Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: I'm joined today by Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Speaker: This is the organization that manages the DeYoung Museum and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco's most prominent public art institutions.
Speaker: Campbell was previously the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker: And right now, the Legion of Honor is home to an exhibition open until September 24th called The Tudors, Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.
Speaker: This was organized in conjunction with curators at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the exhibition features works of art and decorative art relating to arguably the most famous royal dynasty in history, which included Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII and Queens Mary and Elizabeth.
Speaker: Thomas Campbell, in addition to being the director of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, is also a specialist in historic textiles, and today's curious object is, in fact, a work of textile art from the exhibition.
Speaker: Thomas, thanks for joining me.
Speaker: Now, let's talk about English Renaissance textiles.
Speaker: The exhibition is all about the Tudors.
Speaker: So tell me, how are Tudor aesthetics different from Plantagenet or Stuart aesthetics?
Speaker: And obviously, not just the period, but their personal proclivities or interests.
Speaker: I think in many ways, there was a lot of continuity.
Speaker: you know, we tend to forget how significant a part textiles played in the medieval and Renaissance courts, but they were, you know, because so little survives today.
Speaker: But in fact, they were perhaps the principal signifier of grandeur, of that you were in a special, you know,
Speaker: a privileged setting.
Speaker: Textiles of any kind were expensive and they were used very theatrically to create, in a sense, a stage set.
Speaker: So in some respects, the sort of the Tudors continued this usage that goes back in time with, you know, sort of less valuable textiles in the less important areas and more important areas, more private rooms, be decorated with the more expensive textiles.
Speaker: So there's great continuity.
Speaker: I think where there is interesting stylistic and thematic shifts in this period is that firstly, Henry VII was his claim to the throne was seen as pretty tenuous by many of his contemporaries.
Speaker: So through his reign and well into and indeed through his children,
Speaker: heraldry and the devices of the Tudors were ubiquitous, woven into embroideries, woven into silks and cloth of gold, and woven in tapestry, on heraldic tapestries or in borders that framed tapestries.
Speaker: So
Speaker: the emphasis which had always existed on heraldry became ever, ever stronger.
Speaker: And then perhaps the other major developments that take place during the Tudor era are that because so many of the textiles are made on the continent by continental craftsmen, whether it's the cloth of gold and the silks and velvets coming from Italy or the tapestries coming from the low countries.
Speaker: Inevitably, the objects that are being imported to the tutor court reflect the stylistic developments that are going on on the continent.
Speaker: So we see the incursion of.
Speaker: sort of renaissance aesthetics coming to England, very often first instance in textiles, especially in tapestries, and also the subject matter as continental artists and patrons become more and more interested in
Speaker: the classics and the subjects that interested the classical world, the ancient world, and that are now being reproduced in Renaissance art.
Speaker: So similarly, we see a similar transference of interest coming to the English court.
Speaker: Well, you mentioned the Low Countries specifically, and the exhibition does include Dutch examples of textile work alongside English examples.
Speaker: How do those measure up against each other?
Speaker: Really, the quality products were coming from the low countries, from the Flanders,
Speaker: During the 15th century, Tuiné was the great center of tapestry production.
Speaker: And that's where huge mythological tapestries that Henry VII purchased were sourced.
Speaker: And then by the turn of the century, Brussels really comes to the fore.
Speaker: And it's from Brussels that Henry VIII acquires most of his great tapestries.
Speaker: And there's really no comparison to what the sort of smaller, lower quality products that were being made in England.
Speaker: You know, the tapestry industry was a, it really was an industry that employed thousands of people in the Low Countries.
Speaker: You had the weavers were members of guilds.
Speaker: They were highly trained, but alongside these highly skilled weavers, you also had a whole
Speaker: infrastructure that supported the tapestry industry.
Speaker: You know, people who were experts in sourcing the raw materials, the wools, the hooks for the very, very expensive tapestries, the gold, silver, gold thread, the dyers who, as the years went by, were creating ever more subtle tints and colorations of the materials.
Speaker: and the rich merchants on whom the whole industry depended.
Speaker: So this was kind of the Hollywood of Brussels, was like the Hollywood of the day, making these huge valuable tapestries.
Speaker: The products you get in England made in small workshops by itinerant weavers, they were much smaller and they were much lower quality.
Speaker: So I think that's really how it was.
Speaker: Well, that's harsh, but honest.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: Well, you know, Renaissance textile art, it's been said to be Northern Europe's answer to the fresco, which wouldn't work very well in England's weather.
Speaker: But, you know, for centuries and even today, I think these textiles are rarely regarded with the same sort of reference and scholarly attention as the great Renaissance frescoes.
Speaker: How do you explain that oversight?
Speaker: Again, it's probably a combination of factors.
Speaker: I mean, ironically, people talk about tapestry as being the fresco of the north, but in fact,
Speaker: tapestries, the tapestry medium and other precious textiles were as avidly sought in Spain and in Italy, in Southern Europe as in Northern Europe.
Speaker: And they were in the homes of the rich.
Speaker: You know, they were often hung over frescoes, especially hung in the winter months.
Speaker: In the north, it was a kind of portable, you know, one of the attractions of tapestry was it was a portable feast during the Middle Ages when the royal courts and the courts of the noblemen were often quite itinerant.
Speaker: You know, the advantage of tapisters and textiles, they could be rolled up and sent on ahead of the main court, you know, several days in advance.
Speaker: And in the time it took to hang the textiles up, you could transform a cold, damp interior into a richly, you know, richly colored,
Speaker: very, you know, decorative setting.
Speaker: You know, of course, they kept out the drafts, but they were much more than that.
Speaker: They were, you know, a very, in an age when any image, any image was very rare.
Speaker: Tapestries were a, you know, huge scale, a manifestation of splendor and of wealth.
Speaker: And they combined that with the fact that, you know, they, because they were woven images, they could, the patron could choose subject matter that was flattering to themselves.
Speaker: So whether it was, you know, buying subjects that were available in the market that depicted historical heroes or mythological heroes,
Speaker: who could provide sort of flattering comparisons for the patron or in the most extreme cases, the patron could actually adapt an existing design or commission a new design that was explicitly
Speaker: celebratory of them.
Speaker: So, you know, it was a medium of magnificence, it was a medium of suggestion in our own modern day terms, it was a medium of propaganda.
Speaker: Why is it so overlooked now?
Speaker: Well, you know, only a tiny fraction of what was made survives today.
Speaker: You know, I mean, for example, we have textiles in general, the vulnerable.
Speaker: There's a beautiful cope in the exhibition that was one of 30 made for Henry the seventh.
Speaker: That and two fragments are all that survives of that set of 30.
Speaker: When Henry died,
Speaker: the inventors taken after his death record something like two and a half thousand tapestries literally hung edge to edge sort of three miles of tapestry wow but today only about 40 tapestries from that collection survive in the british royal collection a few others can be identified around the world some of which are in the exhibition but it's a
Speaker: it's a staggeringly low number.
Speaker: So you've got the challenge of survival and then you've got the challenge of perception.
Speaker: When modern day perception, when art history became sort of professionalized as a discipline in the course of the 20th century, it really built on the
Speaker: the kind of the legacy of the age of reason.
Speaker: An era in which painting had become the sort of the art form of choice.
Speaker: And tapestry over the years has been very often by most eminent art historians has been dismissed as a kind of a decorative art.
Speaker: and people have focused obsessively on paintings and frescoes when it comes to figurative art.
Speaker: And there's a great deal of information about those artists where in contrast, the textiles and tapestries have been pushed aside as decorative arts.
Speaker: And their study is made even harder because of the positive documentation, because of the lack of information about the people who designed them, a lack of understanding about the whole industry.
Speaker: So all of these factors have worked together.
Speaker: In in, I'd say over the last
Speaker: 30 years or so, there's been a growing awareness that in fact, if you want to look holistically at the art and splendor of the great courts of the past, then you do have to take into account the textiles, the metalwork, the jewelry, the fashion, to understand that it was a sort of the patrons of the day
Speaker: had a very different approach to the arts than we do today.
Speaker: As a decorative arts specialist, the idea of decorative arts being shunted to the side as some kind of lesser form is painful to hear.
Speaker: But that is, of course, you know, that's the modern misconception.
Speaker: And I think, you know, one of the fun things for those of us who are interested in the decorative arts is that, you know, in fact,
Speaker: There's a lot still to be discovered and, you know, huge strides have been made in recent years in getting to a fuller understanding of the way that patronage and art worked at the time.
Speaker: You have spoken about the sort of professionalized context of the textile production in the Low Countries in contrast to the perhaps more domestic setting of textile production in England.
Speaker: But, you know, that production, of course, was not just in
Speaker: humble homes and cottages, but all the way up the social ladder as far as the nobility.
Speaker: And when a noblewoman like famously Bess of Hardwick or Mary Stewart would sit down to work on their embroidery, which they did,
Speaker: What were they actually doing?
Speaker: What did that process look like?
Speaker: Was it more like a sort of a casual hobbyist or closer to an artist's workshop with staff catering to the various specialized tasks or something else entirely?
Speaker: I think it varied from location to location, court to court, household to household.
Speaker: The royal household, of course, had many highly professional staff and workshops.
Speaker: Take the English royal court.
Speaker: They had a whole department known as the wardrobe that was responsible for looking after the precious textiles.
Speaker: They knew there was a strong awareness that textiles were vulnerable to damage and abuse.
Speaker: so the finest pieces were kept in storage and only hung for special occasions and you know i think that's another fact that people forget there was something very theatrical about the courts and the noble households of the time with with the great textiles being brought out for special occasions um
Speaker: it would have really been a very clear signal that something important was happening.
Speaker: Or the court, the noble household was on the move.
Speaker: Along with the wardrobe, you had specialists who were responsible for different areas of that collection.
Speaker: So, you know, the Royal Collection had a man called the Royal Arrasman.
Speaker: who was responsible for repairing tapestries, for helping source and buy tapestries from the continent, and even making small tapestries for the crown.
Speaker: To a lesser extent, that was.
Speaker: And then there were also the royal embroiderers who were making, you know, whether it was embroidering heraldic devices on clothing for senior members of the court or whether it was creating
Speaker: beautiful embroidered textiles for the king or for members of the royal family then to a lesser extent that is repeated in the great households um and then alongside that you have the kind of the amateur engagement the sort of the the the sort of the skill of the needle of of the of the noble women when it comes to you know we
Speaker: We don't know everything about the best of Hardwick, the Mary Queen of Scots, the embroiderers, but the impression is that they were indeed very active themselves.
Speaker: working with designs that have been created for them.
Speaker: But of course, they also had noble women around them and assistants who likely did a lot of the sort of the, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting as well, a lot of the background work.
Speaker: So more broadly, how was the labor of textile production divided between men and women?
Speaker: Again, that's something that's sort of hard to bring fully into focus.
Speaker: And it varies from medium to medium.
Speaker: Take the tapestry industry, which was, as I said, the main centers were in the Low Countries, Brussels, Tuinay, Oudenard.
Speaker: You're talking about a system that was controlled by guilds and was predominantly, the workers were predominantly men.
Speaker: I think a similar thing applies to the high quality silk production and the velvet production in Tuscany.
Speaker: Probably when it came to professional embroiderers, that too was largely a male industry.
Speaker: But then of course,
Speaker: embroidery in the home and the domestic setting was a skill that was highly prized in women folk.
Speaker: So I think that that's where it's in the home context where you have a much where it would have been a highly prized skill for practice by women to a greater degree.
Speaker: We'll be right back with Thomas Campbell after a word from our sponsor, the International Society of Appraisers.
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Speaker: One of the features that textiles share in common with my own field of antique silver is that the raw material itself could be valuable enough to incentivize recycling.
Speaker: And I wonder how often significant textile works were actually reused or repurposed to make new works.
Speaker: Well, I think the whole question of value is something that is often misunderstood and overlooked in the modern day because we tend to look at what survives and I think it's fairly rare.
Speaker: And all too often, people look at this, an old tapestry or an old bit of velvet.
Speaker: we totally fail to understand what would have been very apparent to a contemporary observer which would be the difference in quality and you know just just to take tapestries there was a huge range of value from
Speaker: you know, in the early 16th century, we have import books that sort of tell us how much, what the value of different goods were.
Speaker: And they, you know, tapestries to four or five different categories.
Speaker: sort of the cheapest tapestry was valued at one or a shilling per L. An L was a unit of square 27 inches by 27 inches.
Speaker: So just over two feet square.
Speaker: That was an L.
Speaker: The cheapest tapestry was valued at one to two shillings per L. That was with wool.
Speaker: If it had silk in it, it was probably three to four shillings per L. And then if it had gold thread in it, it was 20 shillings per L.
Speaker: So if you multiply that out into a kind of a full set of tapestries, you're talking about the difference between, you know, a set of tapestries of six or seven pieces, each one measuring
Speaker: three to four yards high by five to six to seven yards wide.
Speaker: You were talking about the difference of value that between, you know, purely wool woven in a basic palette of colors, a set that might've cost, you know, 10 to 20 pounds, which was equivalent to the annual salary of a well-paid worker.
Speaker: Holbein was paid 30 pounds a year.
Speaker: Horan Boot was paid 33 pounds a year.
Speaker: If the set of tapestries had silk in it, you're probably looking at a set that would have cost
Speaker: over a hundred pounds.
Speaker: Now that's, that's the well over the threshold of, you know, what a well off nobleman might be, his annual income, which could be anywhere between, you know, 40 to a hundred pounds.
Speaker: That was a very, that was a decent income.
Speaker: If it had gold thread in it, you might be looking at something like a thousand pounds.
Speaker: And we know that or more, we know that from surveys taken of the income of the richest members of the nobility in the 1530s, that the median income of the top 40 or so families in the country was about 900 pounds a year.
Speaker: So a set of tapestries woven with gold was equivalent to the income of the richest 40 families in the country.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: It's incredible.
Speaker: And then when you actually look and then, you know, there were different terminologies used in the inventories.
Speaker: We know in fact that it really, gold woven tapestries were extraordinarily rare outside of the Royal Collection.
Speaker: um right well who else could afford it who else could afford it exactly so so if you know tapestries woven with silk were pretty dramatic tapestries woven with gold were exceptional and they really kind of created that was the theater of the court you we have account books we have um
Speaker: Henry VII instituted new sort of regulations about how the textiles should be used, how they should be looked after.
Speaker: Very, very detailed.
Speaker: And we know that
Speaker: orders were given that when the tapestries and textiles were being hung for special occasions, the outer rooms were to be hung with the kind of tapestries with wool alone.
Speaker: And then as you got closer to the presence chamber, you know, you'll be going into rooms hung with wool and silk tapestries.
Speaker: and then wool, silk and gold tapestries.
Speaker: And the presence chamber itself would be hung with cloth of gold, which is this sort of this velvet that is interwoven with these gilt threads.
Speaker: They're actually gilt silver filaments wrapped around silk thread.
Speaker: So you would have had this constant progression of splendor, progression of value.
Speaker: And coming back to your question, you know, these these textiles were valued very highly at the time.
Speaker: Some.
Speaker: And it's what happened to them.
Speaker: Huge numbers of the finest tapestries and textiles were sold at the time of the Commonwealth sale after the execution of Charles I. There was a huge sale of the Royal Collections and many of the finest textiles were bought by agents for the working for French, Spanish and German noblemen.
Speaker: And so they crossed the channel to the continent where they've some, you know, some of some survived today.
Speaker: Others have gone the way of other textiles.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: What survived in England, some was kept back for Cromwell as the Lord Protector.
Speaker: And after the restoration of Charles II, some efforts were made to buy back tapestries and textiles from the Royal Court, but with relatively, we're talking about relatively small numbers.
Speaker: And then you've got sort of the passage of time and changing tastes, you know, while tapestry goes on being a form of traditional splendor at the English court.
Speaker: Some of the palaces like Hampton Court and Windsor, you know, the grand old tapestries that survived were left hanging.
Speaker: And then gradually, you know, the old traditions of taking them down and hanging them up are replaced.
Speaker: Instead, they become, under William and Mary, they become sort of historic wallpaper.
Speaker: And they hang for many years through the 18th century, often with paintings being hung on top of them.
Speaker: And sadly, by the end of the 18th century, they've faded, they've tarnished.
Speaker: And there's a period in the early, late 18th, early 19th century when the fashion is now for silks, for more paintings, where a lot of tapestries get taken down.
Speaker: Some are given away as perquisites to members of the royal household.
Speaker: I think a great many were cut up and even burned to extract the gold thread.
Speaker: So you have this long process of decline and destruction.
Speaker: And when it comes to the copes and the vestments, yes, you do find there some of the precious silks get repurposed into clothing, into dresses in the course of the 17th and early 18th centuries.
Speaker: It's a sorry tale.
Speaker: Well, that really puts into perspective the rarity of the surviving items of that period.
Speaker: In the exhibition, we have this magnificent cope that was commissioned by Henry VII.
Speaker: It was one of 30 vestments that he commissioned in the 1490s for use at Westminster Abbey.
Speaker: And it was made in Tuscany.
Speaker: The whole ensemble was made in Tuscany.
Speaker: it's some of the finest, the one piece we have embodies some of the finest of this cloth of gold weaving that survives.
Speaker: It's been especially commissioned for Henry.
Speaker: It has his, the emblem of the, the, the, the portcullis that was his family emblem with the Tudor roses woven around it.
Speaker: The whole ensemble cost tens of thousands of pounds, which was a staggering sum at the time.
Speaker: And we can trace these vestments.
Speaker: Henry VIII inherited them when he went to the field of cloth of gold meeting with King Francis I in France in 1520.
Speaker: We know the vestments were taken there, were part of the splendor.
Speaker: Cardinal Wolsey wore one of them, for example.
Speaker: In the mid-16th century, we know that King Edward ordered that some of them should go to Westminster, where they were probably destroyed in the fire at Westminster many years later.
Speaker: The only ones that survive, this is one cope and two fragments that are now at Stonyhurst College, which is a Catholic educational entity that dates back to the 1590s.
Speaker: And we believe that the single cope and the two other fragments survive because they were taken by Catholics who were leaving England in the 1590s to go to this educational center when it was set up in the in St.
Speaker: Omer in northern France.
Speaker: when they weren't allowed to be trained in the Catholic faith in England.
Speaker: So they went over the channel.
Speaker: And we think these vestiges of that great set went to this education institution then and eventually came back to England when that education institution was set up and moved to England in the 19th century.
Speaker: But it just gives an idea of the kind of, you know, the tenuous nature of survival of these precious textiles.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and I'm glad you brought up the cope because this is really one of the standout objects in the exhibition and a piece I was excited to discuss with you.
Speaker: In fact, it's our curious object for today, this cope made for Henry VII.
Speaker: But I wonder if you could take a step back and just tell our listeners what a cope is.
Speaker: A cope is a kind of a... Imagine a circle cut in half.
Speaker: A cope is the shape of that half.
Speaker: It's... If you take the straight diameter line is the front side, which will... When it's draped over the...
Speaker: the back of the priest.
Speaker: The straight edges were hanged down in front of him and they were very often decorated with rich embroidery which called orpharys.
Speaker: And then the cope wraps around the priest and is a big, large object that typically was
Speaker: embroidered or woven with rich materials and very much manifests the splendor of the officiating figure.
Speaker: And then very often in the kind of the great cathedrals or the court chapels,
Speaker: the officiating priest wearing this coat would then be surrounded by other priests who'd be wearing chasubles that repeated, which are smaller, kind of like jerkins that go over their heads, hang down the front, hang down the back and would be made of similar materials.
Speaker: So you get this ensemble of
Speaker: sort of football team ensemble on matching vestments.
Speaker: And of course, woven with precious materials, as this cope is with all of the gold thread, it would have, you know, imagine it, how it would have, it would have shimmer in the light of the candles and the low lights of the chapel and church.
Speaker: So what good would this have done the king to justify spending such an incredible fortune to acquire 30 of these copes?
Speaker: It's about magnificence.
Speaker: You know, the king wanted to impress the
Speaker: those who saw him, those who saw his officers.
Speaker: And, you know, Henry's case, he invested very heavily in building a new chapel at Westminster that was to be the
Speaker: the resting place for himself and his royal ancestors.
Speaker: It was very important for Henry to, in establishing his legitimate claim to the throne, to demonstrate that he was part of this, he was of the royal blood, he was part of this great lineage.
Speaker: So he invested hugely in expanding the funeral chapel at Westminster and in creating a kind of lavish, you know, this is the pointing, these lavish appointments for the priests who officiated in this building, which brought together religion and his own history.
Speaker: And in a way it becomes, you know, it lays the foundation for a blending of
Speaker: religion and power that has become central to his son's reign.
Speaker: Because, you know, as every school child knows, you know, Henry burned through wives in his pursuit of a male heir.
Speaker: And the great stumbling block for Henry that changed the course of history was that
Speaker: Normally it was a fairly common thing for kings to divorce their wives if they weren't able to produce a male heir.
Speaker: But in Henry's case, he was married to Catherine of Aragon.
Speaker: And because the Pope of the time was under the sway of Charles V,
Speaker: one of Catherine's close relations, the divorce would not be, the Pope would not grant the divorce, which forced Henry into,
Speaker: into a more and more extreme position.
Speaker: And he eventually decided that he had somehow crossed religious law by marrying Catherine, who had previously been married to his older brother, Arthur,
Speaker: and there were appropriate texts he was able to find in the Bible that said he should never have married his brother's wife.
Speaker: Of course, there were also contrary texts, but you know, he'd pick and choose in such circumstances.
Speaker: But when legal discussions failed and Wolsey failed him in that, you know, Henry branched out in this, you know, basically he eventually sets himself up as the head of the English church.
Speaker: He repudiates the Roman Catholic Church.
Speaker: He is the head of his own Catholic Church.
Speaker: And coming back to the textiles, as he goes through this arc, this exploration of his own identity,
Speaker: this evolution of his own identity.
Speaker: It was commonplace for kings and noblemen of the time to identify with heroes of history and mythology and even religious figures.
Speaker: So it's quite common for people to be buying tapestries of Solomon, David, Hercules,
Speaker: But in the course of the 20s and the 30s with Henry, this becomes almost a sort of obsession.
Speaker: And he's through his early years of his reign, he's bought a number of tapestries of, for example, King David.
Speaker: But during the 20s and into the late 20s and into the 30s, he seems to actually kind of really become
Speaker: increasingly he personally identifies with David and his, there's a lot of panegyric around the court, you know, his, the flatterers, the, the, the official, the people who write the, you know, the official documents about, you know, the annals of the time, they go from comparing Henry to David and,
Speaker: to talking about him as a new David.
Speaker: In the exhibition, we have a personal psalter, prayer book made for Henry that has illuminations in it that actually show the images of King David, but it's not David, it's Henry VIII's face.
Speaker: There is Henry playing his harp, but it's, there is David playing his harp, but it's Henry.
Speaker: Clearly, this identification was very, very personal.
Speaker: And we find Henry buying sets of tapestry of David, for example, that, you know, there's one tapestry in the exhibition from a set of David tapestries that Henry purchased in 1528.
Speaker: And it depicts David seeing Bathsheba, falling in love with her,
Speaker: sending Bathsheba's husband Uriah the Hittite to the front lines of the battle where he is killed and Nathan the prophet denouncing David for his perfidy
Speaker: and saying he will be punished.
Speaker: And we then see in the tapestry series, David and Bathsheba mourning the loss of their first child as a result of this wrongdoing.
Speaker: And we then see David reconciling with God
Speaker: prostrating himself and being forgiven by God, after which the Tapestry series shows David going on to success in his war.
Speaker: And the Tapestry series at that time provided a very resonant comparison to Henry, because here was Henry thinking that he had, you know, transgressed religious law by marrying his
Speaker: older brother's wife and he like David, he was being punished, but the deliverance would come when he was able to kind of separate from Catherine and take a new wife.
Speaker: That's, it's almost a kind of, that was where his head was.
Speaker: And during the 1530s, we find him buying other tapestry sets,
Speaker: of St.
Speaker: Paul, for example, there's another tapestry in the exhibition that comes from a set of gold woven tapestries that Henry acquired in about 1538.
Speaker: just at the time that there was all the discussion in England about publishing a Bible, a vernacular Bible in English.
Speaker: And Henry saw himself as a St.
Speaker: Paul to his own people, where St.
Speaker: Peter was associated with the Catholic Church.
Speaker: St.
Speaker: Paul had preached a direct relationship between the individual and God.
Speaker: Henry saw himself as St.
Speaker: Paul to his own people.
Speaker: So we have this incredibly rare fragment that kind of appeared in the marketplace about a decade ago.
Speaker: There's no question in my mind that it comes from Henry's lost set of St.
Speaker: Paul.
Speaker: It shows the burning of the heathen books at St.
Speaker: Paul's order.
Speaker: And this is a very resonant subject because Henry had ordered the burning of reformist books earlier.
Speaker: He saw himself as he was very Catholic in his own religious faith, even though he had setting himself up as the head of the church.
Speaker: So it's, you know,
Speaker: It's in textiles like this that we see the king's personal beliefs writ large to be, as it were, broadcast by displays of textiles and tapestries to be broadcast
Speaker: to the people who mattered.
Speaker: And of course, this wasn't a period of general suffrage.
Speaker: The people who mattered were the noblemen and the merchants and the ambassadors, the people of power who came to the court on a regular basis.
Speaker: So that's why that's why these textile displays were so important.
Speaker: I think you've just made a very strong case for why textile arts should never have been ignored in the way that they have been.
Speaker: What a window into personal experience and interest and political struggle all through the medium of these works of decorative art.
Speaker: It's fantastic.
Speaker: Let me pivot to the exhibition itself, the broader context in which this COPE is being presented now in San Francisco.
Speaker: Why was it important to bring the exhibition about the tutors and their art and their decorative arts to San Francisco?
Speaker: I think a number of reasons.
Speaker: This is the first...
Speaker: major exhibition of tudor of the use of art at the tudor court that has ever taken place in the states so as someone who studied tudor art
Speaker: myself.
Speaker: You know, it's a subject I'm especially attuned to and thought would be of interest to our audience in San Francisco.
Speaker: And of course, the Tudors have been, you know,
Speaker: the subject of much attention from Hollywood and TV dramas like the Tudors.
Speaker: So I thought there'd be literature like Wolf Hall and books like that.
Speaker: So I thought there might be a ready audience for it.
Speaker: Now, of course, at the fine art museums, we have a significant collection of European art, both painting, sculptures and textiles.
Speaker: So in the context of our own collections, it seemed very resonant.
Speaker: It's also very much a personal interest of mine.
Speaker: This is an exhibition that was initiated when I was director at the Met.
Speaker: And like so many exhibitions, it comes to fruition many years later, having gone through all sorts of evolutions and developments.
Speaker: But it struck me as a very rare opportunity to bring a very interesting subject here to San Francisco.
Speaker: And we've talked about how
Speaker: modern audiences often focus on painting and sculpture at the expense of other art forms.
Speaker: And so here was, I thought, a very interesting opportunity to kind of bring in a show that was very holistic in its approach to how the arts were used.
Speaker: And how would you say it's been received by museum goers and supporters?
Speaker: Certainly from the opening events, it looks like it's gonna be very well, very popular.
Speaker: We had quite a lot of people turning up in Tudor dress.
Speaker: Opening night event.
Speaker: And no, I think it's, I'm hopeful it's gonna be very successful.
Speaker: Certainly it was very successful in New York, had a very high attendance.
Speaker: How do you make the case for the fine and decorative arts and their history, their study, their presentation in a city which today has such a dominant tech culture?
Speaker: I don't think there's any disjunction there.
Speaker: We're an educational establishment, right?
Speaker: um you know we we give people the arts are the manifestation of the past you know they're a gateway to the past and the present so our our mission is to give people understanding of the past to kind of connect them with the present and
Speaker: Technology is an ongoing concept.
Speaker: We, the arts of the past, embody the technologies of the past along with the ideas of the past.
Speaker: So we actually, I find that people here in the Bay Area are very interested in how things are made.
Speaker: And this is an exhibition about making, if ever there was one, in many different spheres.
Speaker: Do you have any hopes or expectations for the use of artificial intelligence in the future of Deckard Art Scholarship?
Speaker: Well, I'd say in art scholarship as a whole, you know, AI is being talked about in very dystopian terms because of some of the ramifications.
Speaker: But I think for the museum industry, there are very exciting possibilities.
Speaker: You know, we've all invested so much in the last 30 years in getting our collections online, building up databases.
Speaker: But by and large, the databases that museums across the world have compiled
Speaker: They don't speak to one another.
Speaker: And although there's a vast amount of information now available through the Internet, it's still barely linked.
Speaker: And I think AI has the potential to scrape through databases and consolidate data.
Speaker: and give us turbo charge our knowledge, our access to information about artists, movements that can then be delivered to our audiences in, you know, depending on different levels of sophistication, depending about their own levels of knowledge about a subject in the language of their choice.
Speaker: So I think our educational potential and the research potential is enormous.
Speaker: That's an incredibly exciting idea, actually, which I haven't heard about before.
Speaker: But the possibilities are, I mean, imagine just wanting to peruse every example of 16th century English tapestry in every museum collection across the world.
Speaker: I mean, today that would be a matter of months of research.
Speaker: But if you could do that in a few minutes, gosh, I mean...
Speaker: And I think within five years, that could be the case.
Speaker: Now, obviously, we will have to, as an industry, we'll have to decide, you know, are we leaning into this?
Speaker: Are we collaborating?
Speaker: Are we trying to shape it?
Speaker: Or are we, you know, frightened of it?
Speaker: But I think that it's going to happen around us.
Speaker: So I think that we actually have to, you know, it's in our interest to lean in.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, and it would be fitting to see a San Francisco institution sort of spearheading that effort.
Speaker: I'd like to ask you a couple of sort of personal questions, if you don't mind.
Speaker: Starting with, you know, I wonder if you'd like to identify an exhibition that you haven't been involved in producing, something that's been mounted in the last few years that you found particularly interesting or extraordinary or moving.
Speaker: Um, God, where to start?
Speaker: I mean, there's so many.
Speaker: But I'm sitting here in Sonoma looking out into the mist of the old trees.
Speaker: And it brings to mind, I remember seeing in Tokyo about 10 years ago, an exhibition of an artist called, Japanese artist called Tohaku.
Speaker: who was a painter coinciding with Elizabeth I. His career spanned from the second half of the 16th century into the early 17th century.
Speaker: And he painted screens.
Speaker: And in the earlier years of his life, he had somewhat Baroque screens with large tree trunks and
Speaker: irises and animals against gold backgrounds.
Speaker: And they were exquisite in their line and detail.
Speaker: And then in the later years of his life, he's, he's become more and more gestural painting trees in the mist and they become more and more
Speaker: ink marks against a white ground.
Speaker: And it was just fabulous, incredibly moving progression of an artist through his career going from one style into this dreamlike ethereal style.
Speaker: And
Speaker: because these are national treasures.
Speaker: So I suspect that they will never travel, certainly not in the way I saw that show in Tokyo.
Speaker: But that's an exhibition that always lives in my mind as something, maybe one day, if.
Speaker: If you could just snap your fingers and step out of time and devote the next year to uninterrupted scholarship, what would you study?
Speaker: um i'd love to get back into tapestry studies you know i've as a curator in that field i really enjoyed that work bringing bringing new attention to what survives of that era um i continue to be especially fascinated by the by the 16th century a moment when
Speaker: I used the analogy earlier, you know, Brussels was the sort of the Hollywood of the day when there was this incredible investment from the courts around Europe in tapestries being made in Brussels of the highest, highest pictorial quality and the highest material quality.
Speaker: And I think there's much more to be done and said about the
Speaker: the manufacture and the role of these tapestries, their iconography, their technical excellence, their aesthetic developments.
Speaker: So I would love at some point in my career to get back to that.
Speaker: What sort of material would you like to see better represented in the collection of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco?
Speaker: Well, you know, we've got a
Speaker: Thinking of the Legion, we've got a good collection of European art from the Middle Ages through to the early 1900s.
Speaker: But there are always gaps to be filled.
Speaker: We just bought a beautiful Canaletto painting, which really fills one major gap.
Speaker: I'd love to see more textiles incorporated into the galleries, and we're actually working
Speaker: thinking about the refreshment of the galleries in due course, replacing skylights, replacing exhibition furniture.
Speaker: So there's a lot of work to be done there.
Speaker: And then over at the De Young, where we have our American and African and Oceanic collections, we're really focusing on building up the presentation of California artists.
Speaker: We have a great historic collection of American art, but I think that when people come to San Francisco, they come to the West Coast.
Speaker: it's very important we showed them the continuity of american art with them with a with a california bias well not bias but with the california through a california lens so we've been making some major acquisitions in that area in recent years um what what fraction of the collection is on view and what fraction would you ideally like to have on view
Speaker: Well, somewhat just the numbers sound disproportionate.
Speaker: I think we have about 130,000 objects in our collections.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: and we only have about two and a half thousand on display.
Speaker: But the caveat to that is of that 130,000, 90,000 are works on paper, prints, drawings, photographs that cannot be displayed on extended.
Speaker: So they have to be rotated.
Speaker: And we've just built a new gallery at the Legion where we will have a higher rotation of those works on paper.
Speaker: Another 14,000 are textiles.
Speaker: Again, they can't be on permanent display because they're so light sensitive.
Speaker: So those also need to be rotated.
Speaker: So what we have on display is, you know, it's sort of, it's comes from the other part of the collection, which is more stable.
Speaker: I would certainly like to have more on display, you know, so look into the future.
Speaker: I'd love to add more space at the Diyang, add more space at the Legion.
Speaker: But in the meantime, we're working hard to get all the collections online so at least people can see what we have in storage and make it accessible for study in that way.
Speaker: Well, Thomas Campbell, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker: I appreciate your time and your insight.
Speaker: Is there anything we missed that you'd like listeners to hear about?
Speaker: No, I think we've covered, we've ranged far and wide.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: I hope that's been fun, great fun talking to you.
Speaker: That's our show for today.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: And thanks to Thomas Campbell and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibition is The Tudors, Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, open until September 24th of this year.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Millen.
