Fragment with musicians (1200s): Art, History and Details

Fragment with musicians (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The repeating pattern features female musicians playing tambourines. They wear long blue and blue-green robes in alternate rows. A lamp hangs between them, suggesting an evening setting. Traces of their black hair peek out from under red headdresses. This textile, along with several other fragments, was found within the pages of a Christian manuscript in the Cathedral of Vich, near Barcelona in northeastern Spain.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment with musicians
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: Spain, probably Almeria
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk and gold thread: lampas weave with areas of double cloth
• Dimensions: Overall: 16.8 x 14 cm (6 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.); Mounted: 27.3 x 24.1 cm (10 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1932.137

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Los Angeles County Museum. 2000 Years of Silk Weaving: An Exhibition Sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum in Collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. 1944.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), and Maurice Sven Dimand. A Handbook of Muhammadan Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1944.
• 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.

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.