Tapestries come of age. (Current and Coming).(Brief Article)

Tapestries were designed by some of the most esteemed artists of their day for important church officials and members of the royal families of England and Europe between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Nonetheless, tapestries have for many years been relegated to the fringes of the arts. Thomas Campbell, the associate curator in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has done an excellent job of redressing this imbalance by organizing a landmark exhibition of tapestries, on view at the museum from March l4 to June 19. The show is entitled Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence and includes forty-five tapestries woven between 1420 and 1560 in the Netherlands, Italy and France. Also on view are approximately twenty preparatory drawings, cartoon fragments, and designs that enable the viewer to better understand how these works were conceived and executed.

As Campbell relates in the enormous and most informative catalogue of the exhibition, an inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII in 1547, reveals that he owned more than twenty-seven hundred tapestries, which he had either inherited or acquired. These were spread through his fourteen palaces, other residences, and the four removing wardrobes (suites of furniture and tapestries that traveled with or in advance of members of the royal family). Francis I of France lavished more money on Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Primaticcio for their tapestry designs than for their paintings, and, according to Giorgio Vasari, Pope Leo X spent five times more money engaging Raphael to design the tapestry series Acts of the Apostles for the Sistine Chapel than he paid Michelangelo to fresco the Sistine Ceiling. Clearly in their own time tapestries were ...