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Foreword
Koenraad Brosens
Description: European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago
European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago
THE collection of ancient tapestries at the Art Institute of Chicago comprises at present close to one hundred items that have been purchased by, or, more frequently, donated or bequeathed to, the museum over more than a century...
Author
Koenraad Brosens
PublisherArt Institute of Chicago
Copyright© 2008 The Art Institute of Chicago
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23559
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Foreword
Guy Delmarcel
The collection of ancient tapestries at the Art Institute of Chicago comprises at present close to one hundred items that have been purchased by, or, more frequently, donated or bequeathed to, the museum over more than a century. These objects came from many different countries, and were woven by various manufacturers using models and cartoons provided by a diverse assortment of artists. None of them were intended for display in a museum. In fact, a museum’s collection is a highly artificial gathering of items, which look a bit like passengers on a railway platform: some may be alike, some may be different, but all remain mute, standing side by side, gazing at each other without reciprocal knowledge of one another’s identity, before finally going their separate ways on different trains. The last part of the comparison is particularly true for tapestries, which, due to their sensitivity to light, are normally exhibited only for limited periods of time before being returned to storage. It is the art historian and the curator’s task to bring them back to life, trying to find out where and when they were conceived, what original function they served, and what their subsequent destiny has been. Indeed, each tapestry has its own story, sometimes known and quite fascinating, in other cases still undiscovered.
Initially intended to cover the walls of castles and abbeys to keep warmth inside the buildings, tapestries were among the most prestigious objects owned by the upper classes. When some unknown artist or weaver, probably in northwestern Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, conceived the idea of representing stories on these weavings, as opposed to merely decorative patterns, tapestry embarked on its own glorious career in the figurative arts, rising to the level of wall painting in Southern Europe and, much later, to the level of painting on wood or canvas. Their owners could enjoy the romances represented, but they could also often identify with the heroes of the past, imagining themselves a new Hercules, a new Alexander, or a new Cyrus. The variety of subjects is endless and astonishing, as is duly reflected in the Art Institute’s collection. They range from biblical and Christian themes to allegory, ancient history, heraldry, and mythology, as well as representations of daily life and hunting and merely decorative greenwork or verdures—those so-called winter gardens which sometimes constitute the bulk of a collection.
Above all, tapestry is distinguished by its serial aspect. Many weavings in the Art Institute’s collection nowadays appear to be independent works of art, but most originally belonged to series of several related pieces woven from cartoons that could be put on the loom repeatedly to produce multiple suites or “chambers.” Reconstructing the sets to which such isolated pieces originally belonged was one of the main challenges of the present research. The Art Institute can proudly exhibit several such partial suites, including pieces from a sixteenth-century edition of The Months, two weavings from a seventeenth-century edition of The Seasons, and the enormous late-Baroque fourteen-piece Story of Caesar and Cleopatra, ensemble.
Many items in the Chicago collection are masterpieces, highly representative of an epoch or a style. These pieces include the late medieval Resurrection, the Renaissance Medallion Months and Pomona Surprised by Vertumnus and Other Suitors, the aforementioned Flemish Story of Caesar and Cleopatra, the Gobelins Autumn and Winter and Grotesque Months, the Beauvais Elephant and Emperor Sailing, and the Aubusson Outdoor Market, Some of these pieces are even of royal or princely origin. But many other tapestries from less well known series or with less distinguished provenances also offer the reader a sometimes surprisingly interesting subject or story.
Scholarly literature about ancient tapestry has greatly increased over the course of the past decades. Numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and articles have provided ever more refined insights into the many questions surrounding the origins, production, and iconography of tapestries. This has led to a widespread diversification and specialization of the field. Christa C. Mayer Thurman, curator of the Art Institute’s collection, therefore made the wise decision to enlist the participation of other specialists in the field, thus leading a team of several reputed scholars from the United States as well as from Europe. As a result, this catalogue presents the reader not only an in-depth analysis of the Chicago holdings, but also a broad perspective on tapestry history. Many entries indeed contain fascinating comments about artists, designs, and weavers, opening new and unknown perspectives with implications that reach far beyond the object at hand. Moreover, the authors consistently prepared their contributions with a large cultivated audience in mind, and so this catalogue not only introduces the Art Institute’s tapestries to scholars and the public, but also provides the reader a pleasant and instructive handbook of the medium.
The present volume is embedded in a tradition of similar publications, in which the United States has played a leading role over the past forty years. Homage should be paid first of all to Adolfo S. Cavallo, author of the 1967 catalogue of the tapestries in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His pioneering publication traced the outlines of a sound methodology which became a model for future major catalogues of this type, including Anna G. Bennett’s publication on the tapestries held by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1976; ind ed. 1992), Edith A. Standen’s catalogue of the post-medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1985), the three volumes thus far published of the holdings of the Pacrimonio Nacional, Madrid, by Paulina Junquera de Vega (1986) and Concha Herrero Carretero (2000), Cavallo’s own book on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval tapestries (1995), Candace J. Adelson’s volume on the tapestries in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1994), Nello Ford Grazzini’s catalogue of the holdings of the Quirinale in Rome (1994), Lucia Meoni’s first volumes on the Medici collection in Florence (1998; 2007), and lastly, the catalogue of the tapestries in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, by Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis and Hillie Smit (2004), We may only hope, now that the Art Institute of Chicago has published its collection, that other major museums will follow its example and disclose their treasures as well.