Volume 55, Number 1 · January 17, 2008
The Wonders of the Loom
By Anthony Grafton
Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Thomas P. Campbell
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,October 17, 2007–January 6, 2008; and the Palacio Real de Madrid, March 6–June 1, 2008.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 563 pp., $75.00; $55.00 (paper)
Three hundred years ago, the good and the great ate their meals, danced their minuets, and carried out their plots surrounded by tapestries. Splendid hangings, woven by skilled artisans working, inch by inch, to designs drawn up by artists such as Raphael, Rubens, and Van Mander, were a passion—even an obsession—for the monarchs of the Baroque. Kings and prelates proved their virtue and displayed their power, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only through the armies that enforced their writs and the buildings, statues, and paintings that embodied their taste, but also through the tapestries that hung all around them.
Review, 4502 words
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