Imagine you’re walking through a gallery, lit with a magical aura that could only come from the softest candlelight or the most thoughtful natural lighting filtering through the air. The white oak floor emanates a welcome warmth. The room is quiet. A different sort of ambiance than the gentle cacophony of the typical art museum. No, a velvet hush falls over the space, blanketing the environment in cozy stillness. Where the concrete walls once stood, you can see only fabric. Floor to ceiling, intricately designed, infinitely stitched. Tapestries filled with life and death, screaming a simultaneous story of victory and defeat, past and present.
Carefully placed casework filled with armor and weapons punctuate an otherwise completely open room at the Kimbell Art Museum. I can creep along the margins of Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries,” focusing on individual narrative and minute detail. I can gaze left to right, allowing my eyes to follow the through lines of the narrative like a film strip. Or, I can stand in the center of the room and spin, slowly opening the periphery of my eyes to take in the breadth of the story as it happens, frozen in stitches but vibrant and alive. I can be Neo, frozen in the Matrix, with bullets whizzing past as the camera rotates at impossible angles. In reality, I am merely a woman of the 21st Century, standing amid gargantuan tapestries telling a story 500 years old.
Installation view, “Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries” at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
When it is time for us to commemorate the greatest victories and defeats of our time, how will we do it? Will we write great works of literature, or publish detailed photo essay compendiums, or create websites or films or great plays to perform? 500 years ago, half a world away, a fleet of artisans bent their backs over warp and weft, weaving brilliant silk, wool, gold, and silver in impeccable detail, their needles building an epic saga of hope, fear, triumph, and anguish in a monument to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s victory over King Frances I. I imagine them squinting in the candle light, gazing at the threads as they wove they built their tale by hand.
Rare in their size and scope, and especially rare in their excellent condition, the tapestries envelop me with their dazzling detail. Though I am immersed in the story, I cannot help but to wonder at the labor that poured into creating the seven tapestries that fill the gallery. These tapestries are not the master work of a single brilliant painter or sculptor. Designed by court artist Bernaert van Orley, they are the culmination of thousands of hours of labor by artisan weavers in the Willem and Jan Dermoyen workshop in Brussels and took six years to complete. At the time they were made, tapestries were much more expensive to produce than paintings, and so the States General of the Brussels royal palace was indeed making a statement about power in their commission, and again in their display.
As a fiber artist myself, I consider the process these artisans underwent to produce the tapestries, which are so large the Kimbell had to construct larger walls in order to display them. Construction likely started with the creation of a large cartoon painting on paper or cloth, the same scale as the finished works. With the cartoon affixed to the underside of a massive loom, weavers likely sat side by side, working colorful weft strands into the warp and knotting them off in accordance with their template, painting the image in thread. Stitch by infinitesimal stitch. Foot by painstaking foot. My back hurts just thinking about it.
The layout of the exhibition is key to the reading of the tapestries and the weaponry on display. Standing at the center of the room, you can spin in a slow circle and trace elements of the landscape and story as they bleed into one another, continuing a panoramic view of this short and bloody battle. Evident throughout is the conflict between past and present, as knights and mercenaries wielding swords and lances under thick plate armor fall to lushly dressed nobles and soldiers wielding firearms. From your perch in the center of the gallery, you might also play a matching game with the weaponry, tracing pikes and suits of armor and firearms to their corresponding images in the tapestries. Throughout the exhibition, I had the distinct feeling I was participating in a very old, very detailed, very bloody game of I Spy.
Detail, Brandistock, from “Art and War in the Renaissance” at the Kimbell Art Museum
Don’t let the brilliant palette, frilly attire, and picturesque landscapes fool you: the overall content of this exhibition is not for the faint of heart. Horses falling dead under screaming knights. Soldiers fleeing into the river to drown. Puddles of blood. Terror. Defeat. The chaos of war is masterfully stitched in vibrant, painterly thread. As I look, I grow solemn at the thought of the weavers spending hours toiling with their crimson threads, spilling blood into the brilliant blue water, creating masterful translucency, and bending space and time to their will. As their threads weave into the fabric of the story, they participate in the drowning of the soldiers and the felling of the horses over and over.
Detail, “The Flight of the French Rear Guard under the Duke of Alençon,” tapestry designed by Bernard van Orley, woven in the workshop of Willem and Jan Dermoyen, Brussels
Just as I think I can truly, positively, bear no further witness to the violence, I smile incredulously at the sight of an unarmed man carrying a chicken on a pike, making mischievous eye contact with me. While I’m sure the pillaged chicken is intended for some soldier’s supper, I prefer to imagine the feathered friend leading the vanguard in a frenzied attack of beak and claws. The illustrated presence of the Imperial Baggage Train among the chaotic battle scenes emphasizes a recurring theme throughout the exhibition: it’s about the people. The people who fought, the people who fed, the people who died, the people who paid, the people who wove. The sheer enormity of the tapestries, coupled with the remarkable, often whimsically elegant, examples of period armor and weaponry, emphasizes the collaborative nature of history. I am reminded of the complicity the artists and artisans have in the telling of this story, and the role these items served, 500 years ago and today, as tools of power and propaganda. In the case of the Battle of Pavia tapestries, history is woven by the victors, and there are a lot of authors.
Detail, “The Incursion of the Imperial Baggage Train into the Battlefield, and the Surrender of the Swiss Pikemen of the French Army,” tapestry designed by Bernard van Orley, woven in the workshop of Willem and Jan Dermoyen, Brussels
Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth until September 15, 2024.
