Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/112

 work; but as the mordants cost less, they are more frequently used in our day than the first-mentioned method.

However accurate such a statement may be regarding Italy in general, and Tuscany in particular, it is, nevertheless, utterly untrue as applicable to the rest of the world. In this collection may be seen a valuable piece of this same cut-work—or as Vasari would call it "di commesso"—by French hands, fraught with a story out of our English Romance, and done towards the end of the fourteenth century, No. 1370, p. 76. Now, as Botticelli was born 1457, and died  1515, he came into being almost a whole century too late to have originated such a process of ornamental needlework, which was well known and practised in these parts so many years before the birth of that Florentine painter.

There are some accessories, in mediæval embroidery, which ought not to be overlooked here.

In some few instances,

,

in very many more, wrought after the smith's cunning into little star-like flowers—broader, bigger, and more craftily fashioned than our modern spangles—are to be found sewed upon the silks or amid the embroidery in the specimens before us, particularly those from Venice and its main-*land provinces in Italy, and from Southern Germany. At No. 8274, pp. 168-9, we have a part of an orphrey embroidered on parchment, and having along with its coral, gold beads, and seed pearls, small bosses and ornaments in gilded silver stars; it is Venetian, and of the second half of the twelfth century. No. 8307, pp. 185-6 is a linen amice, the silken apparel of which has sewed to it large spangle-like plates in gilded silver struck with a variety of patterns, showing how the goldsmith's hand had been sought by the Germans of the fifteenth century to give beauty to this silken stuff. The fine piece of ruby-tinted Genoa velvet, which was once the apparel for the lower hem of an alb, is sprinkled somewhat thickly with six-rayed stars of gold and silver; but those made of the latter metal have turned almost black: here we have a sample of Lombard taste in this matter, of the ending of the fifteenth century. Silver-gilt spangles wrought to figure six-petalled flowers on a fine example of gold tissue, under No. 8588, pp. 222-3, present us with a German craftsman's work, in the fourteenth century. No. 8612, p. 233, is not without its value in reference to Italian taste. All over,