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Textiles Don't Get No Respect
28 Plays2 years ago
The cope, a long, loose-fitting ceremonial cloak worn by a priests or bishops, is a curious object. “Imagine a circle cut in half—a cope is the shape of that half,” explains Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Henry VII commissioned thirty of these richly embroidered vestments for the English clergy, helping to lay the foundation for that special blend of religion, power, and material prestige that would mark the reign of his son, the notorious Henry VIII. One of these copes is our focus piece this week. But twenty-nine of its brothers and sisters shared the fate of so many Renaissance textiles: oblivion.
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Transcript
Introduction to Thomas Campbell and the Tudor Exhibition
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm joined today by Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is the organization that manages the DeYoung Museum and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco's most prominent public art institutions.
00:00:23
Speaker
Campbell was previously the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
00:00:27
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.
00:00:37
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.
The Role of Textiles in Tudor Aesthetics
00:00:56
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.
00:01:08
Speaker
Thomas, thanks for joining me.
00:01:10
Speaker
Now, let's talk about English Renaissance textiles.
00:01:13
Speaker
The exhibition is all about the Tudors.
00:01:16
Speaker
So tell me, how are Tudor aesthetics different from Plantagenet or Stuart aesthetics?
00:01:22
Speaker
And obviously, not just the period, but their personal proclivities or interests.
00:01:29
Speaker
I think in many ways, there was a lot of continuity.
00:01:34
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.
00:01:49
Speaker
But in fact, they were perhaps the principal signifier of grandeur, of that you were in a special, you know,
00:02:02
Speaker
a privileged setting.
00:02:04
Speaker
Textiles of any kind were expensive and they were used very theatrically to create, in a sense, a stage set.
00:02:17
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.
00:02:39
Speaker
So there's great continuity.
00:02:42
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.
00:03:02
Speaker
So through his reign and well into and indeed through his children,
00:03:10
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.
00:03:35
Speaker
So
00:03:36
Speaker
the emphasis which had always existed on heraldry became ever, ever stronger.
Influence of Continental Craftsmen on Tudor Textiles
00:03:44
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.
00:04:07
Speaker
Inevitably, the objects that are being imported to the tutor court reflect the stylistic developments that are going on on the continent.
00:04:18
Speaker
So we see the incursion of.
00:04:24
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
00:04:42
Speaker
the classics and the subjects that interested the classical world, the ancient world, and that are now being reproduced in Renaissance art.
00:04:51
Speaker
So similarly, we see a similar transference of interest coming to the English court.
00:04:57
Speaker
Well, you mentioned the Low Countries specifically, and the exhibition does include Dutch examples of textile work alongside English examples.
00:05:07
Speaker
How do those measure up against each other?
00:05:13
Speaker
Really, the quality products were coming from the low countries, from the Flanders,
00:05:24
Speaker
During the 15th century, Tuiné was the great center of tapestry production.
00:05:31
Speaker
And that's where huge mythological tapestries that Henry VII purchased were sourced.
00:05:41
Speaker
And then by the turn of the century, Brussels really comes to the fore.
00:05:47
Speaker
And it's from Brussels that Henry VIII acquires most of his great tapestries.
00:05:54
Speaker
And there's really no comparison to what the sort of smaller, lower quality products that were being made in England.
00:06:06
Speaker
You know, the tapestry industry was a, it really was an industry that employed thousands of people in the Low Countries.
00:06:15
Speaker
You had the weavers were members of guilds.
00:06:20
Speaker
They were highly trained, but alongside these highly skilled weavers, you also had a whole
00:06:28
Speaker
infrastructure that supported the tapestry industry.
00:06:33
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.
00:06:58
Speaker
and the rich merchants on whom the whole industry depended.
00:07:04
Speaker
So this was kind of the Hollywood of Brussels, was like the Hollywood of the day, making these huge valuable tapestries.
00:07:14
Speaker
The products you get in England made in small workshops by itinerant weavers, they were much smaller and they were much lower quality.
Why is Textile Art Undervalued?
00:07:30
Speaker
So I think that's really how it was.
00:07:33
Speaker
Well, that's harsh, but honest.
00:07:35
Speaker
I appreciate it.
00:07:38
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.
00:07:48
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.
00:07:59
Speaker
How do you explain that oversight?
00:08:01
Speaker
Again, it's probably a combination of factors.
00:08:05
Speaker
I mean, ironically, people talk about tapestry as being the fresco of the north, but in fact,
00:08:14
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.
00:08:30
Speaker
And they were in the homes of the rich.
00:08:33
Speaker
You know, they were often hung over frescoes, especially hung in the winter months.
00:08:41
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.
00:08:56
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.
00:09:07
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,
00:09:20
Speaker
very, you know, decorative setting.
00:09:22
Speaker
You know, of course, they kept out the drafts, but they were much more than that.
00:09:28
Speaker
They were, you know, a very, in an age when any image, any image was very rare.
00:09:37
Speaker
Tapestries were a, you know, huge scale, a manifestation of splendor and of wealth.
00:09:48
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.
Textiles as Status Symbols and Propaganda
00:10:06
Speaker
So whether it was, you know, buying subjects that were available in the market that depicted historical heroes or mythological heroes,
00:10:17
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
00:10:36
Speaker
celebratory of them.
00:10:39
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.
00:10:50
Speaker
Why is it so overlooked now?
00:10:53
Speaker
Well, you know, only a tiny fraction of what was made survives today.
00:11:02
Speaker
You know, I mean, for example, we have textiles in general, the vulnerable.
00:11:08
Speaker
There's a beautiful cope in the exhibition that was one of 30 made for Henry the seventh.
00:11:16
Speaker
That and two fragments are all that survives of that set of 30.
00:11:22
Speaker
When Henry died,
00:11:24
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
00:11:53
Speaker
it's a staggeringly low number.
00:11:57
Speaker
So you've got the challenge of survival and then you've got the challenge of perception.
00:12:05
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
00:12:19
Speaker
the kind of the legacy of the age of reason.
00:12:25
Speaker
An era in which painting had become the sort of the art form of choice.
00:12:34
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.
00:12:47
Speaker
and people have focused obsessively on paintings and frescoes when it comes to figurative art.
00:12:57
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.
00:13:10
Speaker
And their study is made even harder because of the positive
Professional vs Domestic Textile Production
00:13:14
Speaker
documentation, because of the lack of information about the people who designed them, a lack of understanding about the whole industry.
00:13:23
Speaker
So all of these factors have worked together.
00:13:27
Speaker
In in, I'd say over the last
00:13:31
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
00:13:58
Speaker
had a very different approach to the arts than we do today.
00:14:03
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.
00:14:13
Speaker
But that is, of course, you know, that's the modern misconception.
00:14:18
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,
00:14:27
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.
00:14:46
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.
00:15:01
Speaker
But, you know, that production, of course, was not just in
00:15:05
Speaker
humble homes and cottages, but all the way up the social ladder as far as the nobility.
00:15:12
Speaker
And when a noblewoman like famously Bess of Hardwick or Mary Stewart would sit down to work on their embroidery, which they did,
00:15:23
Speaker
What were they actually doing?
00:15:25
Speaker
What did that process look like?
00:15:26
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?
00:15:41
Speaker
I think it varied from location to location, court to court, household to household.
00:15:50
Speaker
The royal household, of course, had many highly professional staff and workshops.
00:16:00
Speaker
Take the English royal court.
00:16:03
Speaker
They had a whole department known as the wardrobe that was responsible for looking after the precious textiles.
00:16:14
Speaker
They knew there was a strong awareness that textiles were vulnerable to damage and abuse.
00:16:21
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
00:16:45
Speaker
it would have really been a very clear signal that something important was happening.
00:16:50
Speaker
Or the court, the noble household was on the move.
00:16:55
Speaker
Along with the wardrobe, you had specialists who were responsible for different areas of that collection.
00:17:03
Speaker
So, you know, the Royal Collection had a man called the Royal Arrasman.
00:17:08
Speaker
who was responsible for repairing tapestries, for helping source and buy tapestries from the continent, and even making small tapestries for the crown.
00:17:24
Speaker
To a lesser extent, that was.
00:17:26
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
00:17:44
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
Historical Valuation and Recycling of Textiles
00:17:55
Speaker
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
00:18:09
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.
00:18:23
Speaker
working with designs that have been created for them.
00:18:26
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.
00:18:41
Speaker
So more broadly, how was the labor of textile production divided between men and women?
00:18:48
Speaker
Again, that's something that's sort of hard to bring fully into focus.
00:18:54
Speaker
And it varies from medium to medium.
00:19:00
Speaker
Take the tapestry industry, which was, as I said, the main centers were in the Low Countries, Brussels, Tuinay, Oudenard.
00:19:10
Speaker
You're talking about a system that was controlled by guilds and was predominantly, the workers were predominantly men.
00:19:21
Speaker
I think a similar thing applies to the high quality silk production and the velvet production in Tuscany.
00:19:34
Speaker
Probably when it came to professional embroiderers, that too was largely a male industry.
00:19:44
Speaker
But then of course,
00:19:46
Speaker
embroidery in the home and the domestic setting was a skill that was highly prized in women folk.
00:19:54
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.
00:20:08
Speaker
We'll be right back with Thomas Campbell after a word from our sponsor, the International Society of Appraisers.
00:20:14
Speaker
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00:20:23
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00:21:17
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Ceremonial Significance of Textiles
00:21:23
Speaker
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00:22:03
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Again, that's isa-appraisers.org.
00:22:12
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.
00:22:25
Speaker
And I wonder how often significant textile works were actually reused or repurposed to make new works.
00:22:38
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.
00:22:55
Speaker
And all too often, people look at this, an old tapestry or an old bit of velvet.
00:23:03
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
00:23:20
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.
00:23:32
Speaker
And they, you know, tapestries to four or five different categories.
00:23:37
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.
00:23:52
Speaker
So just over two feet square.
00:23:53
Speaker
That was an L.
00:23:56
Speaker
The cheapest tapestry was valued at one to two shillings per L. That was with wool.
00:24:04
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.
00:24:17
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
00:24:31
Speaker
three to four yards high by five to six to seven yards wide.
00:24:38
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.
00:24:58
Speaker
Holbein was paid 30 pounds a year.
00:25:00
Speaker
Horan Boot was paid 33 pounds a year.
00:25:05
Speaker
If the set of tapestries had silk in it, you're probably looking at a set that would have cost
00:25:10
Speaker
over a hundred pounds.
Stories and Preservation of Surviving Textiles
00:25:12
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.
00:25:29
Speaker
That was a very, that was a decent income.
00:25:32
Speaker
If it had gold thread in it, you might be looking at something like a thousand pounds.
00:25:37
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.
00:26:04
Speaker
So a set of tapestries woven with gold was equivalent to the income of the richest 40 families in the country.
00:26:15
Speaker
Incredible.
00:26:16
Speaker
It's incredible.
00:26:17
Speaker
And then when you actually look and then, you know, there were different terminologies used in the inventories.
00:26:22
Speaker
We know in fact that it really, gold woven tapestries were extraordinarily rare outside of the Royal Collection.
00:26:33
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
00:26:56
Speaker
Henry VII instituted new sort of regulations about how the textiles should be used, how they should be looked after.
00:27:05
Speaker
Very, very detailed.
00:27:07
Speaker
And we know that
00:27:10
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.
00:27:22
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.
00:27:30
Speaker
and then wool, silk and gold tapestries.
00:27:34
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.
00:27:46
Speaker
They're actually gilt silver filaments wrapped around silk thread.
00:27:52
Speaker
So you would have had this constant progression of splendor, progression of value.
00:28:00
Speaker
And coming back to your question, you know, these these textiles were valued very highly at the time.
00:28:09
Speaker
Some.
00:28:11
Speaker
And it's what happened to them.
00:28:15
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.
00:28:43
Speaker
And so they crossed the channel to the continent where they've some, you know, some of some survived today.
00:28:50
Speaker
Others have gone the way of other textiles.
00:28:54
Speaker
Um,
00:28:56
Speaker
What survived in England, some was kept back for Cromwell as the Lord Protector.
00:29:02
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.
00:29:18
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.
00:29:36
Speaker
Some of the palaces like Hampton Court and Windsor, you know, the grand old tapestries that survived were left hanging.
00:29:44
Speaker
And then gradually, you know, the old traditions of taking them down and hanging them up are replaced.
00:29:50
Speaker
Instead, they become, under William and Mary, they become sort of historic wallpaper.
00:29:56
Speaker
And they hang for many years through the 18th century, often with paintings being hung on top of them.
00:30:04
Speaker
And sadly, by the end of the 18th century, they've faded, they've tarnished.
00:30:10
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.
00:30:24
Speaker
Some are given away as perquisites to members of the royal household.
00:30:31
Speaker
I think a great many were cut up and even burned to extract the gold thread.
00:30:39
Speaker
So you have this long process of decline and destruction.
00:30:48
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.
00:31:08
Speaker
It's a sorry tale.
00:31:11
Speaker
Well, that really puts into perspective the rarity of the surviving items of that period.
00:31:19
Speaker
In the exhibition, we have this magnificent cope that was commissioned by Henry VII.
00:31:29
Speaker
It was one of 30 vestments that he commissioned in the 1490s for use at Westminster Abbey.
00:31:41
Speaker
And it was made in Tuscany.
00:31:45
Speaker
The whole ensemble was made in Tuscany.
00:31:49
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.
00:32:00
Speaker
It's been especially commissioned for Henry.
00:32:03
Speaker
It has his, the emblem of the, the, the, the portcullis that was his family emblem with the Tudor roses woven around it.
00:32:19
Speaker
The whole ensemble cost tens of thousands of pounds, which was a staggering sum at the time.
00:32:27
Speaker
And we can trace these vestments.
00:32:34
Speaker
Henry VIII inherited them when he went to the field of cloth of gold meeting with King Francis I in France in 1520.
00:32:44
Speaker
We know the vestments were taken there, were part of the splendor.
00:32:48
Speaker
Cardinal Wolsey wore one of them, for example.
00:32:53
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.
Henry VIII's Use of Tapestries for Narrative
00:33:14
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.
00:33:31
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.
00:33:50
Speaker
Omer in northern France.
00:33:53
Speaker
when they weren't allowed to be trained in the Catholic faith in England.
00:34:01
Speaker
So they went over the channel.
00:34:05
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.
00:34:21
Speaker
But it just gives an idea of the kind of, you know, the tenuous nature of survival of these precious textiles.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:29
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.
00:34:40
Speaker
In fact, it's our curious object for today, this cope made for Henry VII.
00:34:49
Speaker
But I wonder if you could take a step back and just tell our listeners what a cope is.
00:34:56
Speaker
A cope is a kind of a... Imagine a circle cut in half.
00:35:02
Speaker
A cope is the shape of that half.
00:35:07
Speaker
It's... If you take the straight diameter line is the front side, which will... When it's draped over the...
00:35:19
Speaker
the back of the priest.
00:35:23
Speaker
The straight edges were hanged down in front of him and they were very often decorated with rich embroidery which called orpharys.
00:35:33
Speaker
And then the cope wraps around the priest and is a big, large object that typically was
00:35:46
Speaker
embroidered or woven with rich materials and very much manifests the splendor of the officiating figure.
00:35:59
Speaker
And then very often in the kind of the great cathedrals or the court chapels,
00:36:10
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.
00:36:28
Speaker
So you get this ensemble of
00:36:33
Speaker
sort of football team ensemble on matching vestments.
00:36:40
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.
00:37:00
Speaker
So what good would this have done the king to justify spending such an incredible fortune to acquire 30 of these copes?
00:37:13
Speaker
It's about magnificence.
00:37:15
Speaker
You know, the king wanted to impress the
00:37:22
Speaker
those who saw him, those who saw his officers.
00:37:27
Speaker
And, you know, Henry's case, he invested very heavily in building a new chapel at Westminster that was to be the
00:37:44
Speaker
the resting place for himself and his royal ancestors.
00:37:50
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.
00:38:09
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.
00:38:39
Speaker
And in a way it becomes, you know, it lays the foundation for a blending of
00:38:46
Speaker
religion and power that has become central to his son's reign.
00:38:54
Speaker
Because, you know, as every school child knows, you know, Henry burned through wives in his pursuit of a male heir.
00:39:10
Speaker
And the great stumbling block for Henry that changed the course of history was that
00:39:17
Speaker
Normally it was a fairly common thing for kings to divorce their wives if they weren't able to produce a male heir.
Tapestries as Tudor Narrative Tools
00:39:27
Speaker
But in Henry's case, he was married to Catherine of Aragon.
00:39:32
Speaker
And because the Pope of the time was under the sway of Charles V,
00:39:44
Speaker
one of Catherine's close relations, the divorce would not be, the Pope would not grant the divorce, which forced Henry into,
00:39:57
Speaker
into a more and more extreme position.
00:40:02
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,
00:40:18
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.
00:40:25
Speaker
Of course, there were also contrary texts, but you know, he'd pick and choose in such circumstances.
00:40:32
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.
00:40:47
Speaker
He repudiates the Roman Catholic Church.
00:40:52
Speaker
He is the head of his own Catholic Church.
00:40:56
Speaker
And coming back to the textiles, as he goes through this arc, this exploration of his own identity,
00:41:07
Speaker
this evolution of his own identity.
00:41:08
Speaker
It was commonplace for kings and noblemen of the time to identify with heroes of history and mythology and even religious figures.
00:41:24
Speaker
So it's quite common for people to be buying tapestries of Solomon, David, Hercules,
00:41:32
Speaker
But in the course of the 20s and the 30s with Henry, this becomes almost a sort of obsession.
00:41:43
Speaker
And he's through his early years of his reign, he's bought a number of tapestries of, for example, King David.
00:41:53
Speaker
But during the 20s and into the late 20s and into the 30s, he seems to actually kind of really become
00:42:02
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,
00:42:31
Speaker
to talking about him as a new David.
00:42:34
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.
00:42:54
Speaker
There is Henry playing his harp, but it's, there is David playing his harp, but it's Henry.
00:43:01
Speaker
Clearly, this identification was very, very personal.
00:43:04
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.
00:43:20
Speaker
And it depicts David seeing Bathsheba, falling in love with her,
00:43:30
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
00:43:52
Speaker
and saying he will be punished.
Significance of the Tudor Exhibition Today
00:43:55
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.
00:44:13
Speaker
And we then see David reconciling with God
00:44:18
Speaker
prostrating himself and being forgiven by God, after which the Tapestry series shows David going on to success in his war.
00:44:28
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
00:44:44
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.
00:44:55
Speaker
That's, it's almost a kind of, that was where his head was.
00:45:01
Speaker
And during the 1530s, we find him buying other tapestry sets,
00:45:08
Speaker
of St.
00:45:10
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.
00:45:22
Speaker
just at the time that there was all the discussion in England about publishing a Bible, a vernacular Bible in English.
00:45:32
Speaker
And Henry saw himself as a St.
00:45:36
Speaker
Paul to his own people, where St.
00:45:38
Speaker
Peter was associated with the Catholic Church.
00:45:42
Speaker
St.
00:45:43
Speaker
Paul had preached a direct relationship between the individual and God.
00:45:51
Speaker
Henry saw himself as St.
00:45:53
Speaker
Paul to his own people.
00:45:56
Speaker
So we have this incredibly rare fragment that kind of appeared in the marketplace about a decade ago.
00:46:05
Speaker
There's no question in my mind that it comes from Henry's lost set of St.
00:46:12
Speaker
Paul.
00:46:13
Speaker
It shows the burning of the heathen books at St.
00:46:16
Speaker
Paul's order.
00:46:17
Speaker
And this is a very resonant subject because Henry had ordered the burning of reformist books earlier.
00:46:24
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.
00:46:34
Speaker
So it's, you know,
00:46:36
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
00:46:53
Speaker
to the people who mattered.
00:46:55
Speaker
And of course, this wasn't a period of general suffrage.
00:46:58
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.
00:47:09
Speaker
So that's why that's why these textile displays were so important.
00:47:15
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.
00:47:23
Speaker
What a window into personal experience and interest and political struggle all through the medium of these works of decorative art.
00:47:35
Speaker
It's fantastic.
00:47:37
Speaker
Let me pivot to the exhibition itself, the broader context in which this COPE is being presented now in San Francisco.
00:47:49
Speaker
Why was it important to bring the exhibition about the tutors and their art and their decorative arts to San Francisco?
00:48:01
Speaker
I think a number of reasons.
00:48:05
Speaker
This is the first...
00:48:08
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
00:48:24
Speaker
myself.
00:48:25
Speaker
You know, it's a subject I'm especially attuned to and thought would be of interest to our audience in San Francisco.
00:48:35
Speaker
And of course, the Tudors have been, you know,
00:48:40
Speaker
the subject of much attention from Hollywood and TV dramas like the Tudors.
00:48:46
Speaker
So I thought there'd be literature like Wolf Hall and books like that.
00:48:51
Speaker
So I thought there might be a ready audience for it.
00:48:53
Speaker
Now, of course, at the fine art museums, we have a significant collection of European art, both painting, sculptures and textiles.
00:49:04
Speaker
So in the context of our own collections, it seemed very resonant.
AI's Impact on Art Scholarship
00:49:09
Speaker
It's also very much a personal interest of mine.
00:49:11
Speaker
This is an exhibition that was initiated when I was director at the Met.
00:49:18
Speaker
And like so many exhibitions, it comes to fruition many years later, having gone through all sorts of evolutions and developments.
00:49:26
Speaker
But it struck me as a very rare opportunity to bring a very interesting subject here to San Francisco.
00:49:34
Speaker
And we've talked about how
00:49:39
Speaker
modern audiences often focus on painting and sculpture at the expense of other art forms.
00:49:47
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.
00:49:59
Speaker
And how would you say it's been received by museum goers and supporters?
00:50:05
Speaker
Certainly from the opening events, it looks like it's gonna be very well, very popular.
00:50:12
Speaker
We had quite a lot of people turning up in Tudor dress.
00:50:17
Speaker
Opening night event.
00:50:19
Speaker
And no, I think it's, I'm hopeful it's gonna be very successful.
00:50:25
Speaker
Certainly it was very successful in New York, had a very high attendance.
00:50:31
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?
00:50:51
Speaker
I don't think there's any disjunction there.
00:50:58
Speaker
We're an educational establishment, right?
00:51:01
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
00:51:27
Speaker
Technology is an ongoing concept.
00:51:31
Speaker
We, the arts of the past, embody the technologies of the past along with the ideas of the past.
00:51:41
Speaker
So we actually, I find that people here in the Bay Area are very interested in how things are made.
00:51:50
Speaker
And this is an exhibition about making, if ever there was one, in many different spheres.
00:52:00
Speaker
Do you have any hopes or expectations for the use of artificial intelligence in the future of Deckard Art Scholarship?
00:52:11
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.
00:52:27
Speaker
But I think for the museum industry, there are very exciting possibilities.
00:52:33
Speaker
You know, we've all invested so much in the last 30 years in getting our collections online, building up databases.
Reflections on Art Exhibitions and Future Research
00:52:44
Speaker
But by and large, the databases that museums across the world have compiled
00:52:52
Speaker
They don't speak to one another.
00:52:54
Speaker
And although there's a vast amount of information now available through the Internet, it's still barely linked.
00:53:05
Speaker
And I think AI has the potential to scrape through databases and consolidate data.
00:53:15
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.
00:53:45
Speaker
So I think our educational potential and the research potential is enormous.
00:53:54
Speaker
That's an incredibly exciting idea, actually, which I haven't heard about before.
00:53:59
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.
00:54:15
Speaker
I mean, today that would be a matter of months of research.
00:54:19
Speaker
But if you could do that in a few minutes, gosh, I mean...
00:54:23
Speaker
And I think within five years, that could be the case.
00:54:28
Speaker
Now, obviously, we will have to, as an industry, we'll have to decide, you know, are we leaning into this?
00:54:35
Speaker
Are we collaborating?
00:54:36
Speaker
Are we trying to shape it?
00:54:38
Speaker
Or are we, you know, frightened of it?
00:54:44
Speaker
But I think that it's going to happen around us.
00:54:46
Speaker
So I think that we actually have to, you know, it's in our interest to lean in.
00:54:53
Speaker
Right.
00:54:53
Speaker
Well, and it would be fitting to see a San Francisco institution sort of spearheading that effort.
00:55:04
Speaker
I'd like to ask you a couple of sort of personal questions, if you don't mind.
00:55:10
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.
00:55:36
Speaker
Um, God, where to start?
00:55:38
Speaker
I mean, there's so many.
00:55:41
Speaker
But I'm sitting here in Sonoma looking out into the mist of the old trees.
00:55:49
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.
00:56:04
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.
00:56:19
Speaker
And he painted screens.
00:56:22
Speaker
And in the earlier years of his life, he had somewhat Baroque screens with large tree trunks and
00:56:31
Speaker
irises and animals against gold backgrounds.
00:56:36
Speaker
And they were exquisite in their line and detail.
00:56:41
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
00:56:55
Speaker
ink marks against a white ground.
00:56:59
Speaker
And it was just fabulous, incredibly moving progression of an artist through his career going from one style into this dreamlike ethereal style.
00:57:13
Speaker
And
00:57:14
Speaker
because these are national treasures.
00:57:17
Speaker
So I suspect that they will never travel, certainly not in the way I saw that show in Tokyo.
00:57:25
Speaker
But that's an exhibition that always lives in my mind as something, maybe one day, if.
Aspirations for the Fine Art Museums' Collections
00:57:33
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?
00:57:45
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
00:58:16
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.
00:58:35
Speaker
And I think there's much more to be done and said about the
00:58:40
Speaker
the manufacture and the role of these tapestries, their iconography, their technical excellence, their aesthetic developments.
00:58:51
Speaker
So I would love at some point in my career to get back to that.
00:58:55
Speaker
What sort of material would you like to see better represented in the collection of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco?
00:59:03
Speaker
Well, you know, we've got a
00:59:08
Speaker
Thinking of the Legion, we've got a good collection of European art from the Middle Ages through to the early 1900s.
00:59:17
Speaker
But there are always gaps to be filled.
00:59:20
Speaker
We just bought a beautiful Canaletto painting, which really fills one major gap.
00:59:27
Speaker
I'd love to see more textiles incorporated into the galleries, and we're actually working
00:59:32
Speaker
thinking about the refreshment of the galleries in due course, replacing skylights, replacing exhibition furniture.
00:59:40
Speaker
So there's a lot of work to be done there.
00:59:43
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.
00:59:58
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.
01:00:05
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
01:00:30
Speaker
Well, somewhat just the numbers sound disproportionate.
01:00:34
Speaker
I think we have about 130,000 objects in our collections.
01:00:36
Speaker
Um,
01:00:42
Speaker
and we only have about two and a half thousand on display.
01:00:46
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.
01:00:58
Speaker
So they have to be rotated.
01:01:01
Speaker
And we've just built a new gallery at the Legion where we will have a higher rotation of those works on paper.
01:01:08
Speaker
Another 14,000 are textiles.
01:01:13
Speaker
Again, they can't be on permanent display because they're so light sensitive.
01:01:19
Speaker
So those also need to be rotated.
01:01:22
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.
01:01:30
Speaker
I would certainly like to have more on display, you know, so look into the future.
01:01:36
Speaker
I'd love to add more space at the Diyang, add more space at the Legion.
01:01:41
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.
01:01:54
Speaker
Well, Thomas Campbell, thank you so much for joining me today.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
01:01:58
Speaker
I appreciate your time and your insight.
01:02:01
Speaker
Is there anything we missed that you'd like listeners to hear about?
01:02:04
Speaker
No, I think we've covered, we've ranged far and wide.
01:02:14
Speaker
Excellent.
01:02:15
Speaker
I hope that's been fun, great fun talking to you.
01:02:20
Speaker
That's our show for today.
01:02:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
01:02:22
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.
01:02:32
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
01:02:39
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
01:02:42
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
01:02:44
Speaker
And I'm Ben Millen.