If willing ofc- Tell Me About the Significance of Tapestries and Soft Architecture in Medieval Contexts
Oh boy am I willing!
Rosie- I hope you dont mind me calling you that- you have just become my new best friend!
Ok so I have NO clue how familiar you are with textiles and their history so we're gonna start with a little infodump history lesson.
Back before industrialization fabric, and clothing, was THE Most Expensive Thing most people would ever own. This is because textiles require HUGE amounts of labor and material to produce. So to start you are either growing plants or raising animals like sheep or alpacas or silkworms to even GET the raw fiber. Then you have to clean it, process it, and get it ready to spin. Now before the spinning jenny was invented in 1764, for THE WHOLE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE we could spin ONE thread at a time AND it had to be done BY HAND. And the skill of the spinster and the material quality used would determine how expensive the base thread would be- please note we are not even to the fabric part of clothes yet. So you take that thread and then you have to put those threads on a loom (this is your warp, more on that later), which up until the 1800s had to happen BY HAND again, and then you have to weave another thread through the warps (this is your weft) to actually make a fabric instead of a bunch of parallel threads. And the complexity of the design and weave structure (cause there is more than 1! Like so SO many more) determines the cost of the fabric. Fabrics that use more material and have a more complicated pattern will of course cost more. (This is not even getting into embellishments like embroidery or lace.) And thats before you have to sew a garment by hand. So textiles are EXTREMELY VALUABLE. they would not be wasted, there were whole systems designed to minimize textile waste, some textiles were literally used as forms of currency and were more valuable than gold or gems.
Now to define some terms.
Soft architecture is a term textile historians use to refer to all the things that define a space that are not actual architecture. So for example the "hard" architecture is the walls and the doors and the windows of a building. Soft architecture is everything that goes inside the walls- the furniture but most important to this lecture the textiles! Its things like curtains and carpets and wall hangings that help define the space beyond the (usually) 4 walls! For example say you have a big open main room in your house- you put down a large carpet too and set up a little TV area but then in the other corner of the room you have an office with a desk. Or maybe you have an open doorway and hung up a beaded curtain. You have divided the space with the rug and furniture or the curtain but you haven't changed the actual structure of the room you haven't added a wall but the space has still been divided into living room and office.
Next up is tapestry. So tapestry is a very specific weaving technique (and im gonna throw some more technical terms at you but I prommy its not as scary as it sounds) defined as a plain weave with a discontinuous weft.
So every woven fabric has a warp- in the case of tapestries this is the line of threads that go up and down perpendicular to the floor when a tapestry is hung on the wall. The warp is the back bone of the fabric its what gives fabric structure and its what's strung on a loom. The weft is the threads that go back and forth through the warp and in the case of tapestries they are the threads that run parallel to the floor. The weft is what makes up the picture in a tapestry and is usually made of one very long thread that goes all the way across the fabric and then back. A plain weave is the most basic of all weave structures its just the traditional over under over under pattern. A discontinuous weft just means that instead of the weft being one long thread from one edge of the fabric to the other, a single row is broken up into a bunch of wefts in different colors. This is how we get the cool patterns without a ton of thread waste!
Now tapestries are usually made out of wool but can also incorporate metallic and silk thread with the wool. These will cost extra. And metallic threads were literal retention of value because they were literally threads wrapped in precious metal- cloth of gold didnt just look gold it was woven from gold, and so they could be burned to recover the metal. This is one of the reasons so few tapestries have survived to the modern day - they were burned to recover the gold and silver used in them.
So back to the wool of it all- you see tapestry traditions pop up in places like the Low countries, France and England because they have a really big wool industry but not a lot of silk production.
Tapestries can be insanely intricate and the big ones take teams of skilled artisans literally YEARS to weave. Little ones, and by little I mean like the size of a fucking shower curtain, still take a long time but they are often used for decorating furniture and private chapels and private areas.
I cannot stress enough how big a flex owning even a small tapestry was. These were only available to Royalty and the obscenely wealthy. The materials, the labor, the craftsmanship, the whole PROCESS of making tapestries made them worth more than gold.
So how do you make a tapestry? First off you have a designer come up with this thing called the petite patron: this is your starting sketch, your proof of concept, a painting around the size of a typical painting that you show to the commissioner and they go yay or nay. Then you have the grand patron also known as the cartoon. Cartoons are true to size paintings used to map out a tapestry. Tapestry is basically just recreating these cartoons- which are works of art in their own right! And these are huge. I cannot stress how fucking BIG tapestries can get. Like the human figures are larger than life-sized big, especially because theyre designed to basically be portable wallpaper or frescoes.
Now why would you have a tapestry? Well the benefits of tapestry is that not only are they a huge flex of precious resources, insane craftsmanship, and literally years of investment but they are also practical. The benefits of a tapestry over a fresco or mosaic is that tapestry is portable and also good climate control in places where youll note- tends to get a little drafty. And at this time the courts of western Europe are also moving around a LOT to differnt castles so they take their tapestries with them to decorate the different locations but also to keep their tents warm when they are literally on the road.
In the 1360's we see a HUGE upswing in tapestry patronage. Like the royal family of France goes from having like 5 in their collection to having several HUNDRED each. The Valois princes, sons of John the Good of France, are mainly to blame for the upswing in popularity but the Tudors are not exempt!
Tapestries helped create the feeling of a room. The finest work along with narrative and propaganda patterns were reserved for like the throne rooms or great halls- places where EVERYONE could see the flex. Tapestries for private areas were generally genre scenes or plant patterned and "of a coarser make" (still took YEARS to weave btw) but just having a "coarse" tapestry was more than pretty much anyone would ever get.
To get an idea Raphael (yes THAT Raphael- the one the ninja turtle is named after) was commissioned by the Pope to design a series of tapestries (and thats another thing tapestries were often parts of whole series designed to be displayed on all the walls of a room) for the Sistine chapel in Rome (yes THAT Sistine chapel). Raphael was paid 1,000 golden ducats (which is roughly over 100,000 USD today according to a quick google search) for each design (I think there was 9 total?) and his designs cost OVER 2,000 ducats EACH to actually weave.
I got to see some of Raphael's cartoons and matching tapestries when I went to london this summer and I swear you go in like "yeah I know they're big" and then you are looking at them in person in a room with like 20ft+ ceilings like "I have severely underestimated their size".
Anyway to bring it back to our fanfiction start in any historical au set in Europe period between 1350 and the 1700s "Mr. Landlord, Mr. Real Estate" Shane Hollander absolutely owns at least 1 tapestry if hes a prince make it atleast 20 personally and the walls of any castles should be covered in them thank you for coming to my Ted Talk :)
