I
f you received a Christmas card of the Adoration of the
Magi by a late medieval or Renaissance artist, it is likely
that at least one of the kings was depicted wearing a
lavish robe of gold cloth. The term denotes a silk fabric
woven with a second weft of gold threads, either made
of gold wire or threads wound about by gold strips. Originating
in exotic places to the east of Europe—the Byzantine Empire,
Islamic lands, and China—such fabrics denoted wealth and
status. They epitomize international exchange, an interwoven
world, to borrow the title of a beautiful exhibition recently on
view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Christian Europe, sumptuary laws restricted the wearing
of gold cloth to monarchs and the upper ranks of the nobility.
We see evidence of this in a D’Arcy Collection painting, Pedro
Berugette’s
Assurance to Joseph
(
late 15th century), in which
both the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph wear gowns of gold cloth.
Thrones and chairs of state were bedecked in it, as one sees in
Ventura di Moro’s
Coronation of the Virgin
(
ca. 1430).
This autumn, I was able to acquire a sample of such cloth
for the collection. The pattern portrays three aspects of the
pomegranate: its small circular flowers in bloom, the spikey
corona of its sepals once fertilized, and the orb of the mature
fruit. A myriad of pomegranate cloth of gold patterns were
produced in both Islamic and European textile centers. I
have found a match for this particular pattern in the holdings
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is attributed to a
Florentine loom from the second half of the 15th century, the
era of Botticelli and the young Michelangelo. The fragment’s
curious curved bottom edge suggests that it was once part of a
liturgical vestment called a cope.
