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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until May 13, 2025

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Metatextiles and the Triumph of Tapestry

Adams, Kristen Irvine
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587680861250671

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History of Art.
Tapestry triumphed as the most prized and celebrated artistic medium in Europe during the Early Modern era (1400-1750) – an age we normally associate with great sculptures and paintings. This is evidenced by tapestry collections included in inventories that outnumber other media by a significant margin. Despite tapestry’s prestige in this period, the innovative character and historical importance of this medium has gone largely unrecognized by modern scholars compared to other art forms, especially painting. My dissertation aims to redress this failure by analyzing shifts in tapestry design, initiated by Raphael’s tapestry designs made for the Sistine Chapel in the sixteenth century, which ultimately transformed the way in which tapestry was designed and experienced in subsequent centuries. The woven medium’s elevated status stems, in part, from the expense and material splendor of wool, silk, and gilt-metal threads, but I argue that it is also because tapestry was conceptualized as a metatextile, or a self-aware medium during this period. This means that tapestry manipulated innovations and characteristics from other media to better showcase the full range of its own artistic capacities. In other words, woven ensembles imitated other media like fresco and easel painting, sculpture, and architecture to great visual effect, but did so according to and by means of tapestry’s distinctive materiality, or its characteristics of thread, scale, and mobility. I consider the unexamined role that borders, a distinctive framing feature of tapestry design, played in tapestry’s articulation of other artistic media’s illusionistic forms. I argue that these framing devices, combined with the medium’s immense size, mobility, and material richness, are key to tapestry’s self-awareness in relation to other art forms in the period. By tracing this metatextile trajectory, my dissertation brings to life for contemporary viewers (who encounter only a fraction of tapestry’s original splendor when viewing these objects in the controlled environments of a museum) the manner in which Early Modern textile spaces were commissioned, designed, and experienced. In doing so, my dissertation reasserts tapestry’s novelty and prominence among the visual arts, and explains the attraction and challenge that this particular medium presented for the period’s leading designers.
Barbara Haeger (Advisor)
Christian Kleinbub (Committee Member)
Karl Whittington (Committee Member)
330 p.
Art Criticism; Art History
art history; tapestry; textiles; materiality; material studies; metatextiles; illusionism; frames; framing devices

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Adams, K. I. (2020). Metatextiles and the Triumph of Tapestry [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587680861250671

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Adams, Kristen. Metatextiles and the Triumph of Tapestry. 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587680861250671.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Adams, Kristen. "Metatextiles and the Triumph of Tapestry." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587680861250671

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1587680861250671
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.