| 介绍（英） | This chasuble is constructed from a most unusual textile, from which two distinct designs were taken to create the front and back of the vestment. The back of the garment, shown here, was made from a portion of the fabric with a pattern of repeating mound-shaped motifs enclosed in an ogival frame linked by floral sprays; the front uses a pattern of red diamond-shaped motifs resting on a blue band, which once appeared on each side of the repeating-mound pattern.
A departure from most of the dyed cloths made for export on India’s Coromandel Coast, this textile finds its closest visual parallel in a group of European brocaded silks now referred to as "lace-patterned." These eighteenth-century textiles are characterized by the use of large-scale motifs, especially streamers and floral sprays, which are set against delicate, lacelike diaper patterning and floral vines. Although these silks were related to contemporary eighteenth-century fashions in lace, at the time they may have been known as "persiennes" and were seen as having an exotic Eastern flair (see MMA 61.80.2).
The relationship between this cloth and its European prototype is less direct than that of other Indian dyed cloths modeled after the so-called lace-patterned silks, samples of which must have been taken to India for the textile dyers to copy (see MMA 36.90.12). Both this fabric and a very similar one used to make a Dutch wentke recently acquired by the Metropolitan (MMA 2012.561) have diamond-shaped motifs and ogival frames linked by floral sprays, showing a reliance on the same European textile source. The prototype may have been Italian, as these fabrics reveal intriguing resemblances to Italian examples from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, which have comparably robust designs.¹
The style of the chasuble ・ combining aspects of Austrian and southern German fashions of the mid-eighteenth century ・ suggests that the fabric was traded to central Europe.
[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]
Footnotes
1. See, for example, Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 52.1.3. |