Bernard Van Orley - Tapestries

Tapestries

Tapestries were held in much higher esteem than paintings, and were more expensive. At this period, they were often woven with gold and silver thread. They had additional value as decoration and insulation for the large, bare and cold walls of palaces and church choirs.

Barend van Orley had already started designing tapestries in his youth, but after 1530 he seemed to have stopped painting altogether, applying himself solely to cartoons for tapestries and designs for stained-glass windows.

One of the first tapestry cartoons ascribed to him were the four cartoons for the "Legend of Our-Lady-on-the-Zavel (Legend of Notre-Dame on the Sablon)" (1516–1518), commissioned by Frans van Taxis. One of them represents the patron and two emperors : Maximilian I and his father Frederick III. This is an allusion to the postal contract obtained by Frans von Taxis, giving him a monopoly for the postal system between Brussels and the rest of the empire. The style of these tapestries were still traditional with an overcrowded composition set in a two-dimensional plane.

From the 1520s on, under the influence of the Raphael tapestries woven at Brussels for Pope Leo X, his tapestries began more to resemble woven paintings, more in line with the aesthetics of the Renaissance, as can be seen in his two Passion series (one set in the Royal Palace of Madrid, the other set dispersed over several museums) and the Lamentation (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These tapestries, some woven by Pieter de Pannemaeker, show clearly the influence of the tapestry cartoons of Raphael and the work of Dürer in the rendering of the figure types. Since Dürer had been a guest in the house of van Orley at the time the contracts for these tapestries were signed, it cannot be excluded that the two artists have discussed the design. First the first time in Passion tapestries, the figures receive a dramatic weight through their large size and through their position in the foreground