brought to England, and opened for the world's inspection and study, an artist had not, either in this country or abroad, any available means of being correctly true in the patterns of those silks and velvets with which he wished to array his personages, or of the hangings for garnishing the walls of the hall in which he laid the scene of his subject. In such a need, right glad was he if he might go to any small collection of scanty odds and ends belonging to a friend, or kept in private hands. So keenly was this want felt, that, but a few years ago, works of beautiful execution, but of costly price, were undertaken upon the dress of olden times, and mediæval furniture; yet those who got up such books could do nothing better than set out in drawings, as their authorities for both the branches of their subject, such few specimens as they could pick up figured in illuminated MSS. and the works of the early masters. Here, however, our own and foreign artists see before them, not copies, but those very self-same stuffs.
If we go to our National Gallery and look at the mediæval pictures there, taking note of the stuffs in which those old men who did them clothed their personages; if, then, we step hither, we shall be struck by the fact of seeing in these very textiles, duplicates, as far as pattern is sought, of those same painted garments. For example, in Orcagna's Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the blue silk diapered in gold, with flowers and birds, hung as a back ground; our Lord's white tunic diapered in gold with foliage; the mantle of His mother made of the same stuff; St. Stephen's dalmatic of green samit, diapered with golden foliage, are all quite Sicilian in design, and copied from those rich silks which came, at the middle of the fourteenth century, from the looms of Palermo. While standing before Jacopo di Casentino's St. John, our eye is drawn, on the instant, to the orphrey on that evangelist's chasuble, embroidered, after the Tuscan style, with barbed quatrefoils, shutting in the busts of Apostles. Isotta da Rimini, in her portrait by Pietro della Francesca, wears a gown made of velvet and gold, much like some cut velvets here.
In the patterns followed by the Sicilian looms, and those of Italy in general, may almost always be found the same especial elements. Of these, one is the artichoke in flower; and in F. Francia's painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary with our Lord in her arms, and saints standing about them,—No. 179,—St. Laurence's rich cloth of gold is diapered all over with the artichoke marked out in thin red lines. So, too, in the picture of V. Cappaccio, No. 750, the cloth-of-gold mantle worn by our Lord's mother, as well as the dress of the Doge, are both diapered with this favourite Italian vegetable. Often is this artichoke shut in by an oval,
