Happy accident find: this was also returned for my ‘Actaeon’ search.
I will always be in awe of tapestries like this. For one, the amount of detail. I highly recommend you check out this beauty’s listing on the Met website (link below, as always); they have a viewer where you can zoom in and just be in awe of the d e t a i l s. The shading, the rich colors, the way every single freakin’ leaf has definition; and it’s. All. Woven. Someone was changing thread colors with nearly every stitch!
For seconds, the border. They didn’t *have* to make it as elaborate as they did, but they did. It doesn’t repeat. There’s a monkey. There’s a scarlet macaw. There are birds that are but one shade off from the surrounding border and you would miss if you weren’t looking closely. Amazing.
For lasts, the size. Almost eleven feet high. Fifteen feet long. This thing’s a behemoth. And even though it was made by a French factory, in the late 17th-early 18th centuries there was no way they were using machinery to do the job.
So, yeah: awe.
TLDR: this thing rocks.
Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins. (Designed before 1680, woven late 17th-early 18th century). Diana and Actaeon, from a set of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Retrieved from: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/204484
