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/234



differed only in materials. In that, as in this, we have a couple of stags well attired, with their heads upturned to a large pencil of sunbeams darting down upon them amid a shower of raindrops.

1311.

Silk and Gold Damask; ground, deep violet; design, St. Mary of Egypt, with her own hair falling all over her, as her only garment, on her knees before an altar on which stands a cross; behind her, a tree, upon which hovers a bird with a long bough in its beak; and high up over against her an arm coming from a cloud with the hand in benediction, and rays darting from the fingers, between two stars, one of eight, the other of six points, all mostly in gold. Venetian, 15th century. 12 inches by 11-1/2 inches.

The materials and the weaving of this valuable tissue are both good, and figure a saint once in great repute in Oriental Christendom as well as among those Europeans who traded with the East, as an example of true repentance. A part of the design is, so to say, ante-dated, and to understand the whole of it we ought to know something of the life of this second Magdalen.

In the latter half of the fourth century St. Mary of Egypt, then a girl of twelve, fled to Alexandria, where she led an abandoned life.

It chanced that she went in a certain ship full of pilgrims to Jerusalem, where, on the feast of the Elevation of the Cross, she was hindered by a miracle from entering the church. Then, coming to herself, she made a vow of penance, and withdrew to the desert beyond the Jordan. There she lived unseen for forty years, till all her garments fell away and she had nothing wherewith to clothe herself but her own long hair.

On the stuff before us the anachronism of its design will be soon perceived from this rapid sketch of St. Mary's life. Instead of being, as she must have been, arrayed in the female fashion of the time when she went to Jerusalem, the great penitent is represented so far quite naked that her own long tresses, falling all around her, are her only mantle—just as she used to be more than forty years afterwards. But yet the design well unfolds her story; the hand darting rays of light