Chasuble Fragment with Realistic Animals (c. 1420): Art, History and Details

Chasuble Fragment with Realistic Animals (c. 1420) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Around 1400 an emerging interest in the bucolic world of nature encouraged a new trend among textile designers, as seen in the lions, hawks, dogs, and ducks on this luxury silk fragment. The continual influence of Chinese asymmetry, however, is evident in the prominent undulating palmette trees, enlarged from sinuous vines frequently seen in Italian silks and velvets from this period.

Object facts

• Title: Chasuble Fragment with Realistic Animals
• Date: c. 1420
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk, gold thread; lampas weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 115.6 x 33.7 cm (45 1/2 x 13 1/4 in.); Mounted: 120.7 x 36.8 cm (47 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1947.294

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "A Fifteenth-Century Italian Textile." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 35, no. 3 (1948): 46-44.
• Weibel, Adèle Coulin. Two Thousand Years of Textiles; The Figured Textiles of Europe and the Near East. New York: Published for the Detroit Institute of Arts [by] Pantheon Books, 1952.
• Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts. Aspects of Late Mediaeval Art; The Mediaeval Conference, the Ohio State University. 1958.

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.