International studio (55.1915)

The Resuscitation of a Dead Art

of Assyrian tapestry. The Caliphs of Bagdad and
the Ptolemys of Egypt hung their persons and the
walls of their palaces with marvellous trappings
woven on the looms of Memphis and Alexandria.
Wherever were pomp and magnificence there were
tapestries. They were the appanage of kings and



DECORATIONS BY P. V. GALLAND
conquerors, to be flaunted in camps and throne
rooms. The finest wool, silk, and silver and gold
thread were employed in this manufacture, and
cities like Tyre acquired fame for the dyes used.
During the dark ages, that awful Byzantine
period when for nine long centuries art was ban-
ished from the earth, the art of tapestry weaving
suffered the fate of all the other arts and was
forgotten.
With the re-awakening of the artistic conscience

in the fourteenth century, however, tapestry came
into its own once more. Thanks to the encourage-
ment of sesthetic grandees like the dukes of Bur-
gundy, the Medicis, the Popes, the French and
Spanish kings, it was quick in regaining favour.
By the end of the fifteenth century the weavers
of Arras, Lille, Tournai, Brussels, Paris, Bruges,
were everywhere acclaimed. For nearly two
hundred years the looms of Flanders and of
France, to say nothing of Spain and Italy, were
busy translating into silk and dyed wools and gold
thread the cartoons especially drawn for them by
Raphael, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian,
Veronese, Rubens, Teniers, Coypel, Le Brun and
others of lesser fame.
The relative value of painting and tapestry,
even at that period, is eloquently demonstrated by
the price paid to Raphael by Pope Leo X for the
ten panels of The Apostles. Raphael received ten
thousand dollars for the ten cartoons, and Peter
Van Aelst, the Brussels weaver, one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. This suite is now pre-
served in the Vatican, and, although much of its
pristine colouring is gone, its value is placed by
experts at one million five hundred thousand
dollars. A much less famous suite, consisting
only of four panels, the Scenes of Opera by Coypel,
sold for five hundred and eighty thousand francs
in rgoo.
Aside from its value as a work of art, of course,
there is always to be considered in a tapestry
the intrinsic value of the gold that may be used
in its weaving and the value of the time devoted to
the work. While it probably took Raphael less
than six months to paint the cartoons of The
Apostles, it took Van Aelst and his assistants four
years to execute them on the high loom. The suite
known as The King's Story, which is of about the
same size as The Apostles, took ten years to make.
In the first twenty-eight years of its existence,
from 1663 to 1690, the Royal Manufactory of the
Gobelins, numbering two hundred and fifty weav-
ers, only turned out nineteen high-loom pieces.
When we read, therefore, that in 1656 the corpo-
ration of tapestry weavers of Paris decorated the
streets along which the processions of Holy Week
were to pass with eight hundred panels, we can
form some idea of the activity which the art of
tapestry weaving had acquired in the years imme-
diately preceding that period.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century,
however, a period of depression and discourage-

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