The Renaissance And Italian Tapestries

By Author: Alla Marinow
Total Articles: 8
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Mention the word ‘Renaissance’ to any person and it will evoke names such Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Florence, Italy, Rome etc to name just a few. Why is it that, this word and its associated time in history sticks in our memory and means something important to all of us? Very simply put, it was the turning point or the bridge in history that took us out of the dark ages (medieval Europe) into the modern world as we know it today. The Italian Renaissance was the extraordinary flowering of literature, science, architecture, mathematics, banking, medicine, music, printing, sculpture and of course art and its associate tapestries. It was a harkening back to classic Greece, to Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Euclid, Homer, Aristotle, Hippocrates etc. The scholars, artists, mathematicians and scientists of 15th century Italy studied the classic Greeks, learned from them and moved the world forward.

While volumes can be written (and have been written) on the Italian Renaissance this article will focus on the tapestries of the Italian Renaissance period- which are a study unto themselves.

Interestingly, tapestries ...
... from the Renaissance lagged behind the other arts by about 100 years. Wall tapestries were originally derived from illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages. Figures were byzantine in nature and depth of plane in art and tapestries did not exist. Giotto (1304-1313) spawned a whole new way of painting with color, depth, perspective, movement and emotion in his characters. This is still pre-renaissance art, but the door was flung open to new developments in painting. By the time the Italian Renaissance was in full swing by the late 1400’s, artists such as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Durer, Bronzino, Raphael, to name just a few had totally revolutionized art. However, tapestries remained trapped in the medieval period, with everything in wall tapestries portrayed on a single flat plain. The main weaving center for hand woven tapestries was Brussels, Bruges in Belgium. The wall tapestry guilds did not connect to the changing art world and continued to produce tapestries that were familiar to them.

The year is 1515 when the world of tapestries changed in their artistic nature. Pope Leo X, a Medici and lover of art is elected to the Vatican. After visiting the Sistine Chapel and admiring the work of Michelangelo, his is inspired to adorn the walls of the Sistine Chapel with tapestries. With no existing weaving mills in Italy at that time, he decides to use the expertise of the Brussels weavers, and the brilliance of an Italian artist- Raphael to create the cartoons (art work) for the hand woven tapestries. He commissions Raphael to produce 10 cartoons describing scenes from the Acts of the Apostles- all destined for Brussels to be created into the magnificent tapestries for the Vatican. Raphael lavished all his knowledge of composition, anatomy and drama into the most remarkable wall hanging tapestries ever produced. Sent to Bernhaert Van Orley to supervise the weaving and to the Peiter Van Aelst wall tapestry workshops in Brussels, the weaving of tapestries in Europe finally left the medieval world as a craft, and entered the Renaissance as an art form in 1515. Each of the Raphael tapestries measured 16 ft x 21 ft and took only 5 years to complete. Deeply affected by these wall tapestries, Van Orley then set about creating new designs that would permanently change the way tapestries were woven from that point on.

When the Raphael tapestries where unveiled in Rome in 1520, the wealthy of Florence, Rome and Venice were taken with the new art form and a new market for wall hanging tapestries was created. Cosimo de Medici, a patron of the arts and philanthropist establishes Italian wall tapestry weaving mills in Ferrara and Florence. Using Italian artists to create the art work, he imports weavers from Belgium to Italy. In a matter of 10-20 years, the center of weaving tapestries is shifted from Belgium to Italy and then to France.

Since then, weaving of hand woven tapestries has flourished throughout Europe. And today we have reproduction tapestries available to us, jacquard woven, silk screened, and hand woven in sizes that our rooms can bear. The designs are your choice; the art for these magnificent tapestries was created for us by artists long gone.