Chasuble

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This garment is almost certainly a dealer's composite object, assembled at the end of the nineteenth century: though resembling a priest's chasuble, it is unconventionally large, and combines patched and repaired very low quality, thin, soft and relatively modern velvet with a much older set of very fine embroideries. This beautiful green and gold embroidered orphrey was created using the difficult, expensive and time consuming or nué technique, in which delicate gilded silver metal threads were laid parallel, horizontally across the ground fabric, with fine colored silks stitched over and around this support; the flesh areas of the figures are rendered only in colored silk threads. The four roundels represent Saints Sebastian and Catherine of Alexandria (on the front) and Saints Augustine and Michael (on the reverse).

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art