Six-Color Chasuble Front with Animal Pattern (1415–25): Art, History and Details

Six-Color Chasuble Front with Animal Pattern (1415–25) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Few velvets were woven in Italy with as many as six colors of pile, such as this front panel from a chasuble. The chasuble is the main sleeveless outer vestment worn by priests while officiating during Mass. The resulting weave highlights a complex animal pattern in which deer appear behind a fence and peacocks flank a fountain above—an artistic fashion that emerged in the 1300s. This complicated weaving process was gradually abandoned during the 1400s in favor of monochrome floral patterns that were often embellished with gold.

Object facts

• Title: Six-Color Chasuble Front with Animal Pattern
• Date: 1415–25
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Velvet
• Technique: Silk, polychrome velvet with cut pile
• Dimensions: Overall: 80 x 57.8 cm (31 1/2 x 22 3/4 in.); Mounted: 86.4 x 63.5 cm (34 x 25 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1943.66

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

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.
• 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.