Venetian gros point lace was prized for its refined beauty long after its heyday. This maniple repurposes seventeenth-century needle lace, which has been cut up and reassembled into a new shape. This is part of the set 10.186.1, .2, .3, .5 that comprises a chasuble, maniple, stole, and chalice veil.

Undyed wool ground, satin weave. Cherry red and dark chrome green cut pile, all wool fiber. Pattern shows a formal bouquet of roses, carnations and chrysanthemums in urns with dragon handles on pedestals hung with lambrequins and flanked by paired birds holding berries in beaks. Each length shows barely one repeat. Slightly faded and worn in places; ground shows slight brown stains.

Like the nearby crimson example, this is a damask. Its subtle pattern was achieved by contrasting the shiny warp face with the matte weft face of the same weave, a technique that European weavers learned by studying imported Chinese silks. The motif’s midsize scale renders this design versatile enough to be used for furnishings, wall coverings, or dress fabric. This green silk damask was displayed in European Textiles and Costume Figures, on view at the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (visible at center bottom in the photograph of 1938), and at Walton High School (visible at right in the photograph of February 9, 1939).[Elizabeth Cleland, 2017]

The Venetian gros point needle lace that covers the surface of this stole would have taken skilled hands many months to produce. For this reason, it was highly prized long beyond its popularity in the seventeenth century. This is part of the set 10.186.1, .2, .3, .5 that comprises a chasuble, maniple, stole, and chalice veil.

Ground: natural-colored twill fabric with linen warp and cotton weft. Design: naturalistic trees with large leaves and flowers (tulips?). Stitches: satin, stem, French knots, bullion knots, and composite stitches. Worked with wool in blue green, greens, yellow, pinks, red, dark blue, and brown. Very fragmentary: much pieced and mended.

Silk, velvet: cut, uncut, voided; twill weave foundation and gilt strip

The embroidered portions of this cloth were probably once part of a large marriage bedcover made in China for export. Later, the precious bedcover was cut up, and portions were pieced together with a delicate quilted European floral silk to create the panel as it appears today.¹ Its relatively small size indicates that it may have served as a christening or bearing cloth for a child being carried to the baptismal font for christening.²  At the very center of the textile are three bands from the original coverlet, one with a roundel containing a scene of a man and a woman flanking a tree, perhaps inspired by traditional depictions of Adam and Eve. The blossoming tree grows from a large container decorated with a continuous pattern of hexagons, a Chinese design suggesting longevity, and on the tree is a bleeding heart pierced with arrows, a secular symbol referring to love and devotion in Renaissance Europe.³ The dress of the couple is generally consistent with that of late sixteenth to early seventeenth century Europe: the woman’s unstructured clothing is typical of the early seventeenth century, while the man’s hat conforms to late sixteenth-century examples.⁴ Their garments are overembroidered with repeating Chinese patterns, as if made to resemble Chinese silk damasks. The two other adjoining bands at the center of the panel were formerly one. If placed one directly above the other, they form a scene with a pair of ducks in a lotus pond. Although the lotus pond is an enduring theme in Chinese textiles, here the pattern shows a heightened emphasis on flower centers, common in Chinese export textiles, and another type of duck has been substituted for the pair of egrets or mandarin ducks more frequently found in a traditional Chinese image. Another part of the original coverlet was retained as the embroidered border of the present panel; while its sides were heavily pieced together, the ninety-degree corners were untouched in the piecing process, indicating that it served as a border in the original coverlet as well. The delicate, light peach-colored European textile chosen to surround the exotic portions of the cloth has a floral pattern typical of the last decades of the seventeenth century.⁵ The panel is fully lined in a white monochrome woven silk with a small floral pattern on a continuous fretwork background likely woven in China. Cloth of this type, termed rinzu, was exported from China to Japan in large quantities during the seventeenth century to be used as the foundation fabric of luxurious dyed and embroidered Japanese kimonos, until the Japanese started producing it themselves in the mid-Edo period, starting in the 1680s.⁶[Melinda Watt, adapted from Interwoven Globe, The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800/ edited by Amelia Peck; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: distributed by Yale University Press, 2013]1. Chinese embroidered textiles on white silk were frequently used or reused in elite contexts in Europe. See Cammann and Blomqvist, Spansk korkåpa av kinesiskt broderi/A Spanish Cope Made from a XVIIth Century Chinese Embroidery. Cammann associates white grounds with manufacture in Guangzhou.  2. For further discussion of bearing cloths, see Cora Ginsburg LLC, A Catalogue of Exquisite and Rare Works of Art . . . Winter 2011 ・ 2012, p. 6. 3. Bayer et al., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, p. 62. 4. For similar hats and facial hair in the dress of many of the male figures in a tapestry of 1597 ? 99, see Surprise Attack on Calais, in Campbell et al., Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, p. 56. 5. See, for example, Metropolitan Museum, acc. nos. 09.50.1196 and 09.50.1581; see also a textile reproduced in Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, p. 253, fig. 160. 6. Gluckman and Takeda, When Art Became Fashion, p. 338. See also Ogasawara, Some to ori no kansho￣ kiso chishiki, pp. 243 ? 44. The lining may be a later addition.

Close analysis reveals that the swath of lace covering this rare chasuble has actually been assembled from over a dozen different pieces of Venetian gros point, arranged to fit the Roman silhouette. Needle lacemaking emerged in Venice in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and its elaborate openwork patterns, defined by negative space, were unlike any textile that had come before. This technique developed out of cutwork, in which a woven linen foundation is traced with a pattern which is then cut out, and stitches are worked back into the voided areas. Eventually this evolved into punto in aria (literally “stitches in air”), wherein the base fabric was no longer necessary and the stitches were worked directly onto parchment. Gros point needle lace was perhaps the pinnacle of this technique, with three-dimensional motifs worked so densely that they almost appear to be carved from ivory. The sculptural elements are padded with linen or wool fibers, and covered with thousands of buttonhole stitches in extremely fine linen thread.Although gros point peaked in popularity between 1650 and 1670, it was incredibly time consuming to make and thus remained very valuable even after it fell out of fashion for secular dress. Given that lacemaking was common work in convents, it follows that a church could have had many pieces of lace on hand to contribute to a set of vestments. In Italy, the church continued to support the lacemaking industry, commissioning objects for ecclesiastical use long after the demand for gros point began to wane. The lace in this chasuble is predominantly made up of long, narrow borders which have been arranged in a mirrored pattern on the front and back. These vary in scale from dense patterns of smaller motifs forming an orphrey down the front and back, to larger, more wide-set motifs on either side. The narrowest strips outline the orphrey as well as the neck opening, and run around the back of the chasuble. Many individual motifs have been cut and rearranged to fill in gaps in the design, connected with bars of buttonhole stitches dotted with picots.While gros point is the predominant type of lace represented on the chasuble, two other types of needle lace are also used. Point plat, literally meaning flat point, was a needle lace worked in similar scrolling patterns to gros point, but without any three-dimensional elements. To blend it more seamlessly into this chasuble, the point plat has had raised flourishes applied to the surface, but upon closer inspection it still retains a flatter effect overall. On the front of the chasuble at the bottom left, two pieces of tape lace are also incorporated, with similar raised elements attached to imitate gros point. Tape lace was a much quicker method of lacemaking wherein lengths of woven tape were arranged into a pattern and stitched together. Also known as Battenburg lace, its popularity peaked in the nineteenth century in competition with machine-made lace, but much earlier examples exist as well.While wide bands of lace were a commonly used on albs, chasubles made entirely of handmade lace are extremely rare. There are very few extant examples in the world, but those known are a similar set of lace vestments at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London [inventory number 1411-1871], and a chasuble at the St. Gallen Textile Museum in Switzerland [inventory number 51480]. The chasuble in the collection of the Victoria and Albert is comprised of many strips of gros point borders, arranged in a mirrored pattern with a Y-shaped orphrey on the back. In contrast, the lace on the chasuble in St. Gallen appears to have been constructed of larger pieces of lace made to fit the garment, making it even more of an extreme rarity. The vestment set of which this chasuble is a part was passed down as a family heirloom by the Priuli family of Venice. It includes the chasuble, a maniple [10.186.2], a stole [10.186.3], and a chalice veil [10.186.4]. Descending from a noble Hungarian lineage, the Priuli family relocated to Venice almost a millennia ago and were admitted to the Grand Council in 1100. Their family tree includes three Doges and four Cardinals, the most well-known being Antonio Priuli, who was Doge in Venice from 1618 to 1623. In 1907, one of the family’s heirs sold these rare vestments to Jacques Krakauer, a lace dealer in New York City. It was purchased by the Museum as a complete set in 1910.[Elena Kanagy-Loux, 2017]

1651 / 1700, Italy

1651 / 1700, Italy

Description