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[Albertus Pictor]

(fl. c. 1460; d after 1509).

Painter and textile designer, active in Sweden. According to a signature found in Sala Church, Uppland, his real name seems to have been Albertus Immenhusen. He was probably of German origin. He married in 1473 and was a burgher of Stockholm, where he ran a workshop for liturgical embroidery. Apparently well-to-do, during the years 1501–1507 he paid a higher tax than any other painter in Stockholm. About this time he also seems to have delivered an altarpiece to the Brigittine convent of Naantali (Swed. Nådendal) in Finland. He is last mentioned in 1509, when he played an instrument, probably the organ, at the Corpus Christi Guild of Stockholm.

Albert thus had many talents, but his main field must have been wall painting. His earliest works are in Södermanland and include the signed wall paintings in the church at Lid, where he also painted his self-portrait. It has been conjectured that Albert may have been an apprentice of a Master ...

(fl Arras, 1419–64).

Burgundian painter and tapestry designer. He was a wealthy member of the Arras bourgeoisie and seems to have been a very successful artist. His first recorded work was the painting of mainly heraldic devices in memory of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, at the abbey of St Vaast in 1419. The work was undertaken in such a short time and for a sufficiently large payment that he has been considered the head of an important workshop. In 1426 he was again paid for heraldic painting at Arras, and in 1454 he shared with Jacques Daret the supervision of the painting by Robert de Moncheaux (fl 1454–68) of the tomb of the abbot of St Vaast, Jean du Clercq (untraced).

Bauduin is best known for his execution of the designs for a set of tapestries of the History of Gideon (destr. 1794), considered the most outstanding tapestries owned by ...

[Colin]

(fl ?1363; d Paris, 1398–9).

French tapestry-weaver and textile dealer. He was one of the most successful of several French luxury textile merchants based mainly in Paris and Arras during the late 14th century and the only one whose work is known to have survived. He was a citizen of Paris and is referred to variously as a weaver of high-warp tapestries, a merchant of tapis sarrazinois, and, more generally, a merchant. His second wife, Marguerite de Verdun, who came from a family of weavers in Troyes, continued his business after his death with his son Jean (b c. 1371). Bataille worked for some of the most distinguished aristocratic clients of the French court from at least 1373 (and perhaps as early as 1363). References to his workshop are few, however, and the range and scope of his activities make it clear that he more commonly acted as a middleman, negotiating often sizable commissions (sometimes involving extended payment schedules), farming out work to individual workshops, buying textiles from as far away as Arras and Caen, and occasionally delivering goods as far away as Bruges. He became rich and, at least by ...

[Bayeux Embroidery]

Embroidered strip of linen telling and interpreting the story of the events starting in 1064 that led up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It is made up of eight conjoined sections of different lengths. The scenes at the end of the tapestry are damaged and some are lost, but its surviving length is 68.38 m and its depth varies between 457 and 536 mm. The linen is relatively fine (18 or 19 warp and weft threads per 10 mm) and the embroidery is in wool, in laid-and-couched work, defined by stem or outline stitch. The latter is also used for all the linear detail and the lettering. No trace of any construction lines or of tracing from a cartoon remains on the tapestry. The colours are terracotta, blue–green, a golden yellow, olive green, blue, a dark blue or black (used for the first third of the tapestry), and a sage green. Later repairs were carried out mainly in light yellow, greens, and oranges. The earliest possible mention of the tapestry is in ...

From the time John Cassian established the first female foundation in Marseille in ad 410, monastic women lived in varying states of enclosure and were surrounded by diverse images and objects that contributed to their devotion, education and livelihood. The first rule for women, written in 512 by St Caesarius of Arles, emphasized their strict separation from men and the world, as did the Periculoso, a directive issued by Pope Boniface VIII (reg 1294–1303) in 1298. Various architectural solutions developed throughout the Middle Ages to reconcile the necessities of enclosure with the access required by male clerics to celebrate Mass and provide pastoral care. Nuns’ choirs, where the women would gather for their daily prayers, were often constructed as discreet spaces in the church, which allowed women to hear or see the Mass without interacting with the cleric, as in the 10th-century choir in the eastern transept gallery at St Cyriakus in Gernrode, Germany. In some Cistercian examples, the nuns’ choir appeared at the west end of the nave. Dominican and Franciscan architecture was largely varied. Double monasteries, which housed men and women, also required careful construction. A 7th-century text describing the church of St Brigida in ...

(fl Arras, 1395–1429).

Burgundian tapestry-weaver. He is notable as the only documented 14th- or 15th-century high-warp weaver whose part in the production of an extant tapestry is certain. The tapestries of SS Piat and Eleuthère (Tournai, Notre-Dame Cathedral) were made and finished at Arras by Feré in December 1402, according to a lost inscription woven above four scenes and now preserved only in a 17th-century copy by Canon Dufief (Brussels, Bib. Royale Albert 1er, MS. 13762, p. 82). The same inscription stated that Feré made this work for Toussaint Prier (d 1437), a canon of Tournai Cathedral, to which he donated the tapestries. It is not clear from the inscription whether Feré was personally responsible for all or part of the weaving or acted as the overseer of a workshop. The tapestry itself, however, appears in its simplicity of materials, scale, and design to conform with the documentary evidence for Feré’s life....

Embroidered textile (Girona, Cathedral; see Girona Cathedral) produced in Catalonia c. 1100. Although popularly labelled a tapestry, it is in fact a monumental embroidery in wool and linen on fine wool twill. It might have been produced for the cathedral following its consecration in 1038, since the cathedral is known to have possessed a number of textiles as early as 1053. Although a 16th-century reference to a hanging depicting the Emperor Constantine is sometimes taken to allude to this work, it is not otherwise documented before the end of the 19th century.

While the lack of comparable textiles leaves the date of the work uncertain, both pictorial style and the forms used in the inscriptions support a date in the late 11th or very early 12th century. In its present state, it takes the form of a substantial fragment, approximately 3.65m×4.70m, of an original perhaps 5 m sq. Today, it lacks a narrow strip along its right edge and over a metre of its lower section. The wool used predominantly in its embroidery was dyed a wide range of colours, including greens, blues, red, beige, black and various earth tones; bleached linen or hemp is also evident. Self-couching and stem stitch combine to cover the base material completely and create a tapestry-like appearance....

Term applied to a style of architecture and the decorative arts inspired by the Gothic architecture of medieval Europe. It has been particularly widely applied to churches but has also been used to describe castellated mansions, collegiate buildings, and houses. The Gothic Revival has also been described by many scholars as a movement, rather than style, for in the mid-19th century it was associated with and propagated by religious and political faith. From a hesitant start in the mid-18th century in England and Scotland, in the 19th century it became one of the principal styles of building throughout the world and continued in some huge projects until well into the 20th century (e.g. Episcopal Cathedral, Washington, DC, 1908–90; by G(eorge) F(rederick) Bodley and others). ‘Gothic Revival’ became the standard English term when Charles Locke Eastlake published A History of the Gothic Revival (1872). The word ‘Gothic’ had by then definitely mutated from a depreciatory epithet into the denomination of a style or period of medieval architecture. To distinguish medieval Gothic from modern Gothic, most European languages used the prefix ‘neo-’ (e.g. Dut. ...

(b Paris; fl Brussels, 1448; d c. 1468).

Franco-Flemish illuminator, scribe and designer. He was first paid for restoring old books and writing and illustrating new ones for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, on 26 January 1448, a task that he continued for the next eight years, being rewarded with the title of ducal valet de chambre in October 1449. In 1456 he ceased this exclusive work; in order to widen his clientele, he purchased citizenship in Bruges the following year, probably because of a new ordinance limiting the practice of illumination to citizens. He paid dues to the Bruges guild until 1462 but continued to live in Brussels near the ducal palace on the Coudenberg. Here he joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross in 1463, the membership of which comprised ducal servants and city leaders, including Rogier van der Weyden. In 1464 Jean became valet de chambre to the Duke’s heir, Charles de Charolais; he was probably still alive in ...

[Lat.: ‘English work’]

Term used in medieval continental inventories to describe English embroidery. It was famed for its fine goldwork and skilful use of the techniques of underside couching and split stitch (for these techniques see Textile, §III, 2). Such embroidery was used for both ecclesiastical and secular textiles, although very few of the latter have survived.

Medieval inventories mention various forms of embroidered hangings, covers and also costumes. Of these, altar frontals, apparels, chasubles, copes, dalmatics, maniples, and stoles were often carefully preserved in church treasuries and have survived. Embroidered copes, in particular, were sent as gifts to popes, cardinals, and bishops. These costly objects were often diplomatic gifts from the English king himself, and more examples survive in collections in continental Europe than those that escaped destruction at the Reformation and remained in England. As Matthew Paris recorded, it was the skilful use of gilt and silver thread in English embroidery that was admired by Pope ...

(b ?nr Liège, c. 1410; d Aix-en-Provence, c. 1476).

Embroiderer and painter. Possibly in the circle of Jan van Eyck, he was apparently active at the Burgundian court in the early 1430s. It was perhaps in Dijon, while a prisoner there in 1435–6, that René, Duke of Anjou, engaged him; Pierre is documented in Naples with René in 1440. The artist’s first wife was Ydria Exters ‘d’Allemagne’ (d 1460), a widow and the mother of Barthélemy d’Eyck, presumably René’s chief painter. In 1444 Pierre du Billant painted a chariot for René’s daughter Margaret (1430–82) for her engagement to Henry VI, King of England, and in 1445 he received the substantial payment of 404 livres ‘pour ouvraiges de broderies faits à Tours’. In 1447 he painted on canvas a St Mary Magdalene (untraced), which René sent to his wife. Pierre headed a workshop in which his principal assistant is identified as Jean Gaultier. In 1448 he received 173 livres for unspecified works. In ...

[Jean de Bruxelles]

(fl 1498–1521).

South Netherlandish painter and designer of tapestry cartoons, stained-glass windows, and sculpture. He is first documented in 1498, as a Brother of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, and later became court painter at Mechelen and Brussels to Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Spanish Netherlands. Jan’s widely imitated tapestry designs, filled with graceful, melancholic figures set in a mixture of Late Gothic and Renaissance architecture, helped to create a uniform style in Brussels tapestries in the first quarter of the 16th century. The basis for attributing tapestries to Jan, or his workshop, is the documented series of the Story of Herkinbald (Brussels, Musées Royaux A. & Hist.), which was made for the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament at Leuven and for the design for which Jan was paid 2.5 Rhenish guilders and some wine in 1513. His collaborators were the painter ‘Philips’ [Maître Phillipe] and the weaver ‘...