Baroque Lace and Other Textile Fragments from Italy

Linen bobbin-lace
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Linen needle lace (Man's collar in Venetian style)
ca. 1650-75
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Linen needle lace (Chalice cover)
ca. 1675-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Linen needle lace (Angel with palm and crown of martyrdom)
ca. 1675-1725
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

LACE – A slender open-work fabric of linen, cotton, silk, woollen, or metal threads, usually ornamented with inwrought or applied patterns.

The men sate at home spinnying and woorkyng of Lace.

– William Watreman, Fardle of facions conteining the aunciente maners of Affrike and Asia (translated 1555)

                              *

The King's Edict prohibiting all his Subjects from using any Gold or Silver, either fine or counterfeit; all Embroiderie, and all Lace of Millan, or of Millan fashion.

– title of sumptuary proclamation issued by James I in 1613

                              *

The busy town . . . where finest lace industrious lasses weave. 

– John Gay, An Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, 1715

                              *

In the shadows lay fine webs and laces of ice.

– George Macdonald, Annals of a quiet neighborhood, 1866

Silk damask
ca. 1500-1600
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk and metallic thread embroidery on linen
ca. 1500-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk
ca, 1600-1625
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk and metallic thread brocade
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk  and metallic thread brocade
ca. 1650-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk damask
ca. 1675-1725
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk embroidery on silk grosgrain
ca. 1700-1725
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk satin brocade
ca. 1700-1725
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk appliqué with metallic trim on silk 
ca. 1700-1800
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk
ca. 1700-1800
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Citations from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Early Silks from Italy

Silk velvet woven with gold thread
ca. 1200-1300
Italy, probably a Silk Road import
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk woven with gilded parchment wrapped on linen core
ca. 1300-1400
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk velvet brocade
ca. 1475-1500
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

SILK – The strong, soft, lustrous fibre produced by the larvae of certain bombycine moths which feed upon mulberry leaves.

Oft did she heave her Napkin to her eyne
Which on it had conceited characters,
Laundring the silken figures in the brine . . .

– William Shakespeare, Lover's Complaint, 1597

                              *

A huffing wench, whose ruffling silks
Make with their motion music unto love . . . 

– Anonymous, How a man may chuse a good wife from a bad, a pleasant conceited comedie, wherein 'tis shewed, 1602

                              *

Spinning Worms, that in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk . . .

– John Milton, Comus, 1634

                              *

The maiden's chamber,
Silken, hush'd and chaste.

– John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes, 1820

                              *

He who has little silver in his pouch must have the more silk on his tongue. 

– Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last of the Barons, 1843

Silk velvet
ca. 1500
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk woven with gold wrapped on silk core
ca. 1500-1600
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk woven with metal foil wrapped on silk core
ca. 1575-1625
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk embroidery on linen base, depicting Sacrifice of Isaac
ca. 1575-1625
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk needlepoint on linen net
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk velvet
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk velvet, wool, metallic trim, on Corporal (for altar use) 
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk embroidery on linen net
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk satin with corded silk
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk 
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk-linen brocatelle
ca. 1600-1700
Italy
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Citations from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Repeat Patterns

Screen-printed cotton and linen
for couturier Paul Poiret, by Atelier Martine
1912
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Printed cotton
ca. 1875-1925
England
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk satin damask (monogram and rooster-heads)
ca. 1900
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jacquard-woven silk (magnolia blossoms)
ca. 1900
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk satin
ca. 1840
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

THE ENEMY

My youth was nothing but a lowering storm
occasionally lanced by sudden suns;
torrential rains have done their work so well
that no fruit ripens in my garden now.

Already the autumn of ideas has come,
and I must dig and rake and dig again
if I am to reclaim the flooded soil
collapsing into holes the size of graves.

I dream of new flowers, but who can tell
if this eroded swamp of mine affords
the mystic nourishment on which they thrive . . .

Time consumes existence pain by pain,
and the hidden enemy that gnaws our heart
feeds on the blood we lose, and flourishes!

– from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (1857), translated by Richard Howard (1982)

Roller-printed cotton
ca. 1840
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Roller-printed cotton
ca. 1830
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Printed cotton, designed by Hippolyte Le Bas for Oberkampf & Cie.
ca. 1816-18
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Block-printed cotton
ca. 1700-1800
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Block-printed wallpaper (morning glories)
ca. 1795-1810
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Leather wall-covering, stamped, painted, and silvered
ca. 1725
Holland
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Linen and cotton twill
ca. 1600-1700
France
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk-embroidered purse, with metal frame
ca. 1600-1700
England
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Silk appliqué with embroidery on silk velvet 
ca. 1600-1700
Europe
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Border design with pigments on paper (foliage and shells)
undated
Europe
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Cavendish Album, British Museum - 18th-century Drawings

attributed to Alessandro Gherardini
Putti
before 1723
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

attributed to Luigi Garzi
Kneeling putto lifting cloth
before 1721
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Studies of infants
before 1714
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

ON THE DIALECTIC OF TACT

"The precondition of tact is convention no longer intact yet still present.  Now fallen into irreparable ruin, it lives on only in the parody of forms, an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant, of the kind preached by unsolicited advisers in newspapers, while the basis of agreement that carried those conventions in their human hour has given way to the blind conformity of car-owners and radio-listeners.  . . .  Other than convention, there is nothing by which tact could be measured.  Convention represented, in however etiolated a form, the universal which made up the very substance of the individual claim.  Tact is the discrimination of differences.  It consists in conscious deviations.  Yet when, emancipated, it confronts the individual as an absolute, without anything universal from which to be differentiated, it fails to engage the individual and finally wrongs him.  The question as to someone's health, no longer required and expected by upbringing, becomes inquisitive or injurious; silence on sensitive subjects becomes empty indifference, as soon as there is no rule to indicate what is and what is not to be discussed. Thus individuals begin, not without reason, to react antagonistically to tact: a certain kind of politeness, for example, gives them less the feeling of being addressed as human beings than an inkling of their inhuman conditions, and the polite run the risk of seeming impolite by continuing to exercise politeness, as a superseded privilege.  In the end, emancipated, purely individual tact becomes mere lying." 

 – from Minima Moralia (1951) by Theodor Adorno, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (1974)

Adorno's example of the "tactful silence" should resonate with all viewers of what is now called "heritage drama."  In Jane Austen, active silence is the norm, a silence aware of itself and perceptible to its audience as a unique and valuable form of speech.  Two centuries later, in Ann Beatty or Raymond Carver, silence can only be empty.  

Francesco Fernandi
Head of a boy looking upward
before 1720
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Anonymous artist working in Naples
Head of a man in a turban
18th century
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Portrait of a Prelate
ca. 1700
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Carlo Maratti
Head of a woman in profile looking upward
before 1713
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Carlo Maratti
Study for statue of St John the Evangelist carved by Rusconi
 for niche designed by Borromini at St John Lateran, Rome
ca.1703
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

William Comyn (active in Venice)
Portrait of a man in the guise of a philosopher
before 1720
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

William Comyn (active in Venice)
Two young women hunting with a dog
before 1720
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Pietro de' Pietri
Adoration of Magi
before 1716
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Holy Family and Saints
before 1714
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

Giuseppe Passeri
Birth of the Virgin
ca. 1707
drawing from the Cavendish Album
British Museum

attributed to Henry Trench
Venus and Cupid
ca. 1700
drawing on blue paper from the Cavendish Album
British Museum