Border with Strozzi emblems

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This splendidly woven fabric would have been appropriate for decorating a room beneath a cornice or as a bed valance. Although this particular textile may have been woven as late as the seventeenth century, its design surely goes back to the fifteenth and incorporates Filippo Strozzi's favorite motifs of a falcon on a branch and three half-moons with flames. Sprays of roses are tied together with banderoles bearing the motto "I wait and so does virtue" —fitting for Filippo Strozzi, who patiently worked to restore the prestige of his family in Florence following their political exile.

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