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/79

 along with the rearing of the silkworm. Of the main-land loom we would specify No. 8256, p. 163, No. 8634, p. 242, No. 8638, p. 243.

Till within a few years the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, likely from that city itself, No. 721, p. 13, does credit to its loom, as it wove in the seventeenth century. Northern Italy was not idle; and the looms which she set up in several of her great cities, in Lucca, Florence, Genoa, Venice and Milan, earned apart for themselves a good repute in some particulars, and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, like as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in speech, so too had it a something often thrown into its designs and style of drawing which told of the place and province whence the textiles came.

Lucca at an early period made herself known in Europe for her textiles; but her draughtsmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have thought themselves bound to follow the style hitherto in use, brought by the Saracens, of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even cheetahs, as we behold in the specimens here No. 8258, p. 163, and No. 8616, p. 234. But, at the same time, along with these eastern animals, she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white, like in the example the last mentioned. She soon dropped what was oriental from her patterns, which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner, as we observe, under No. 8637, p. 243, No. 8640, p. 244, and showing an inclination for light blue, as a colour.

As in other places abroad, so at Lucca, cloths of gold and of silver were often wrought, and the Lucchese cloths of this costly sort were, here in England, during the fourteenth century, in particular request. In all likelihood they were, both of them, not of the deadened but sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as "tissue." Exeter Cathedral, , 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca:—"una capa alba de panno de Luk." At a later date, belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles—one purple, the other red—of the same glittering stuff, "casula de purpyll panno," &c., where we find it specified that not only was the textile of gold, but of that especial sort called tissue. York cathedral was particularly furnished with a great many copes of tissue shot with every colour required by its ritual, and among them were—"a reade cope of clothe of tishewe with orphry of pearl, a cope with orphrey, a cope of raised clothe of goulde," making a distinction between tissue and the ordinary cloth of gold.