Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Altersbedingt leicht vergilbt, sonst guter Zustand / Slightly yellowed due to age, otherwise in good condition. - Preface The convenient term "medieval" applies only in a limited way to tapestries that have survived from the years before 1525. Except for a handful of pieces dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, all so-called medieval tapestries represent the art as it was practiced in Europe in the late Middle Ages, from about 1350 to 1525. It is as difficult to single out the moment when "medieval" becomes "Renaissance" in this art as it is in the other arts. It has been said that the new tapestry style superseded the old in the southern Netherlands about 1520, when the Brussels entrepreneur Pieter van Aelst produced the Acts of the Apostles tapestries after Italian Renaissance cartoons by Raphael. However, Netherlandish tapestries that were woven in the two preceding decades already show some of the form and much of the ornament characteristic of Italian Renaissance art. The same pieces also show a painterly but entirely Netherlandish tapestry style that had developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Neither the Acts of the Apostles cartoons nor any other single set of exotic tapestry designs could divert so strong a native current. When a fully pictorial high Renaissance Netherlandish tapestry style did assert itself about 1530m tapestries woven after designs by Bernaert van Orley or his shop, like the Hunts of Maximilian, it slid smoothly into place: certainly novel and Italianate, it was no more nor less than another development in an indigenous tapestry style that had been evolving for at least two centuries. ISBN 9780870996443