Parrots and Animals (1300s): Art, History and Details

Parrots and Animals (1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Silk weaving became an important industry in Italy during the 13th century, especially in Lucca and Venice. Initially, it was closely associated with silk patterns that were woven in the well established textile industry in Islamic Spain. Here, the Islamic influence is apparent in the paired eagles and gazelles flanking concentric bulb-shaped palmettes. Many variations of this design were woven in Italy during the 1300s. Examples that belonged to a pope, cardinal, and bishop provide dates between 1334 and 1361 based on their obituaries. Inventories in the Vatican also describe vestments displaying animals and birds with gold heads throughout the1300s. Here, costly gold thread was only interlaced where it is visible in the pattern.

Object facts

• Title: Parrots and Animals
• Date: 1300s
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Textile
• Technique: silk, gold thread; a combination of two weaves (lampas)
• Dimensions: Overall: 84.8 x 26.7 cm (33 3/8 x 10 1/2 in.); Mounted: 90.2 x 33 cm (35 1/2 x 13 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1926.507

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.