Part 2

While the designers have at different periods met these various problems in different ways and with varying skill, the technique of the weaving has never been modified to any extent. For centuries this simple kind of weaving has been done. In essentials it is the same as that used in the most primitive kind of cloth manufacture. The warps are stretched on a frame that may rest horizontally or stand upright. The shuttle full of thread of the desired color is passed over and under the alternate warps, the return reversing the order, now under the warps where it was before over, and over where it was under. A comb is used to push the wefts thus woven close together so that they entirely cover the warps. In the finished tapestry the warps run horizontally across the design. A change of colors in the weft-threads creates the pattern. In the more complex patterns of later works the weaver follows the design drawn in outline on his warps, or sometimes, in the horizontal looms, follows the pattern drawn on a paper laid under his warps so that he looks down through them. His color cues he takes from the fully painted cartoon suspended somewhere near in easy view. Occasionally, in later pieces, to enrich the effect, the simple tapestry weave is supplemented with another technique, such as brocading (cf. No. 52), but this is rare.

All the earliest examples left to us of this kind of weaving are akin to tapestry as we usually know it only in technique. They have practically no bearing on the development of its design. Of the very earliest we have no evidence left by which to judge. Homer, the Bible, and a number of Latin authors all mention textiles that probably could be classed as tapestries; but the references are too general to give us any definite clue as to the treatment of the design. But from the VIth to the VIIIth century, the Copts in Egypt produced many pieces, showing, usually in very small scale, birds and animals and foliage, and even groups of people. Of these we have many samples left. From various parts of Europe, primarily from Germany, in the next two centuries we have a few famous examples. But these are almost wholly without significant relation to the central development of tapestry design. Tapestry, in our sense of the word, begins, as far as extant examples are concerned, with the XIVth century.

From the XIVth to the end of the XVth century was the Gothic period. Then tapestry was at its greatest height. More of the requisites of its design were met, and met more adequately and more naturally, than by any subsequent school of designers or any looms. As illustration, the tapestry of the Gothic period is interesting, vivid, and provocative. The stories and episodes that it presents were, to be sure, all part of the mental content of the audience, so that they comprehended them more immediately than we; but even without the literary background we follow them readily, so adequate is their delineation. Moreover, they carry successfully almost every narrative mood--humor, romance, lyricism, excitement, pathos, and pure adventure--and, except in the traditional religious scenes, they wisely eschew such tenser dramatic attitudes as a momentous climax, long-sustained suspense, or profound tragedy. Finally, when they had a good tale to tell, the Gothic designers rendered their episodes with a fullness of incident and a vivacity of detail never again equaled.

As mural decorations, too, the Gothic tapestries are equally successful. For the figures are always flat and, even while natural and animated, are often slightly formalized and structural in drawing (cf. No. 10); the outlines are clean and active, the colors strong and broad, the vistas either eliminated as in the millefleurs (cf. No. 11) or completely simplified (cf. No. 13), while the details are abundant and delightful. Finally, they are among the most sumptuous textiles ever woven in the Western World--sumptuous, not because of costly material, for they only rarely use metal thread, and even silk is unusual, but sumptuous because of the variety and magnificence of their designs and the splendor and opulence of their color.

Thus the Gothic designers both appreciated and employed to the full all of the æsthetic conditions of their art; yet they did not do this from any theoretical comprehension of the medium. The supremacy of Gothic tapestry rests on a broad basis. It is the final product of one of the most vital and creative epochs in the history of art; its designers were brought up in a great tradition, surrounded everywhere by the most magnificent architectural monuments, accustomed to the habit of beauty in small as well as great things, still inspired and nourished by the fertile spirit that had created and triumphantly solved so many problems in the field of art. A passion for perfection and an elevated and sophisticated taste animated all of the crafts, of which tapestry was but one. The full flowering of tapestry is contemporaneous with that of Limoges enamel, paralleling it in many ways, even to the employment of the same designers (cf. No. 7). Great armor was being made at the same time--armor that exemplified as never before or since its inherent qualities and possibilities: perfection of form and finish, a sensitive and expressive surface, and exquisite decoration logically developed out of construction. Furniture also achieved at that time a combination of strength with natural and imaginative embellishments that still defies copy, while the first publishers were producing the most beautiful books that have ever been printed, unsurpassable in the clear and decorative silhouette of the type, in the perfection of tone, and in the balanced spacing of the composition. Other textile arts, such as that of velvet and brocade weaving, reached the utmost heights of subtlety and magnificence. This easy achievement of masterpieces in kindred fields, so characteristic of great epochs, doubtless stimulated tapestry-weaving as it did every other art.

This great achievement of the Gothic period in so many fields of art was the natural flowering of the spirit of the time. Life for all was limited in content, education as we understand it meager and ill-diffused, opportunities for advancement for the individual about non-existent. Despite these limitations--partly, indeed, because of them--and despite the physical disorders of the age, there were, none the less, a simplicity and unity of mind and an integrity of spirit that provided the basis for great achievement. The spontaneous and tremendous energy, the inexhaustible fertility that was an inheritance from their Frankish and Germanic forbears were now moulded and controlled by common institutions, by the acceptance of common points of view and the consciousness of unified and fundamental principles of life, the acceptance of an authoritative social system that defined and limited each man's ambitions. All these factors prevented the protracted self-analysis, the aimless criticism, the uncertainties and confusion of individual aims that consume our energies, detract from our will, and impoverish our accomplishments. Theirs was in no sense an ambiguous age; they were conscious of a universal spirit, continuously pressing for expression in art which could fortunately forge straight ahead to objective embodiment.

The stimulation of all of the arts had come in part, too, from the inrush of culture from the Byzantine Empire, where traditions and riches had been heaping up continuously ever since the Greek civilization had at its height spilled over into the East. Every flood-tide of culture is created by various streams of ideas and customs that have for generations taken separate courses. All competent ethnologists are agreed that, no matter what the native equipment of a people is, no matter how abundant are their natural resources, how friendly and encouraging is their environment or how threatening and stimulating, one stream of culture flowing alone never rises to great heights. Invention, evolved organization, and artistic production come only with the meeting and mingling of ideas and habits. The East had first fertilized European intellectual creativeness when the numerous Crusades and the sacking of Constantinople by the Franks brought a wealth of novel and exciting ideas into France and the neighboring territories in the XIth and XIIth centuries. There followed the great period of cathedral-building with all the minor accompanying artistic developments of the sculpture, the glass-painting, the manuscript illuminating, the enameling, the lyrics of Southern France, and the romances and fabliaux of Northern. This tide was ebbing slowly when a second rush from the East incident to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 lifted it again. The art of tapestry was especially sensitive to this second Byzantine influence. The industry was coming to its height; the demand was already prodigious, the prices paid enormous, the workers highly skilled and well organized. Tapestry was ready to assimilate any relevant contribution. It enthusiastically took unto itself the sumptuous luxury of the decadent Orient with its splendid fabrics, encrusted architecture, complex patterns, and heavy glowing colors. The simple Frankish spirit of the earlier pieces (cf. No. 2) was almost submerged by the riotously extravagant opulence of the East (cf. Nos. 17, 18). On the other hand, too, from the jewelry of Scandinavia, a remote descendant of an ancient Oriental precedent, tapestry adopted examples of heavy richness of design. And at the same time it took also from the Byzantine some of the formality, the thickness of elaborate drapery, the conventionalization of types, and the rigidity of drawing that had paralyzed the art of Byzantium, but that in tapestry enhanced the architectural character and so constituted a real addition. The tendency of the late XIVth century to an absorption in an exact naturalism which might have immediately rushed French and Flemish taste into the scientific realism of the Florentine Renaissance was checked and deflected by the example and the memory of the stiff carven form, the arrested gestures, and the fixed draperies of the mosaics and manuscript illuminations of the Eastern Empire (cf. No. 8).

But aside from these general considerations, which were vital for the creation of great tapestries, there was at work a specific principle perhaps even more important. The manner of treatment which the tapestry medium itself calls for was one which was native to the mind of the time and which declared itself in a great variety of forms.

In the first place, the Middle Ages were in spirit narrative. The bulk of their literature was narrative--long historical or romantic poems with endless sequences of continued episodes that never came to any dominating climax. Their drama, too, was narrative, a story recounted through a number of scenes that could be cut short at almost any point or could be carried on indefinitely without destroying the structure, because there was no inclusive unity in them, no returning of the theme on itself such as distinguishes Greek drama or Shakespeare and which we demand in modern times. Their religion and their ethics also were narrative, dependent, for the common man, upon the life history of sacred individuals that both explained the fundamental truths of the universe and set models for moral behavior. And they were supplemented, too, by profane histories with moralizing symbolism contrived to point the way to the good life, such as we find in the _Roman de la Rose_ (cf. No. 4). Even their lesser ethics, their etiquette, was narrative, derived from the fabric of chivalric romance. And, again, their greatest art, their architecture, was adorned with narrative, ornamented with multiple histories, so that even the capital of a column told a tale. The whole world about them was narrative, so that the painters and designers must needs think in narrative terms, and hence as illustrators. The narrative features of the other arts also lent them valuable examples for their tapestries. Most of their renderings of religious stories were taken direct from the Mystery Plays (cf. No. 14), and some of their scenes were already familiar to them in stained glass and church sculptures.

Moreover, narrative decorations were interesting and important to the people of the XVth century because they had only very limited resources for intellectual entertainment. Books were scarce, but even if plentiful would have been of little use, for very few could read. The theatre for the mass of the people was limited to occasional productions on church holidays of Mystery and Miracle plays, and even for the great dukes these were only meagerly supplemented by court entertainers. There was no illustrated daily news, no moving pictures, no circuses, no menageries, no easy travel to offer ready recreation. In our distractedly crowded life today we are apt to forget how limited were the lives of our ancestors and what pleasure, as a result, they could get from a woven story on their walls.

In the second place, the Gothic designers, when they came to draw their decorative illustrations, because of their inherited traditions, naturally fell into a technique adapted to the architectual forms of mural decoration. For all the art of the Middle Ages was the derivative of architecture, and at its inception was controlled by it. The original conception of the graphic arts in this period was the delineation on a flat surface of sculpture--sculpture, moreover, that was basically structural, because made as part of a building. So the painted figures were heavily outlined silhouettes in a few broad planes with the poise and the restraint essential to sculpture. These early statuesque figures, familiar in the primitive manuscript illumination and stained-glass windows, had, by the time the tapestries reached their apogee, been modified by a fast-wakening naturalism. But the underlying idea of the silhouette and of the poised body was not yet lost, and so it was natural for tapestry designers to meet these requirements. The naturalism, on the other hand, was just becoming strong enough to make the lines more gracefully flowing and the details more varied and more delicate and exact in drawing, so that the very transitional form of the art of the time made it especially well adapted to a woven rendition.

In the third place, the cartoons, even if they were not quite right in feeling when they came from the painter's hand, would be modified in the translation into the weave by the workmen themselves; for the weavers at that time were respected craftsmen with sufficient command of design to make their own patterns for the less important orders, and were therefore perfectly able to modify and enrich the details of the cartoon of even a great painter. And no designer in the one medium of paint can ever fit his theme to the other medium of wool quite as aptly as the man who is doing the weaving himself.

Thus because the Gothic period happened to be a time when it was natural for the artists to make vivacious and decorative illustrations in clear, flat silhouettes with rich details, most of the Gothic tapestries have some measure of artistic greatness, sufficient to put them above all but the very greatest pieces of later times. Even when we discount the additions that time and our changed attitude make, the beauty of softened and blended colors, the charm of the unaccustomed and the quaint, the interest of the unfamiliar costumes, the literary flavor of old romantic times--even discounting these, they are still inherently superior. To be sure, they are rarely pretty and are sometimes frankly ugly, but with a tonic ugliness which possesses the deepest of all æsthetic merits, stimulating vitality. They have verve, energy, a pungent vividness that sharply reminds the beholder that he is alive. Their angular emphatic silhouettes and pure, highly saturated, abruptly contrasted colors catch and hold the attention and quicken all the vital responses that are essential to clear perception and full appreciation. They are a standing refutation of the many mistaken theories that would make the essence of beauty consist merely in the balanced form and symmetry, or smooth perfection of rendition, or photographic accuracy of representation. They are a forceful and convincing demonstration that in the last analysis beauty is the quality that arouses the fullest realization of life.

Within the common Gothic character there are clearly recorded local differences: the division between the French and the Flemish, not marked until the middle of the XVth century, because up to that time the Franco-Flemish school was really one and continuous. It amalgamated influences from both regions and absorbed a rather strong contribution from Italy. The center of activity was at first Paris and then at the courts of the Burgundian dukes. But after the middle of the century the divergence is rapid and clear. The French is characterized by greater simplicity, clarity, elegance, and delicacy. Even the strong uprush of realism was held in check in France by decorative sensitiveness. The most characteristic designs of the time are the millefleurs, the finer being made in Touraine (cf. No. 8), the coarser in La Marche. The Flemish decoration, on the other hand, is sumptuous, overflowing, sometimes confused, always energetic, and strongly varied in detail. Nothing checks the relentless realism that sometimes runs even to caricature and often is fantastic (cf. the punishment scenes in No. 4). Typical of Flemish abundance are the cartoons with multiple religious scenes, heavy with rich draperies and gorgeous with infinite detail, yet not subordinating to theme the human interest of many well-delineated types of character (cf. No. 18). Brussels was the great center for the production of work of this kind, but beautiful pieces were being produced in almost every city of the Lowlands--Bruges, Tournai, Arras, and many more.

The German Gothic tapestry is quite different from both of these. It was developed almost entirely independently, under quite other conditions. While the French and Flemish shops grew up under the patronage of the great and wealthy nobles, and worked primarily for these lavish art-patrons, in Germany the nobles were impoverished and almost outcast; there was scarcely a real court, and all the wealth lay in the hand of the burghers, solid, practical folk who did not see much sense in art. So while in France and in the Lowlands the workshops were highly organized under great _entrepreneurs_, and the profits were liberal, in Germany the workshops were very small, and many of the pieces were not made professionally at all, but were the work of nuns in the convents or of ladies in their many idle hours. Thus the industry that in France and Flanders was definitely centered in the great cities such as Paris and Brussels, in Germany was scattered through many towns, primarily, however, those of south Germany and Switzerland. And, too, while the designs for the French and Flemish pieces were specially made by manuscript illuminators, painters, or professional cartoon designers, some of whom, like Maître Philippe (cf. Nos. 17-19), conducted great studios, for the German pieces the weavers themselves adapted the figures from one of the woodcuts that were the popular art of the German people or from some book illustration. So while the French and Flemish tapestries reached great heights of skill and luxury, and really were a great art, the German tapestry remained naïve and simple and most of its artistic value is the product of that very naïveté.

Toward the close of the XVth century a change begins to appear in the character of tapestry design. More and more often paintings are exactly reproduced down to the last detail. At first sporadic products, the reproductions of the work of such masters as Roger Van der Weyden and Bernard Van Orley become more and more frequent until by the end of the first quarter of the XVIth century they are a commonplace. Yet even though tapestry is no longer entirely true to itself, these tapestry paintings are nevertheless beautiful and fit. A woven painting has not yet become an anomaly because painting in Northern Europe is still narrative and decorative. There are still poise and restraint and clear flat silhouette and rich detail.

It was not until tapestry plunged full into the tide of the Italian Renaissance that it entirely lost its Gothic merits. But when, beginning in 1515 with the arrival of Raphael's cartoons for the Pope's _Apostle_ series, the weavers of the North began to depend more and more for their designs on the painters of the South and on painters trained in the South, the character of tapestry completely changed. True, tapestry in the old style was still made for two decades, but in diminishing numbers. The Renaissance had the field. In place of endlessly varied detail, the designers sought for instantly impressive effects, and these are of necessity obvious. Every-thing grew larger, coarser, more insistent on attention. Figures were monumental, floreation bold and strong, architecture massive. Even the verdures developed a new manner; great scrolling acanthus-leaves and exotic birds (cf. No. 33) took the place of the delicate field flowers and pigeons and songsters. Drama took the place of narrative. On many pieces metal thread was lavished in abundance. The whole flagrant richness of the newly modern world was called into play.

For the first time also with Renaissance tapestry, it becomes relevant to ask, Do they look like the scenes they depict?--for realism was in the full tide of its power. A hundred and fifty years before the Renaissance realism had begun to develop, inspired by the naturalism of Aristotle, whose influence had gradually filtered down from the schools to the people, and throughout the XIVth and early XVth century it had been slowly growing. The hunting tapestries of the first part of the XVth century are early examples of it. But the Gothic realism was an attempt to convey the impression of the familiar incidents of life, to get expressive gestures, to record characteristic bits of portraiture, whether of people or things or episodes, so that a Gothic tapestry can be adjudged naturalistically successful if it carries strongly the spirit and effect of a situation regardless of whether the drawing is quite true or not (cf. No. 2). Renaissance realism, on the other hand, is not satisfied with the impression, but strives for the fact. It wishes to depict not only the world as one sees it, but as one knows it to be--knows it, moreover, after long and careful study. So in all Renaissance graphic art correct anatomy becomes of importance, solid modeling is essential, and all details must be specific.