Preface

Summary

As a tapestry conservator, living in New York, I have had the privilege of working on some of the masterpieces of medieval tapestry. During my years of professional practice, I have developed a great respect for the extraordinary skills of the anonymous artisans who created these tapestries, and have often wondered about their lives and how they all managed to work together to create these works of art. I also became curious about how the tapestries themselves were designed. Sometimes the iconographic programs in medieval tapestries are highly complex, and, in studying the pictorial content of them, I became interested in who was responsible for organizing this material and how they went about it. Often these tapestries depict narrative cycles derived from medieval literature. Did the artists themselves compile these visual narratives? Or was there another step in the design process before the artists began their preliminary drawings? If that was the case, how was this information communicated to the artists and cartoon painters who prepared the designs for the weavers?

Early tapestry histories did not generally dwell on design and production, or, for that matter, on details about weavers and other artisans. However, these matters were not entirely overlooked. In my reading I noticed that there were two fifteenth-century manuscripts from Troyes, France, mentioned frequently by tapestry historians. One was an account book from a church in Troyes listing payments to a group of artisans working together to produce a tapestry for the church. The other, from later in the century, was a set of instructions for the iconographic content to be portrayed in a choir tapestry for another church in Troyes. Although nearly all tapestry historians, as well as some art historians and social historians, mentioned this primary material, only brief excerpts of the manuscripts were quoted. I became interested in this material and located a copy of a nineteenth-century transcription by Philippe Guignard, archivist of the Département de l’Aube in Troyes. Both manuscripts contained precisely the sort of information on the working practices of medieval artists and craftsman that I had not been able to find elsewhere. Since both documents contained important source material known to only a handful of specialists in medieval art and history, I concluded that it would be worthwhile to make this material more widely available in an English translation.