The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 29, no. 7 (March, 1971)

8. Chasuble, front view. Spanish, early
XV century. Cut and voided velvet;
embroidery in silk and gold thread,
greatest width 251/2 inches. The
Cloisters Collection, 53.63.2
Not all embroidery can be so easily placed
on the basis of style. One of the best-preserved
vestments is a chasuble, whose iconographic
and stylistic characteristics are too general to
enable us to determine its source (Figure 6).
The lavish use of couched gold thread on the
borders and the design of the architectural
settings are generally associated with Spanish
needlework, but the iconography and some of
the stylistic details are more Italianate. All the
orphrey panels represent scenes from the Life
of Christ, except the bottom one on the back,
which depicts St. George and the dragon. This
departure from the iconographic sequence may
indicate that the chasuble was commissioned
either for a church dedicated to St. George or
by a donor whose patron saint was St. George.
A charming provincial German chasuble of
the fifteenth century, probably from Lower
Saxony, is unusual in its use of appliqued
leather, which may originally have been silvered,
for parts of the design, and wool for
the field in place of the velvet brocade or cut
and voided velvet that were usually used as
backgrounds (Figure 7; page 307, Figure 14).
In many vestments, the orphreys and the
velvet to which they are attached are not
contemporary, usually because badly worn velvet
has had to be replaced. In the case of an
early fifteenth-century Spanish chasuble, the
original velvet is Spanish, but the upper twothirds
of the front has been replaced with
Italian velvet (Figure 8). In other cases, however,
imported materials were used originally;
thus Spanish orphreys may also appear on
Italian velvet in an unrestored vestment.