Textile Fragment with the Annunciation (1370–1400): Art, History and Details

Textile Fragment with the Annunciation (1370–1400) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The motif shown here depicts the Virgin Mary and the angel Gabriel in a repeating sequence. Both figures kneel above a bed of flowers while a dove representing the Holy Ghost hovers above. The ground of this luxury silk, woven with highlights of gold thread, is now a faded blue. Its original purpose is not clear, but it may have originally been part of an altar frontal or possibly an ecclesiastical cope, or cape.

Object facts

• Title: Textile Fragment with the Annunciation
• Date: 1370–1400
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk with gold thread; lampas weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 23.2 x 47.6 cm (9 1/8 x 18 3/4 in.); Mounted: 28.6 x 53.3 cm (11 1/4 x 21 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1931.61

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Musées royaux d'art et d'histoire (Belgium), and Isabelle Errera. Catalogue d'étoffes anciennes et modernes décrites par Isabelle Errera. Bruxelles: Vromant, 1927.
• Gertrude Underhill. "Two Fifteenth Century Brocades." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 18, no. 4 (1931):
• Underhill, Gertrude. "Textiles from the H. A. Elsberg Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 9 (1939): 143-46.

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.