Altar Cloth (c. 1350): Art, History and Details

Altar Cloth (c. 1350) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This large, embroidered altar cloth is one of the rarest, most important medieval church furnishings in existence. It was stitched by nuns in the Premonstratensian Convent in Altenberg on the Lahn River, north of Frankfurt, Germany, and was used to cover the church’s high altar in the weeks leading up to Easter. The cloth is an example of linen embroidery, a specialty of German nuns in the later Middle Ages. The Altenberg monastery church once had valuable furnishings; the high altar retable (a decorated frame with sculptures and paintings on the top of an altar) has survived, the main parts of which are now in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.

Object facts

• Title: Altar Cloth
• Date: c. 1350
• Culture: Germany, Altenberg on the Lahn, Premonstratensian Convent, 14th century
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: embroidery: linen
• Dimensions: Overall: 154.3 x 374.5 cm (60 3/4 x 147 7/16 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1948.352

A detail from the museum

When lit from behind, the previously hidden details emerge and the complex design becomes evident.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Farcy, Louis de. La Broderie, du XI siècle jusqu'à nos jours, d'après des specimens authentiques et les anciens inventaires. 1er (et 2) supplément. 1er (et 2) supplément. Angers: Belhomme, 1900.
• Lehnert, Georg, W. Behncke, E. W. Braun, Moriz Dreger, Otto von Falke, J. Folnesics, Otto Kümmel, Erich Pernice, and Georg Swarzenski. Illustrierte geschichte des Kunstgewerbes. Berlin: M. Oldenbourg, 1907.
• Der Grosse Brockhaus. Grosse Brockhaus. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1930.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.