The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns these tapestries through the altruistic generosity of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. They are the most interesting primitive work which are on public view in our country, and awake to enthusiasm even the most insensate dullard, who has a half hour to stand before them and realise all they mean in art, in morals and in history.
To the lives of the Prophets and Saints we can always turn; from the romance of men and women we can never turn away. And so when a Gothic tapestry is found that frankly omits Biblical folk and gives us a true picture of men and women of the almost impenetrable time back of the fifteen hundreds, tells us what they wore, in what manner they comported themselves, that tapestry has a sure and peculiar value. The surviving art of the Middle Ages smacks strong of saints, paints at full length the people of Moses' time, but unhappily gives only a bust of their contemporaries.
[Illustration: FIFTEENTH CENTURY FRENCH TAPESTRY
Flemish Tapestry, second half of Fifteenth Century. Boston Museum of Fine Arts]
Hangings portraying secular subjects were less often woven than those of religion and morals, but also the former have less lustily outlived the centuries, owing to the habit of tearing them from the suspending hooks and packing them about from château to château, to soften surroundings for the wandering visitor. Thus it comes that we have little tapestried record of a time when knights and ladies and ill-assorted attributes walked hand in hand, a time of chivalry and cruelty, of roses and war, of sumptuousness and crudity, of privation and indulgence, of simplicity and deceit.
If prowling among old books has tempted the hand to take from the shelves one of those quaint luxuries known as a "Book of Hours," there before the eye lies the spirit of that age in decoration and design. There, too, lies much of the old spirit of morality--that, whether genuine or affected, was bound to be expressed. Morality had a vogue in those days, was a _sine qua non_ of fashion. That famous amateur Jean, duc de Berry, uncle of Charles VI of France, had such a book, "Les Très Riches Heures"; one was possessed by that gifted Milanese lady whom Ludovico Sforza put out of the line of Lombardy's throne. The wonderful Gothic ingenuousness lies in their careful paintings, the ingenuousness where virtue is expressed by beauty, and vice by ugliness, and where, with delightful seriousness, standing figures overtop the houses they occupy--the same people, the same battlements, we have seen on the early tapestries. Weavers must surely have consulted the lovely books of Gothic miniature, so like is the spirit of the designs to that in the Gothic fabrics.