Fragmentary Chasuble with Woven Orphrey Band (1300s): Art, History and Details

Fragmentary Chasuble with Woven Orphrey Band (1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The second half of the 1300s was one of the great periods of Italian silk design. Drawing upon Chinese, Islamic, and European motifs, artists created international designs. This rare, fragmentary chasuble displays a Chinese phoenix with outstretched wings flying toward a group of pseudo-Kufic, Arabic-like letters while a dog snarls at the bird. Arabic script was associated with the Holy Land. Italian textiles were an important export product at the end of the Middle Ages. In this case, the fabric was shipped to Germany, where it was used to create a chasuble, the upper garment of the bishop and priest during Holy Mass.

Object facts

• Title: Fragmentary Chasuble with Woven Orphrey Band
• Date: 1300s
• Culture: Italy (Chasuble) and Germany (Orphrey)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk and gold thread, lampas weave; embroidered orphrey
• Dimensions: Overall: 106.7 x 68.6 cm (42 x 27 in.); Mounted: 123.2 x 82.5 cm (48 1/2 x 32 1/2 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1928.653

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• G. U. (Gertrude Underhill). "A Textile of the Fourteenth Century." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 16, no. 3 (1929).
• 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.
• 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.