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    History of Tapestry PDF

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    sid webber
    The document provides a history and overview of tapestry techniques. It discusses that tapestries are hand-woven wall hangings or upholstery composed of warp threads covered by colored weft threads in a pattern. Two main weaving techniques - high-warp and low-warp - are described. The history section outlines the origins and developments of tapestry weaving in ancient Egypt, Europe, and various regions, with centers in places like Paris, Arras, Brussels, and England. In the 16th-17th centuries, French royal factories dominated production.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    History of Tapestry PDF

    Uploaded by

    sid webber
    660 views5 pages
    The document provides a history and overview of tapestry techniques. It discusses that tapestries are hand-woven wall hangings or upholstery composed of warp threads covered by colored weft threads in a pattern. Two main weaving techniques - high-warp and low-warp - are described. The history section outlines the origins and developments of tapestry weaving in ancient Egypt, Europe, and various regions, with centers in places like Paris, Arras, Brussels, and England. In the 16th-17th centuries, French royal factories dominated production.

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    The document provides a history and overview of tapestry techniques. It discusses that tapestries are hand-woven wall hangings or upholstery composed of warp threads covered by colored weft threads in a pattern. Two main weaving techniques - high-warp and low-warp - are described. The history section outlines the origins and developments of tapestry weaving in ancient Egypt, Europe, and various regions, with centers in places like Paris, Arras, Brussels, and England. In the 16th-17th centuries, French royal factories dominated production.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    660 views5 pages

    History of Tapestry PDF

    Uploaded by

    sid webber
    The document provides a history and overview of tapestry techniques. It discusses that tapestries are hand-woven wall hangings or upholstery composed of warp threads covered by colored weft threads in a pattern. Two main weaving techniques - high-warp and low-warp - are described. The history section outlines the origins and developments of tapestry weaving in ancient Egypt, Europe, and various regions, with centers in places like Paris, Arras, Brussels, and England. In the 16th-17th centuries, French royal factories dominated production.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 5

    History of Tapestry

    The term tapestry refers to hand-woven, figured fabrics--usually of silk or


    wool--used for wall hangings and furniture upholstery. A tapestry is
    composed of a foundation weave, the warp, across which are passed the
    different colored threads of the weft, which forms a decorative pattern. The
    warp is covered completely by the weft threads, which are taken across the
    width of the warp first in one direction and then in the other within the
    boundaries of the different zones of color.

    Technique

    The colors and shapes of the pattern are indicated in a plan, or preliminary
    design, of the tapestry called the cartoon (see CARTOON, art). Tapestries
    are woven on either high-warp or low-warp looms. The high-warp loom is
    vertical, with the warp threads stretched vertically between two rollers. The
    warp threads, usually linen, wool, or cotton, are separated by a rounded
    rod into two sets, back and front, of odd and even threads. All the even-
    numbered threads are placed in front of the separating rod and remain
    free, and the odd-numbered threads remain at the back, each encircled by
    a short loop, or heddle. By pulling on the heddles, which are attached to
    bars, with the left hand, the weaver brings the back threads through to the
    front; at the same time, the right hand threads the weft in between the two
    series of warp threads with a shuttle. The weft thread is passed first over
    the back set of warp threads (half weft) and then in the other direction over
    the front set, making a complete weft. On a low-warp loom the warp
    threads are stretched horizontally between the two rollers. The threads,
    again divided into an odd and even series, are now all equipped with
    heddles, which are arranged underneath the warp threads and controlled
    by treadles. By pressing down with the foot alternately on the treadles, the
    weaver can lower first one and then the other series of warp threads,
    allowing more rapid progress than high-warp weaving in which the weaver
    works with the hands alone.

    History
    Both systems were known and used in the earliest tapestries: a painting
    (c.3000 BC) found in the necropolis of Beni Hasan in Egypt shows a high-
    warp loom; the finest and most interesting of ancient tapestries were also
    produced by this method in Egypt by the Copts in the 1st century AD.
    Excavations and research by archaeologists and historians have proved
    that the process of tapestry weaving was also known and practiced by the
    Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Incas, among other ancient
    peoples.

    Tapestries were not produced in Europe until about the 11th century.
    Thought to be the oldest surviving Western tapestry, the Cloth of Saint
    Gereon (originally in the Church of Saint Gereon in Cologne, Germany) is
    divided in fragments among the Kunstgewerbe museum in Berlin, the
    Musee Historique des Tissus in Lyon, France, the Victoria and Albert
    Museum in London, and the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg,
    Germany. Generally assumed to have been woven in Cologne in the early
    11th century, it bears ornaments similar to those in illuminated
    manuscripts of the period. Germany, especially the region of Saxony, was a
    center for tapestries woven during the Romanesque period; examples are
    preserved in Halberstadt Cathedral.

    By the 12th and 13th centuries, high- and low-warp weaving was practiced
    in France and Belgium, with centers of production established during the
    Gothic period in Paris and Arras in France and Tournai and Brussels in
    Belgium. The Parisian tapestry industry reached its height during the 14th
    century due to the royal patronage of Charles V of France and his brothers-
    -Louis d'Anjou; Jean, Duc de Berry; and Philip the Bold, Duke of
    Burgundy. For Louis d'Anjou, the Parisian merchant and master weaver
    Nicolas Bataille supplied (1377-80) the seven immense Apocalypse
    tapestries (Musee des Tapisseries, Angers, France), the largest tapestry
    series ever woven, from cartoons by Hennequin de Bruges inspired by
    illuminated manusc Æripts of the Book of Revelation. The Burgundian
    dukes--Philip the Bold and his descendants John the Fearless, Philip the
    Good, and Charles the Bold--to whom the province of Artois and its capital
    of Arras belonged, assured the commercial future of Arras during the 14th
    and 15th centuries by ordering their richest tapestries from workshops
    there. The only surviving documented work of the earlier period of Arras is
    the Saint Piat and Saint Eleuthere series presented to the Cathedral of
    Tournai in 1402. By the mid-15th century, Tournai had begun to replace
    Arras as a center of Burgundian patronage: from Pasquier Grenier, one of
    Tournai's master weavers, Philip the Good purchased (1459) a series of
    tapestries representing the Story of Alexander the Great (Galleria Doria
    Pamphili, Rome).

    During the 16th and early 17th centuries, Brussels became the capital of
    European tapestry production with large factories established by Pieter van
    Aelst and Pieter Pannemaker. Among the Flemish weavers' great and noble
    clients were the Austrian Habsburgs, Sigismund II of Poland, and Pope Leo
    X, for whom van Aelst wove the Acts of the Apostles (1515-19; Victoria and
    Albert Museum), after cartoons by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel. With
    this series he introduced the Italian Renaissance style and the practice of
    copying paintings to European tapestry design.

    Widely admired, Flemish weavers established workshops throughout


    Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. At Ferrara, Italy, Jan and
    Nicolaus Carcher served Ercole II d'Este; Jan Rost, Nicolaus Carcher, and
    Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) supervised the tapestry workshop in
    Florence of Cosimo I de'Medici. The first series woven on the Florentine
    looms was the History of Joseph (1547-50; Palazzo Vecchio, Florence),
    designed by the Mannerist painter Angelo Bronzino. In the late 16th
    century Josse Jean Lanckeert and Frans Spierincx moved to Delft, the
    Netherlands, from Antwerp, Belgium; at about the same time Flemish
    weavers established workshops in Germany--at Stuttgart (Jakob de
    Carmes), Frankenthal (Pierre de Waeyere and Everard Van Orley), and
    Munich (Jan van der Biest). In 1620 a royal tapestry factory was
    established at Mortlake, England, with Josse Ampe of Bruges, Belgium, in
    charge of chiefly Flemish workers and weavers.

    These provincial manufacturing centers did not (and could not) compete
    with the French royal factories founded by Louis XIV at GOBELINS (1662),
    Beauvais (1664), and AUBUSSON (1665). These factories dominated
    European production for nearly two centuries with tapestry series designed
    by France's greatest painters, including Charles Le Brun, Jean Baptiste
    Oudry, and Francois CBoucher; the last two worked both for Gobelins and
    Beauvais. Among the series Oudry designed for Beauvais were The New
    Indian Hunts (1727), Country Pleasures (1730), and Fine Verdures (1736);
    for the same factory Boucher designed Village Festivals (1736), The Story
    of Psyche (1741), and Loves of the Gods (1749). During the 19th century,
    when tapestries were in less demand for wall hangings, Beauvais
    specialized in furniture covers, as Aubusson had since the 18th century
    (such as the covers with Oudry's scenes from the Fables of La Fontaine).
    When Beauvais was amalgamated with Gobelins in 1940, Aubusson
    became the major center for tapestry design and production in the 20th
    century--thanks to Jean Lurcat, who settled there for the purpose of
    creating a new tapestry industry at the request of the French Ministry of
    National Ed Cucation in 1939. In 1945, Lurcat, with the artists Marc Saint-
    Saens and Jean Picart Le Doux, founded the Association of Tapestry
    Cartoon-Painters, which pioneered the revival of tapestry as modern
    architectural decoration, according to the principle that tapestries should
    be original works of art (not copies after paintings), intended for walls and
    designed for specific architectural spaces. Reviewed by KATHRYN
    B.Hiesinger

    Bibliography:

    Ackerman, Phyllis, Tapestry, The Mirror of Civilization (1933; repr. 1970);


    Bennett, Anna, Five Centuries of Tapestry (1976); Franses, Jack, Tapestries
    and Their Mythology (1973); Florisoone, Michel, et al., The Book of
    Tapestry: History and Technique (1978); Jobe, Joseph, ed., The Art of
    Tapestry (1965); Thomson, W. G., A History of Tapestry (1930); Weigert,
    R. A., French Tapestry (1963).

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