Samite fragments with double-headed eagles, from the tomb of Saint Bernard Calvo (1200–1243): Art, History and Details

Samite fragments with double-headed eagles, from the tomb of Saint Bernard Calvo (1200–1243) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This silk is woven with horizontal rows of incompleted ovals, each containing a double-headed eagle grasping lions with its talons. It belongs to a group of Spanish silks that emulated the great silks being produced at that time in Byzantium. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Spanish weavers not only drew freely upon Byzantine and Near Eastern models for their designs, but at times went so far as to create outright forgeries. This is one of several textiles found in the tomb of St. Bernard Calvo, Bishop of Vich in Spain, who died in 1243.

Object facts

• Title: Samite fragments with double-headed eagles, from the tomb of Saint Bernard Calvo
• Date: 1200–1243
• Culture: probably Byzantium
• Type: Textile
• Technique: samite: silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 118 x 165 cm (46 7/16 x 64 15/16 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1951.92

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "The Third Silk from the Tomb of Saint Bernard Calvo." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 39, no. 1 (1952): 13-14.
• New York University. Spanish Medieval Art. Loan Exhibition in Honor of Dr. Walter W.S. Cook. 1954.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 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.