I've done my best documenting this, but it's a different thing holding it in your hands and see up close--and feel viscerally--the amount of skill and labor that went into making it hundreds of years ago. (The back gives some sense of that labor.) It is a fragment of a tapestry, which itself came out of a historic textile collection held by a textile mill. (I purchased it from a favorite dealer in Vermont who often acquires interesting things deaccessioned by museums and interesting private collections.) There is a piece of tape on the back side at one corner that describes it as gothic, and then the word mille--which in the process of writing this I've just figured out gets us to mille fleur, meaning a composition with many different small flowers and plants. And I've just found another example very very very close to it out there (Here is a link to that one) identifying it as mid 16th century Belgian, of Brussels or Tornai; looking at other Beligan examples from the same period, I am quite confident of the attribution. Just a fragment here, but of a good scale, and nice to have something 500 years old or so sitting or hanging around! Especially a textile, I'd say, with all that presence of hand-work embedded in it. Pretty special.
47" x 21". One rough short edge as evident but nothing is loose or unraveling and it is not at all fragile. In very good very antique condition, incredibly constructed, tight and sound.
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