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Week 9 Tapestry. 1640 Nicolas Regnier ‘Divine Inspiration of Music’.
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‘It was in tapestry that Tudor courtiers would have been most directly exposed to the classical and humanistic subjects that replaced medieval romances as the staple literary diet of the sixteenth century court’ (Campbell, in Groag Bell, 2004: 157).
‘I uncovered evidence that Christine de Pizan’s ideas had continued to exert substantial cultural, aesthetic and political influence for about two centuries after her death’ (Groag Bell 2004: x). • Referred to Dante, Boethius, Boccaccio
‘The Renaissance created a new vision of womanhood: it also created the modern woman. She rose from the foam of the waves of the Renaissance just like the Venus painted by Botticelli, naked and innocent, ready to awake to a world that so far had bypassed her’ • ‘The movement of the Renaissance developed from the minds of those women who had achieved learning and sophistication because of their historical, geographic and social circumstances’ (Servadio, 2005:1).
Diplomatic Gifts • Decorative hangings • Central heating • Street decoration on feast days • Visual texts • Dowries • Conspicuous wealth and education of owner
Unicorn Tapestries • Symbolism • Patron included in the design • Classical and Christian symbolism • Female characteristics • Milles fleurs
‘In this country three things are excellent: the many fine and beautiful linens in Holland; the beautiful figured tapestries of Brabant; the third is the music, which one could say is perfect’ (Venetian ambassador in Relazione di Borgogna, 1506, in Nash, 2008: 87). Raphael cartoon 1515 Christ nominates Peter as his successor. Series of tapestries ordered for the Vatican
Producing a tapestry • Petit patron • Grand patron • Weavers • Material and colours • Time • Set of six tapestries 5x8 metres 8-16 months • 1 weaver 50 sq cm tapestry a month
Humanism • ‘can best be defined in terms of creative classical studies and in terms of their outcome: a new outlook which made man the centre point and the measure of the universe. Even the enthusiastic study of ancient authors does not in itself constitute humanism. A better criterion would lie in the question whether, like most medieval students of the classics, a scholar regarded a classical text as a source of factual information, or whether with the humanists he understood it as a work of art and so assimilated its aesthetic and stylistic inspiration’.(Dickens, 1977: 128).
The three fates c 1510 • Set of tapestries representing Petrarch’s poem ‘The Triumphs’ • The three fates draw out, spin and cut the thread of life so that death triumphs over chastity.
Lost tapestries of the City of Ladies • The message delivered by these huge woven panels depicting reigning queens, women philosophers, women builders of cities, female warriors, and other praiseworthy and courageous women was not merely a construct of a world created by women but a challenge to the masculine impulse toward patriarchy. (Groag Bell, 2004: 159)
‘From Aristotle we know that the mind governs the body, and what more beautiful than knowledge – and what more ugly than ignorance which is unbecoming to mankind? This point I once made to a man who reproved my desire for knowledge, who said that it does not suit a woman to have learning, and that of those there are very few. And I said to him that it suits a man even less to be ignorant, and that of those there are many’ (De Pizan, Christine’s Vision in Groag Bell, 2004: 23).
