Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 6
Lesson 8: Antwerp, Bruges and Brussels- David, the Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor
- Gossaert, Saint Luke Painting the Madonna
- Van Orley and de Pannemaker, The Last Supper
- Pieter Aertsen, Meat Stall
- Bruegel, the Dutch Proverbs
- Bruegel, Tower of Babel
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
- Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
- Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding
- Reliquary bust of a companion of Saint Ursula
Van Orley and de Pannemaker, The Last Supper
This splendid Last Supper is part of a series of four tapestries illustrating the Passion of Christ. They were designed by Bernard van Orley, a leading artist in sixteenth-century Brussels, the preeminent center for tapestry manufacture in this period. The work exemplifies van Orley’s integration of Northern traditions and Italian models to develop a new tapestry style. He combined the expressive emotion and penchant for detail found in Albrecht Dürer’s Last Supper woodcut, which inspired the tapestry’s compositional arrangement, with Raphael’s monumental figures and spatial construction. Raphael’s cartoons for the tapestry series Acts of the Apostles, commissioned for the Sistine Chapel and sent to Brussels to be woven, were significant models for van Orley and other Flemish artists, providing a paradigm of the grand, heroic narrative style of contemporary Roman art. In the Last Supper, populated by muscular, rhetorically gesturing figures engaged in a moment of high drama, van Orley fully realized tapestry's potential for emulating monumental painting.
View this work on metmuseum.org.
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- The speaker states that tapestries don't seem to garner the same kind of attention that paintings do. I can't fathom why something with this astounding level of craftsmanship and talent wouldn't be showcased. Why do you suppose that is? Are people just naturally drawn to one medium? This piece is magnificent. It deserves just as much attention as any of the renaissance paintings.(8 votes)
- I think it is because tapestries were a middle ages medium and as such were ignored as many of the good things in the middle ages were or perhaps when we think of art we think of oil and canvas not tapestries as a whole however woven art is largely ignored in the modern world so that could be it as well.(4 votes)
- Did he ever say how long a piece like that would have taken to make?(4 votes)
- Here's a quote from Mr. Campbell about how long tapestries took to make -- the example he cites below is larger than the tapestry in the video (which is approx. 11 x 11.5 feet):
“A large tapestry, five yards high by eight yards wide, woven in wool alone, with a warp count of approximately fifteen per inch, would have taken five weavers some eight months or so to weave...excluding the cost and time involved in the design and preparation of the cartoons and setting up the loom.”(3 votes)
- I'm curious as to how he's done it. It'd be great to get an article that expanded on some of the actual techniques used by artists like this, particularly the accomplishment of such smooth chiaroscuro in this woven medium.(2 votes)
- What does the arabic looking script say at1:54?(1 vote)