More brocade and velvet in the National Museum of the Bargello, Florence. My photos are sadly lacking…dim, light-splashed and fuzzy, but enough to see some of the motifs at play. The beautifully simplified forms in the red and green velvet ogee are, I guess, either carnations or tulips.
The reduction of shapes in this fragment, especially when contrasted with the gold/turquoise brocade fragment, references a paring down of motifs to their geometric basics. It’s interesting to see this idea in renaissance cloth, the idea has certainly proliferated in textile patterning; not just since the 1920′s (Bauhaus and Art Deco), but certainly from the ‘Biedermeier’ era – which is earlier c.1815 – 1845. Here I’m thinking of Milwaukee Museum’s 2007 heralded exhibition covering the Biedermeier ethic; and the much acclaimed catalogue in which the era is described as the great perpetrator, in European textiles, of the ‘invention’ of simplicity.
Whether it is an invention, or more of a revival could do with further clarity for me. One just has to look at Coptic fragments (from around 450AD onwards) to see beautiful simplicity both in form and colour and whether this was an invention of simplified forms or an unconscious simplification is not entirely clear to me; and may be beside the point since the Copts were in Northern Africa. In European textiles complexity-of-motif seems to have grown exponentially at the hand of textile artists since the late medieval era. This is indicative of the textiles of Europe only, and of a demographic of producers whose clients could afford such cloth. It largely skirts around European folk and ethnic textile motifs.
As one looks at the development up to today the logic of simplicity begetting simplicity eventually must end in a white space, which we have certainly seen. Alternatively tomorrow’s Printsource and Directions shows should once again engulf us all with revivals and extrapolations – both pumped up or pared down – of all manner of eras and cultures at every turn and in every manner of regurgitation; some working the balance well, some not so much.
