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/198



likely done at Cologne, consists of twenty-six small figures of winged angels robed in various liturgical vestments, and playing musical instruments of all sorts—some wind, some stringed. Of these celestial beings several wear copes over their white albs; others have over their albs narrow stoles, in some instances crossed upon the breast as priests, but mostly belt-wise as deacons: other some are arrayed in the sub-deacon's tunicle, and the deacon's dalmatic: thus vested they hold the instrument which each is playing; and no one but a German would have thought of putting into angels' hands such a thing as the long coarse aurochs' horn wherewith to breathe out heavenly music. On the front orphrey are ten of such angels; on the one made in the shape of a cross, for the back of the chasuble, there are sixteen. At both ends of the short beam or transom of this cross we find admirably-executed armorial bearings. The first blazon—that to the left—shows a shield gules an inescutcheon argent, over all an escarbuncle of eight rays or, for ; dimidiated by, or a fess checky argent and gules, for ; surmounted by a helmet argent crested with a buffalo's head cabosed gules, having the shut-down bars of the helmet's vizor thrust out through the mouth of the animal, which is crowned ducally or the attire argent passing up within the crown; and the mantlings gules. As if for supporters, this shield has holding it two angels, one in a tunicle, the other in a cope. The second shield—that on the right hand,—shows gules an inescutcheon argent, over all, an escarbuncle of eight rays or, crested and supported as the one to the left, thus giving, undimidiated, the blazon of the then sovereign ducal house of.

All these ornaments, armorial bearings, angels, flowers, and foliage, are not worked into, but wrought each piece separately, and afterwards sewed on the crimson silk ground, which is the original one; they are "cut work." The angels' figures are beautifully done, and their liturgic garments richly formed in gold, as are the leaves and stems of the wreaths bearing large silver flowers. From its heraldry we may fairly assume that the chasuble, from which these handsome orphreys were stripped, belonged to the domestic chapel in the palace of the Dukes of Cleves, and had been made for one of those sovereigns whose wife was of the then princely stirring house of De la Marck.

As was observed, while describing the beautiful Syon Cope, No. 9182, the nine choirs of angels separated into three hierarchies is indicated here also; and the distinction marked by the garments which they are made to wear in these embroideries; some are clothed in copes, others in tunicles, the remainder, besides their narrow stoles, in long-flowing white albs only—that emblem of spotless holiness in which all of them