Cloth of Silver, Cut Voided Velvet

Cloth of Silver, Cut Voided Velvet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Velvets like this were used for clothing, religious vestments, and altar dressings, as well as for wall coverings and cloths of honor. The thick, light-reflecting, tactile pile, which differentiates velvet from other silks, was achieved during the weaving process by using rods or wires to loop up warp threads rather than pull them tight and flat. This sumptuous example, which incorporates glittering strips of silver lamella running from selvedge to selvedge, is of a type popularly described as “cloth of silver” from the sixteenth century onward. This cloth of silver was displayed in European Textiles and Costume Figures, on view at the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (visible at far right in the photograph of 1938), and at Walton High School (visible at center right in the photograph of February 9, 1939). [Elizabeth Cleland, 2020]

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cloth of Silver, Cut Voided VelvetCloth of Silver, Cut Voided VelvetCloth of Silver, Cut Voided VelvetCloth of Silver, Cut Voided VelvetCloth of Silver, Cut Voided Velvet

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.