Tapestry

In late medieval Europe, tapestry was the grandest and most expensive medium for figurative images in two dimensions, and despite the rapid rise in importance of painting it retained this position in the eyes of many Renaissance patrons until at least the end of the 16th century, if not beyond.

[1] The European tradition continued to develop and reflect wider changes in artistic styles until the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, before being revived on a smaller scale in the 19th century.

Many kings had "wardrobe" departments with their own buildings devoted to the care, repair, and movement of tapestries, which were folded into large canvas bags and carried on carts.

The Cloth of Saint Gereon, from around 1000, has a repeat pattern centred on medallions with a motif of a bull being attacked by a griffin, taken from Byzantine silk (or its Persian equivalent) but probably woven locally in the Rhineland.

[31] A group with narrative religious scenes in a clearly Romanesque style that relates to Rhineland illuminated manuscripts of the same period was made for Halberstadt Cathedral in Germany around 1200, and shaped differently to fit specific spaces.

[33] A decisive shift in European tapestry history came around 1350, and in many respects set the pattern for the industry until the end of its main period of importance, in the upheavals following the French Revolution.

[22] They were made in large workshops concentrated in a number of cities in a relatively small region of northern France and the Southern Netherlands (partly to be near supplies of English wool).

This was most successful in France, but Tuscany, Spain, England and eventually Russia had high-quality workshops, normally beginning with the importation of a group of skilled workers from the "Flemish" centres.

Apart from Burgundy and France, tapestries were given to several of the English Plantagenets, and the rulers of Austria, Prussia, Aragon, Milan, and at his specific request, to the Ottoman Sultan Bazajet I (as part of a ransom deal for the duke's son).

An important challenge to the northern style was the arrival in Brussels, probably in 1516, of the Raphael Cartoons for the pope's Sistine Chapel commission of a grand set depicting the Acts of the Apostles.

But the twelve pieces in Les Chasses de Maximilien (1530s, Louvre), made in Brussels for a Habsburg patron, show an advanced Renaissance compositional style adapted to tapestries.

Right at the end of the 16th century, a set (now in Madrid) was commissioned of the Triumphs and battles of Archduke Albert, who had just been made sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands (his military career had in fact been rather unsuccessful).

A set produced for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough showing his victories was varied for different clients, and even sold to one of his opponents, Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, after reworking the generals' faces and other details.

[45] Tapestries were commissioned in the Netherlands by rulers across Europe, from King Henry VIII in England, to Pope Leo X and Sigismund II Augustus of Poland and Lithuania.

Les Chasses de Maximilien (The Hunts of Maximilian) was a series of twelve huge Brussels tapestries designed by Bernard van Orley in the 1530s for the Habsburgs, one of the most successful efforts to achieve an up-to-date Renaissance style.

[48] Technically, Brussels tapestries in the last quarter of the 15th century had already become sophisticated enough to begin to incorporate more illusionistic elements, distinguishing between different textures in their subject-matter, and including portraits of individuals (now mostly unknown) rather than generic figures.

Brussels remained much the most important weaving centre, and Rubens, mostly based in Antwerp not far away, brought the grand Baroque style to the medium, with Jacob Jordaens and others also designing many.

The Brussels workshops declined somewhat in the second half of the century, both as large Flemish Baroque paintings took some of their market, and French competition squeezed the remaining niche for tapestries.

The Gobelins works, fed designs in the latest Style Louis XIV by the court artists, became increasingly dominant over the rest of the century, and by 1700 was the most admired and imitated workshop in Europe.

The Story of Troy is an unusual set of seven large tapestry hangings made in China for the Portuguese governor of Macao in the 1620s, blending Western and Chinese styles.

Most of the hangings are embroidery, but the faces and flesh parts of the figures are appliqué painted silk satin pieces, reflecting a Chinese technique often used for Buddhist banners,[55] and the larger forms of thangka.

This trend has its roots in France during the 1950s, where one of the "cartoonists" for the Aubusson tapestry studios, Jean Lurçat spearheaded a revival of the medium by streamlining colour selection, thereby simplifying production,[56] and by organizing a series of Biennial exhibits held in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Many Polish artists had learned to weave as part of their art school training and began creating highly individualistic work by using atypical materials like jute and sisal.

Much of the impetus in the 1980s for working in this more traditional process came from the Bay Area in Northern California where, twenty years earlier, Mark Adams, an eclectic artist, had two exhibitions of his tapestry designs.

"[59] Early in the 1980s many artists committed to getting more professional and often that meant travelling to attend the rare educational programmes offered by newly formed ateliers, such as the San Francisco Tapestry Workshop, or to far-away institutions they identified as fitting their needs.

What was most inspiring for me as a young student was that my tutors in the department were all practising, exhibiting artists engaging positively with what was then a cutting edge international Fibre Art movement.

In 1967, I made a formal decision to step away from the burgeoning and exciting fiber arts movement and to refocus on woven tapestry's long-established graphic pictorial role.

[66] Typically, tapestries are translated from the original design via a process resembling paint-by-numbers: a cartoon is divided into regions, each of which is assigned a solid colour based on a standard palette.

The style's emergence in the 19th century can be traced to the influence of Michel Eugène Chevreul, a French chemist responsible for developing the colour wheel of primary and intermediary hues.

[citation needed] The principles articulated by Chevreul also apply to contemporary television and computer displays, which use tiny dots of red, green and blue (RGB) light to render colour, with each composite being called a pixel.