| P3 has note
| - Garment
By the thirteenth century clerical attire was more or less stabilized throughout the Latin Christian church. According to the Rationale for the Divine Offices of the canonist and liturgist William Durandus (d. 1296), all ranks of the higher clergy were entitled to wear the cope (or pluviale) for processional occasions on feast days. As a result, inventories of monastic churches testify to the existence of a very large number of copes, Canterbury, for example, owning no fewer than sixty copes in 1315. (Dyan Elliot, 'Dressing and Undressing the Clergy', in E. Jane Burns ed. Medieval Fabrications. Dress, Textiles, Cloth, and Other Cultural Imaginings. London, 2004, pp. 56-58; Pauline Johnstone. High Fashion in the Church. Leeds, 2002, p. 11.)
The cope had developed from the same Roman garment (paenula) as had the chasuble, but by the eleventh century had a different form: it was semi-circular and open down the front; the front opening fastened just below the neck across the chest with a short strip of embroidered material or a morse (a metal clasp); orphrey bands ran the full length of the front opening and on the back, the cope retained a vestigial hood which was triangular or shield-shaped (as in this example). (Johnstone, op.cit.) The cope was so voluminous that its rich materials lent themselves to recycling for other purposes. There are many surviving examples of chasubles and dalmatics made of this kind of silk velvet, but fewer examples of full copes, some of which may have been cut down into other less voluminous vestments. Christa Mayer-Thurman illustrates and describes similar velvet copes or pieces of cope in different liturgical colours (green, purple, blue and red) in European Textiles. The Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, pp. 74-87; Donald King illustrates and describes part of a red velvet cope from Italy or Spain in European Textiles in the Keir Collection 400BC to 1800AD, London, 1990, cat. 49, p. 76.
Iconography.
The saints depicted in the orphrey bands probably connect the cope to a Cologne church, or at least a church nearby - and their identity is reinforced by the lettering below their image and attributes. Two of them, St Ursula and St Severinus were Cologne saints. Severinus was not very popular elsewhere. St Hubert seems to have been the dedicatee of a military order established by the Archbishops-Elector of Cologne and was frequently represented in the Cologne area. See Conversion and Mass of St Hubert panels in National Gallery (Glyn Davies). The composition of the Death of the Virgin on the hood is likely to relate closely to imagery in paintings of the period. The depiction of the figures suggests that the scene is based on the Apocryphal Gospel, in particular the passage narrating the moment of the Virgin's death, surrounded by eleven of the Apostles (according to that source, St. Thomas was preaching in remote countries and did not return in time). Here there are, however, twelve apostles, John being the youngest and represented as such, beardless. The symbols that are difficult to make out in the embroidery, because of wear, are probably the palm, All Souls Book, censer and candles.
Textile. Silk velvets of this type were woven in centres in Italy and Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth century. They were often called 'ferronerie' velvets because the effect created is similar to that of ironwork. They ranked among the most expensive luxury textiles of the time.
Dye analysis, carried out at the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique in Brussels in 2007 by Inge Vanden Berghe, identified the red dyestuffs as insect red and tannin (gallnuts), with a trace of red wood. Her conclusion was that the red velvet was dyed with precious red insect dyes: Polish cochineal alone, or a combination of the very expensive kermes with Armenian cochineal. All three dyes sources were in use in Europe in the fifteenth century. According to the study done by Hofenk de Graaf on red dye sources used between 1450 and 1600 (based on TLC analysis), Polish cochineal was often found in Italian silks, whereas often Armenian cochineal or kermes were detected in red fifteenth century silks with a Spanish origin. She also notes that the use of gallnut for silk weighting, in the case of a later dyeing of light colours as scarlet and crimson shades, was most likely in fifteenth century Spain. (Judith H. Hofenk de Graaff. The Colourful past: origins, chemistry and identification of natural dyesfuffs. Abegg-Stiftung and Archetype publications ltd., 2004, esp. pp. 62 and 68).
Embroidery
The way in which the haloes are worked in a succession of curving rays is evidently characteristic of German embroidery (Johnstone, p. 75), and may be compared with the piece from the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich illustrated in her book as Fig. 86, and with the Bohemian chasuble bought from Bock by this museum in the following year (1375-1864). The application of metal threads in a diaper pattern in the ground is also similar. (en)
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)