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| Fragment of voided pile on pile silk velvet, gold filé (gold-wrapped thread) with bouclé (detail), Milan, 1470-1480. 0.66 1.08m (1'2" x 3’5"). Historisches Museum, Bern inv. 21
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08 January 2010 With the exhibition ‘Silk Gold Kermes. Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts’, Milan’s Poldi Pezzoli Museum launches ‘Silk in Lombardy’, a major project, undertaken by the Istituto per la Storia dell’Arte Lombardia, to research the historic gold and silk textiles made in the region and to display them in installments in local museums.
The silks and velvets of 15th century Milan are often misattributed to the other Italian weaving centres of Florence, Genoa, Lucca and Venice, so this exhibition set out to define the Milanese examples, which involved complex art historical and scientific studies on gold, silk and dyes, particularly the reds; some results surprised even the experts. The initial focus was on textiles with hard evidence to tie them to documented information, and the trail fanned out from there.
Like all Italians, the Milanese have always loved fine clothes but, in an era of overt opulence, balked at the high costs of importing luxury textiles. Instead, in about 1442, the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, imported skilled weavers and spinners from the other centres, offering tax exemptions and other benefits. This adds to the confusion in attribution as, at first, there was no common structure to the fabrics, since the weavers all brought different techniques from their old workshops. Analysis of the silk was no help either, as all silkworms are much the same.
Work on the two main red dyes, ‘crimsyn’ and ‘grain’, produced the most significant results by detecting the chemical differences between kermes and the various cochineals and thus defining their countries of origin.
At the time, dyers were forbidden to mix the two dyes, but they did, also cheating with the warp colours. And then there were the selvedges. Each weaving city used a specific selvedge colour to guarantee the use of the finest red dyes, for instance green for Venice. Milan copied them all, so Venice reacted by adding a gold stripe – and Milan copied that, still mixing its dyes, all with the collusion of the authorities.
Gold thread was the only area where strict quality control was fully observed. The gold was beaten into thin sheets, cut into fine strips with special scissors, then spun around a silk core, all highly skilled work. In Milan it was bonded to a silver base under heat, but elsewhere by amalgamation. New technology has revealed the difference between the two processes which, as with the red dyes, was impossible to see with the naked eye. Valuable answers were found to the attribution problems of Milanese silks, and the results are a triumph of collaboration between palaeographers, archivists, scientists and textile historians.
The show itself is a delight, with vibrant silks in bold contrast to dark walls, and lighting raked to heighten the lustrous alto basso (pile-on-pile) velvets and golden bouclé like a froth of tiny bubbles. The showcases are almost shallow enough to touch textiles hung beside portraits of grandees clad in comparable fabrics. Lavish altar frontals and embroidered vestments vie with the monumental kaftan of a Wallachian boyar, and velvet-covered illuminated manuscripts, even tarot cards with characters in silken costumes.
The personae of the story provide the comedy, with all their foibles and insecurities exposed by their peacock habits, particularly the Viscontis’ successors, the Sforzas, who felt a bit ‘new’, like Ludovico Sforza, ‘il Moro’ (the dark). Here is a man obsessed with wearing a startling variety of imprese (heraldic emblems) all at once, until his dream came true and he became Duke of Milan in 1494, when he suddenly took to more sober dress. He’d made it!
Silk Gold Kermes. Secrets and technology at the Visconti and sforza Courts.
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Via Manzoni 12, Milan
29 October 2009 – 21 February 2010
Penny Oakley
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