cannot remain unknown since the publishing of certain doc.u.ments concerning his Christmas task of the _Apocalypse_, and there are scores of known master weavers reaching up through the ages to the time when marks began.

The Brussels mark was the first. It was a simple and appropriate composition, a shield flanked with two letters B. These were capitals or not. One was reversed or not, with little arbitrariness, for the mark was legible and unmistakable in any case, even though the weaver took great liberties--as he sometimes did. The place for this mark was the galloon, and it was usually executed in a lighter colour, but a single tone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRUSSELS]

So much for the town mark, which has a score or more of variations. In addition to this was the mark of the weaver or of the merchant who gave the commission. A pity it was thus to confound the two, to give such confusion between a gifted craftsman and a mere dealer. One was giving the years of his life and the cunning of his hand to the work, while the other did but please a rich or royal patron with his wares.

But so it was, and we can but study over the symbols and glean at least that the tapestry was considered a worthy one, reached the high standard of the day, or it would have had no mark at all.

For it was thus that the marks were first adopted. They were for the protection of every one against fraud. High perfection made Brussels famous, but fame brought with it such a rush of patronage that only by lessening the quality of productions could orders be filled in such hot haste.

Tricks of the trade grew and prospered; there were tricks of dyeing after a tapestry was finished, in case the flesh tints or other light shades were not pleasing. There was a trick of dividing a large square into strips so that several looms might work upon it at once. And there was all manner of slighting in the weave, in the use of the comb which makes close the fabric, in the setting of the warp to make a less than usual number of threads to the inch. In fact, men tricked men as much in those days as in our own.

The fame of the city's industry was in danger. It was the province of the guild of tapestry-makers to protect it against its own evils.

Thus, in 1528, a few years after the weaving of the Raphael tapestries, the law was made that all tapestries should bear the Brussels mark and that of the weaver or the client. Small tapestries were exempt, but at that time small tapestries were not frequent, or were simple verdures, and, charming as they are, they lacked the same intellectual effort of composition.

The Brussels guild stipulated the size at which the tapestry should be marked. It was given at six ells, a Flemish ell being about 27 inches. Therefore, a tapestry under approximately thirteen feet might escape the order. But that was the day of large tapestries, the day of the Italian cartoonists, and important pieces reached that measure.

The guild of the tap.i.s.siers in Brussels, once started on restrictions, drew article after article, until it seemed that manacles were put on the masters' hands. To these restrictions the decadence of Brussels is ascribed, but that were like laying a criminal's fault to the laws of the country. Primarily must have been the desire to shirk, the intent to do questionable work. And behind that must have been a basic cause.

Possibly it was one of those which we are apt to consider modern, that is, the desire to turn effort into the coin of the realm. All of the enormous quant.i.ty of orders received by Brussels in the days of her highest prosperity could not have been accepted had not the master of the ateliers pressed his underlings to highest speed.

Speed meant deterioration in quality of work, and so Brussels tried by laws to prevent this lamentable result, and to protect the fair fame of the symbol woven in the bordering galloon. The other sign which accompanied the town mark, of the two letters B, should have had excellent results, the personal mark of the weaver that his work might be known.

In spite of this spur to personal pride, the standard lessened in a few years, but not until certain weavers had won a fame that thrills even at this distance. Unfortunately, a great client was considered as important as a weaver, and it was often his arbitrary sign that was woven. And sometimes a dealer, wishing glory through his dealings, ordered his sign in the galloon. And thus comes a long array of signs which are not identifiable always. In general, one or two initials were introduced into these symbols, which were fanciful designs that any idle pencil might draw, but in the lapse of years it is not possible to know which able weaver or what great purveyor to royalty the letter A or B or C may have signified.

Happily the light of Wilhelm de Pannemaker could not be hid even by piling centuries upon it. His works were of such a nature that, like those of Van Aelst, who had no mark, they would always be known for their historic a.s.sociation. In ill.u.s.tration, there is his set of the _Conquest of Tunis_ (plate facing page 62), woven under circ.u.mstances of interest. Even without a mark, it would still be known that the master weaver of Brussels (whom all acknowledged Pannemaker to be) set up his looms, so many that it must have seemed to the folk of Granada that a new industry had come to live among them. And it is a matter of Spanish history that the great Emperor Charles V carried in his train the court artist, Van Orley, that his exploits be pictured for the gratification of himself and posterity.

But Wilhelm de Pannemaker lived and worked in the time of marks, so his tapestries bear his sign in addition to the Brussels mark. Of symbols he had as many as nine or ten, but all of the same general character, taking as their main motive the W and the P of his name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILHELM DE PANNEMAKER]

Incorporated into his sign, as into many others of the period, was a mark resembling a figure 4. Tradition has it that when this four was reversed, the tapestry was not for a private client, but for a dealer.

One set of the _Vertumnus and Pomona_ at Madrid (plates facing pages 72, 73, 74, 75) bears De Pannemaker's mark, while others have a conglomerate pencilling.

The sign of Jacques Geubels is, like W. de Pannemaker's, made up of his initials combined with fantastic lines which doubtless were full of meaning to their inventor, little as they convey to us. The example of Jacques Geubels' weaving given in the plate is from the Chicago Inst.i.tute of Art. His time was late Sixteenth Century.

The _Acts of the Apostles_ of Raphael, the first set, was woven by Peter van Aelst without a mark, but the set at Madrid bears the marks of several Brussels weavers, some attributed to Nicolas Leyniers.

The desirability of distinguishing tapestries by marks in the galloon appealed to other weaving centres, and the method of Brussels found favour outside that town. Presently Bruges adopted a sign similar to that of her neighbour, by adding to the double B and shield a small b traversed by a crown.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JACQUES GEUBELS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NICOLAS LEYNIERS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRUGES]

In Oudenarde, that town of wonderful verdures, the weavers, as though by trick of modesty, often avoided such clues to ident.i.ty as a woven letter might be, and adopted signs. However significant and famous they may have been in the Sixteenth Century, they mean little now. The town mark with which these were combined was distinctly a striped shield with decoration like antennae.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUDENARDE]

Enghien is one of the tapestry towns of which we are gradually becoming aware. Its products have not always been recognised, but of late more interest is taken in this tributary to the great stream of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.