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 belonged to the church of St. Gereon at Cologne; a large bit of it is now in the museum at Lyons; another at Nuremberg; whilst a small part of the border only is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. The pattern consists of repeated roundels within each of which is a chimerical bird and bull (? St. Luke), elsewhere is a small eagle (? St. John). The style of design, strong in oriental and Byzantine character, is frequently found in shuttle woven silks of the period.

The renaissance of literature in the 12th century, infused with mystical and religious tendencies, supplied subjects for wall decoration by fresco painting, the practice of which was revived then and came into vogue in Italy and the south, whilst its analogue in the northern and

more weather-wearing countries is to be found chiefly in decorative tapestry weavings. Much tapestry is certainly indebted for its cartoons to wall painting, but illustrations in MSS. also furnished subjects from which tapestry was made by the tapissiers nostrez and tapissiers de la haute lisse in France, Germany and Flanders. The earlier tapestries usually seem to have been narrow and long, e.g. the “toile à broderie” of Bayeux (see ) and the 12th-century tapestries of Halberstadt cathedral. Although the making such narrow, long tapestries survived into the 14th and 15th centuries (see fig. 16), larger shapes (see figs. 14 and 15) suitable as curtains and as hangings to cover large wall-spaces became the more frequent. From this time forward the output from many European towns of big pieces, mostly woven with coloured wools, was continuous and considerable. The more sumptuous examples from the 14th to the 17th century were enriched with gleaning silks and metallic threads.

The subjects of the cartoons from which tapestries were woven varied of course with the tastes of the times, the more frequent of the earlier ones being religious (see fig. 12) or illustrative of moralities. Types of romantic, legendary subjects are displayed in figs. 14 and 15 of the Siege

of Troy, and fig. 23 of Dido and Aeneas. Historical design occurs in fig. 20, which is one of a set of woven possibly at the royal factory of Fontainebleau about 1540, to commemorate the fêtes on the occasion of the marriage of Henri II. with Catherine de Medicis; and again in fig. 25, of the “Glorious Defence of Londonderry.” Pastoral incidents are shown in fig. 16, and social life episodes and incidents in fig. 22, which was woven at the celebrated Medici factory, Florence, in 1639 by a French weaver—Pierre Fevre—from a design in the style of F. d’Albertino (il Bacchiaca), 16th century, entitled “L’inverno” (winter). Less human in interest are tapestries, mostly of the late 15th century, wrought from leafy designs, usually termed “ventures,” of which several were made at Brussels during the 16th century. Heraldic and floral devices were also frequently used, see fig. 19, from a piece of the late 15th century in Winchester College, and fig. 18, which is at Haddon Hall and was woven early in the 16th century. It is very similar to hangings which are at Bern and are said to have been captured from Charles the Bold at the battle of Granson. Many curiously designed tapestries of German 15th-century origin are to be seen in the museum at Basel—one of them (fig. 21) displays strange beasts, unicorns, stags in the midst of Gothic foliage, and labels with legends. Other tapestries, worked from still later phases of ornamental design, are fantastic with schemes of abstract ornament into which are introduced as subsidiary details figure subjects set in panels and medallions.

The treatment of the compositions in cartoons for tapestry follows that adopted by painters. Thus examples from the 11th to the end of the 15th century are formal in the drawing of the forms introduced into them, and comparatively limited in range of colours, lights and shades, in accordance with the mannerisms of the earlier painters whether illuminators of MSS. or wall and panel painters. It has been argued from this that the designers of such early tapestry work possessed a sense of the limitations imposed by the process and materials. But in their day the relatively small number of dyes available involved conventionality in colour, quite as much as the earlier styles of drawing involved conventionality in form.

Fig. 13 is from an interesting design by Jehan Foucquet (1415–1485); and is one of a set, made by him to illustrate the

Trojan War, now in the Louvre. From these drawings tapestries were woven at Arras probably in the middle of the 15th century. One of these hangings in the Victoria and Albert Museum (see figs. 14 and 15) is from Foucquet’s design, representing the arrival of Queen Penthesilea and her warrior women at Troy and the part she took in a fight in which she vanquished Diomedes. This episode was introduced by Quintus Calaber (or Smyrnaeus), a 4th-century writer, in his version of the Homeric story. A tapestry from another of Foucquet’s designs displaying King Priam in the midst of his court is in the Palais de Justice at Issoire.

When Raphael, master of a freer and more realistic style in rendering form and colour, produced his cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles for a set of hangings for Pope Leo X., a new condition naturally came into play, and practically became a principal source of the contrast which is observable

between the designs of tapestries made before his time and those made after the early part of the 16th century. The provision of a bigger scale of dyes for the wools and silks was stimulated to secure success in weaving these more realistic representations of forms and greater subtleties in colour, as well as the developed effects of perspective: compare, for instance, the treatment in fig. 14 with that in fig. 22. The restraint or limitations of the earlier styles were thus gradually supplanted by the comparative complexities of the later; and it is a point of interest to note that provision for still further inventing and improving dyes and so helping tapestry to assimilate to painting is specially included in the regulations (1667) of the state manufactory of the Gobelins, where under M. Chevreul (director of the dye-works for more than fifty years during the 19th century) 14,400 tones of colour have been used.

A chronological succession of styles may also be traced in the borders enclosing such varieties of design as those just referred to. As a rule borders consisting of a selvage or plain band come first (see fig. 12), followed by those in whichlabels with block-letter legends (figs. 14 and 15 and

fig. 17) are features; after them are narrow borders filled in with closely and well-arranged floral forms (see lower border in fig. 17), to which succeed borders of greater width containing elaborate detail (fig. 20). Such as these date from soon after the beginning of the 16th century, and those rather wider and more extravagant in ornament follow on somewhat later (see figs. 22 and 23). In the 18th century massive rococo proscenium frames, as in fig. 25, are sometimes adopted.

Of the notable centres where the industry of tapestry-weaving has been in considerable practice, Arras in the 14th and 15th centuries, Brussels in the 15th and 16th, Middelburg and Delft in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Paris in the 16th and 17th centuries and down to the present time, with

Mortlake in the 17th century, probably stand foremost; and from them the services of experienced workmen equipped with frames and implements were requisitioned and secured at most of the short-lived contemporaneous centres in almost all parts of Europe. Several names of tapestry-weavers working during the first half of the 14th century in Arras, Paris, Valenciennes, St. Omer and Reims, for Burgundian, Flemish and French nobles, have been recorded. Throughout that century a few Weavers and many tapestries came from Arras into England, where the term “arras” became the generic name for woven wall-hangings. Arras tapestries also went in quantities into Italy where they were called “Arazzi,” and into Spain where they bore the name “pannos de raz.” The tapicers of London received their statutes in 1331, and Edward III. caused an inquiry to be held into the mistera tapiciarorum. The industry at Arras began to decline soon after 1460, and was succeeded about this date by works at Bruges, Ghent, Tournai, Lille, Oudenarde, but more especially at Brussels, at which last city the industry grew to an importance even greater than it had enjoyed previously at Arras or elsewhere. The regulations of the Brussels corporation of tapissiers were framed in 1451. Under them tapissiers might draw for one another the stuffs of hangings or of costumes in their figure compositions, trees, animals, boats, grasses, &c., in their “verdures,” or leafy