Lampas woven silk brocaded in silver-gilt thread and silk with pattern of wyverns

This woven brocaded lampas depicts wyverns, eagles and palmettes. Lampas woven with tabby ground and tabby pattern in silk and brocaded in silk and silver-gilt

Purchased in May 1910, as one of 201 textiles in total, for £260 from the Spanish Art Gallery (50 Conduit Street, London), founded in 1907 by Lionel Harris and concentrating on importing art from Spain into England.

The said group of textiles acquired from Lionel Harris commences with the Museum number T.66-1910 and ends with T.260-1910

A small group of exotic silks like this one survive, with figures of real or imaginery birds and animals, sometimes enclosed in circles or geometric compartments. These are very early examples of silks woven in Italy or Spain. A similar piece in the collections of the Abegg-Stiftung in Switzerland (inv. no. 202) has been attributed to Spain on stylistic and technical grounds, and a fragment of the same silk in the Musée des Tissus in Lyon was bought in Spain in 1904. (Otavsky, Karel. Mittelalterliche Textilien I. Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 1995, no. 93, pp. 169-71).

Both pattern and technique indicate the early date; the wyvern (a winged two legged dragon), eagles and palmettes are part of the repertoire of design absorbed into Italian silk weaving from the Byzantine and Isalmic Near East and as far away as China in some cases. This may have come from an ecclesiastical source, from which most early textiles survive, but silks like these were also used for dress and furnishings.

This attribution is more open than that allocated when the object came into the collection, on the basis of the similarity between a silk attributed to Spain by Otavsky in 1995 (Mittelalterlich Textilien I. Riggisberg: Abegg Stiftung, 1995, cat. 93, pp. 169-71. A fragment of the same silk in the Musée des Tissus in Lyon was bought in Spain in 1904.

A small group of fantastical silks like this one survive, with figures of real or imaginary birds and animals, sometimes enclosed in circles or geometric compartments. These are very early examples of silks woven in Italy. Technically and stylistically, this silk also resembles those woven in Spain at this time.

Both pattern and technique indicate the early date; the wyvern (a winged two legged dragon), eagles and palmettes are part of the repertoire of design absorbed into Italian silk weaving from the Byzantine and Isalmic Near East and as far away as China in some cases. This may have come from an ecclesiastical source, from which most early textiles survive, but silks like these were also used for dress and furnishings.

T.66-1910