The stitches in time that still weave spells

The glorious Flemish tapestries from the Renaissance era, with their dazzling details and sumptuous surfaces, were said to overwhelm viewers. Woven with materials ranging from wool and silk to gold and silver, and vastly more expensive than paintings and frescoes, they created an artificial world that, for some, expressed truth more powerfully than reality.

At the start of the 16^th century, Brussels was the top spot for high-quality tapestry production in Europe. Already the prime region in Europe for making quality fabrics, by the late 14^th century the Southern Netherlands also became famous for the quality of its tapestries.

"It was the Dukes of Burgundy who first commissioned tapestries in quantity and launched the fashion as other rulers copied their opulent lifestyle,” says Dr Ingrid de Meûter, former curator of tapestries and textiles at the Royal Museum of Art and History. “This coincided with the establishment of numerous rulers who copied the Dukes of Burgundy in projecting an image of wealth and power and surrounded themselves with grandeur and opulence as proof of their importance. Later, the regents ruling the Southern Netherlands were women who loved the art of tapestry and promoted the local industry tirelessly.”

Arras, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, was the first town to become famous for its tapestries. Indeed, tapestries were called ‘arrazy’ in Poland and ‘arrazzo’ in Italy and ‘drap de Ras’ in Spain. But Philip the Bold’s plan in 1398 to reorganise the finances of the city, including doubling the taxes on tapestry production, prompted many of the tapestry workers and merchants to leave Arras and work in the other towns. They headed to Tournai, Lille, Oudenaarde, and, eventually, Brussels and Bruges.

Half a century later, in 1448, Philip the Good then made it worse for Arras by ordering a spectacular tapestry project, The Story of Gideon, from Tournai rather than Arras. The project was so elaborate that it took four years to complete, so the cost was prodigious for Arras. The next duke, Charles the Bold, followed his great-grandfather’s lead and squeezed Arras to pay for his wars, effectively ending its role as a tapestry city. Production moved deeper into Burgundian territory, and as the dukes had made Brussels their capital, it soon became the go to place for tapestry seekers.

Detail from Pride, part of a set of Seven Deadly Sins by Pieter Coecke.

But what is tapestry? It is a form of textile art traditionally woven by hand on a loom. The loom holds threads called the warp perpendicular to threads between them, called the weft. Tapestry is what is called weft-faced weaving, in which none of the warp threads are visible in the completed work – unlike cloth weaving where both the warp and the weft threads are usually visible. It means that weft yarns are not continuous: different colours and materials are weft components used to reproduce the image. In the major production centres, such as Brussels, the warps were made of wool, while the threads could be wool or cotton, or even silk, gold and silver.

The finest artworks

During the Renaissance, tapestries were considered the finest artwork obtainable. Mere paintings did not come close in general esteem. One reason was the amount of work and time tapestry-making required. A single weavers could take up to a month to produce up a single square metre of coarse tapestry. Higher-quality production, with a finer warp and weft count, was much slower, yielding perhaps half a square metre or less per month.

A large tapestry, five yards high by eight yards wide, woven in wool alone, with a warp count of approximately 15 per inch, would have taken five weavers eight months or so to weave. If finer materials were used, resulting in a higher warp count, it could take much longer. That is, of course, excluding the time involved in the design and preparation of the cartoons and the setting up of the looms.

Different weavers specialised in different aspects of the tapestry, for instance, some specialised in doing faces and others in doing plants and flowers, or animals or buildings (face and hand weavers were paid more because of the skill required). Six weavers might typically work on the same tapestry and they had to work at the same time.

Part of the Decius Mus Cycle tapestries, after the 1616 paintings

How did they know what to weave and how to coordinate their work? They used what was called a cartoon. It was a full-scale coloured pattern that the weaver copied. The cartoon was often produced based on the painting or sketches of the most well-known painters of the time. Some were talented artists: Rubens produced paintings for tapestries for instance. One of the most celebrated of the Brussels cartoon makers Pieter Coeke, a master at blending Italian Renaissance flourishes with a Low Country eye for detail, was Bruegel’s father-in-law.

Before starting work, the weaver would trace the pattern from the cartoon onto the bare warps. The cartoon was then folded or cut into strips and placed directly beneath the warp threads so that the weaver could look at it as he or she recreated the picture. While working they had to weave the image backwards, but the tapestry was rolled up as it was being produced, so they could only see the small bit that they are working on. They would not see the tapestry until it was finished and cut off the loom.

With all the courts and families of wealth from across Europe wanting Brussels tapestries, the pressure on the weavers was intense, with long hours of work in physically demanding conditions. But the pay was decent and the guilds had real political power.

World tapestry capital

Regardless of their provenance, Europe’s crowned heads and moneyed persons had their tapestries produced in Brussels. They might use their local artists to paint the original scene to be made into a tapestry, but the cartoon and the actual tapestry were made in Brussels.

Why were Brussels tapestries so prized? Mainly because of an ordinance passed that said that only guild-member artists could make cartoons. The city’s reputation was such that a later ordinance required each tapestry to have a trademark – a little red shield with a B on either side, one for Brabant and one for Brussels – woven into it to prevent counterfeit works claiming to be made in Brussels.

Our blessed lady of the Sablon, made between 1516 and 1518, from a Bernard van Orley painting

Between 1400 and 1530, the weavers in Brussels reproduced an extraordinary range of surface textures and effects using finer and finer interlocking triangles of colour known as hatchings, the juxtaposition of different materials, and the use of different techniques to link the weft threads.

The tapestry makers in other cities in Burgundy watched what was being done in Brussels and copied some of the techniques, eventually specialising in particular styles: Oudenaarde was famous for its verdures which were mostly green tapestries depicting lush plants.

The Brussels standards raised the overall quality of tapestry-making in Burgundy. Cosimo de Medici wanted to establish an industry in Tuscany, so naturally he sent agents to Brussels to do some undercover work. From the reports he received, we know that in the first half of the 16^th century, in Brussels, a town of 45,000 people, one-third of the population were directly involved in tapestry making. In Oudenaarde, a smaller town, it was 55 percent.

Creating cartoons required time and skill, so unless the commissioning client had exclusivity on the design, they were used over and over again.

A key cost factor was the type of material used. Wool, mostly from England, was the main material used for warps and most of the weft. But anyone wanting to impress (for instance the Dukes of Burgundy) would order pieces woven with silk (from Italy or Spain), or even silver and gilt-metal-wrapped silk thread (from Venice or Cyprus). English custom-duty documents of the early 16^th century show that for instance, tapestries woven with silk cost four times what wool tapestries cost, and metallic thread tapestries were 20 times more expensive than wool.

Another reason that tapestries were so prized was that not only were they spectacular, but they were also so easily transported, a big plus for the rulers of medieval and renaissance Europe who travelled regularly.

Fall, then revival

Tapestry-making began losing its appeal in the mid-17^th century, as it was increasingly seen as an imitation of painting, unable to recapture its previous glories. More and more cartoon makers left grey areas for the weaver to decide how to fill and what colours to use. By the 19^th century, too many colours were being used, and tapestries were framed as if they were paintings.

Madonna and Child, by Edmond Dubrunfaut

By the early 20^th century, tapestries seemed an ancient craft, overtaken by newer arts like photography and cinema. But it was unexpectedly resurrected in Belgium in the post-war era mostly thanks to one man, Edmond Dubrunfaut.

A native of Tournai, a city with an illustrious reputation for tapestries, Dubrunfaut harked back to the craft’s technical roots while using more contemporary styles. He believed that large wall hangings and murals could reconnect the public with art as part of their daily life and that the collaborative nature of tapestry production would help bind society.

Fully detailed cartoons were brought back but they were drawn, not painted. As was the case in the 14^th to 16^th centuries, a limited number of colour tones were used but they were bright modern colours. The threads were colour-coded and indicated on the cartoon by the artist so the weaver knew immediately which thread to use, thereby respecting the vision of the cartoon maker.

The process was also much quicker, reducing costs. Dubrunfaut did all the artwork: the original drawings and paintings, and the cartoons. He opened workshops over the years to produce over 1,000 tapestries, many of which are in public buildings.

Detail from one of the tapestries in the Our Lady of the angels cathedral in Los Angeles, produced by Roland and Christian Dekeukelaere

Dubrunfaut’s style was radically different: he did not copy classic styles but reflected various 20^th century movements. He was quickly noticed: in the late 1940s, the Belgian government ordered 300 square metres of tapestries for embassies around the world. During his 60-year career, he went from expressionism to an exaltation of the beauty of the natural world. He then celebrated the wonders of technology followed by an exploration of ecological issues.

More recently, Flanders Tapestry, located in Wielsbeke in West Flanders, has earned a global reputation. Founded in 1998, brothers Roland and Christian Dekeukelaere produce their own designs and do commissioned work. This is not traditional tapestry weaving, as computers have become an integral part of the process.

One of their first major commissions was for the newly constructed cathedral in Los Angeles, Our Lady of the Angels which was completed in 2002. It features a procession of 135 saints and other figures to be rendered on 36 tapestries each two metres wide and seven metres high, hung on the full length of the side walls of the nave. The people depicted in the procession are all real historical figures, needing faces or forms that had to visually reflect the historical record.

The design, by California native John Nava, was turned into weavable digital files, which were then emailed directly to the Dekeukelaere brothers. What would have taken years to make in the 16^th century with scores of weavers and dozens of looms, took 20 months of designing and two months of weaving by a staff of four.