17th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1998 by Margaret Renner Lidz

Folded carefully inside a storage box at the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, lies one of the world's few surviving seventeenth-century bed quilts [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES IA-D, III OMITTED]. The reversible pictorial quilt is a display of baroque splendor. In the center is a large ship framed by a ring of dogs, portrait medallions, hunting scenes, double-headed eagles, and exotic flowers in a multiple border format. Yellow silk on one side and p ink on the other, the intricate design was created by layering soft cotton twists between silk sheets and then securing the whole with yellow silk thread in a double running stitch. The raised design winds across the silk, the many tiny stitches having preserved the frail fabric for nearly three centuries.

When it was purchased in 1954 the quilt was catalogued as Portuguese, but recent research into the history of Portuguese, but recent research into the history of Portuguese quilting has yielded little that seems to relate to it.(1) A search for comparable, contemporary quilts unearthed a dozen scattered pieces, with purported pedigrees ranging from Indian to Italian [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES IV, V, VIII, XII OMITTED].(2) The individual histories of all these quilts have been lost, the seventeenth-century date being based on the

condition of the silk, the use of late Renaissance decorative motifs, and stylistic comparisons between the quilts and documented seventeenth-century textiles. The intent of this article is to review the various avenues that have been explored in the still inconclusive search for the origin of these mysterious quilts.

While Winterthur's quilt was catalogued as Portuguese, the quilts in Plates IV, V, and VIII have traditionally been ascribed to India, based on their similarity to a group of embroidered quilts made in Bengal.(3) The embroidered Bengali quilts, which are "basically monochromatic...with a strong narrative content," were part of the flood of Indo-Portuguese goods imported into Europe by Portuguese merchants beginning in the first half of the sixteenth century.(4) Quilted silk and cotton bedcovers, together with cushions and carpets, were among the Eastern articles used to give a new soft effect to the European interior in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In striking contrast to the homely values bestowed on bed quilts today, people of the seventeenth century viewed quilted bedcovers as exotic, almost sinful, luxuries. The coveted coverlets became such a profitable part of the Portuguese trade that by 1620, the Portuguese author Nicolau de Oliveira (1566-1634) observed: "There is no ship from India that does not bring at least four hundred."(5)

The resemblance between the Bengali embroidered quilts and the reversible quilts is certainly striking. At least two of the Bengali coverlets have the same Persian-carpet-like scheme as the reversible silk quilts: a geometric center and an outer field framed by multiple borders. Ships, Hapsburg double-headed eagles, hunting dogs, and figures organized in narrative scenes are represented on both types of bedcovers. The sophisticated design and spectrum of European symbols on both groups indicate that they were professionally made for the Western market.

Nonetheless, there are also some significant differences between the Bengali quilts and the reversible silk quilts. The most immediate contrast is in the basic materials. The reversible quilts are made with domestic silk fabric and thread. Cotton was used only for the stuffing. The Bengali quilts are almost all plain-woven cotton embroidered with tussah, or wild silk thread.(6) Chain-stitch embroidery, not raised quilting, created the patterns on the Bengali bedcovers. Although the latter are often referred to as quilts, many consist of unpadded embroidered work. When quilted, the Bengali bedcovers were layered with cotton and then backstitched instead of quilted with running stitches, in simple, repetitive patterns. Additionally, the motifs are not interchangeable. The stylized flora and fauna of the Bengali quilts - tulips, carnations, and palm trees, elephants, leopards, and creatures from Indian folklore, such as Hindu sea monsters-are not seen on the silk quilts. On the other hand, the silk quilts feature motifs not found on the Bengali textiles, such as exotic men in Turkish dress, flags with single crescent moons, unicorns, and griffins. On the Bengali textiles, human faces are depicted almost exclusively in three-quarter position, appearing to have been copied from Western engravings.(7) The faces on the silk quilts are mainly in one-eyed profile, apparently copied from German and Italian lace pattern books,(8) These books, used by a wide range of artisans besides lacemakers, circulated throughout Europe [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].

Rosemary Crill, the deputy curator of Indian and Southeast Asian textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Indian decorative arts in the Western hemisphere, has serious doubts about the Indian attribution of the silk quilts.(9) She has pointed out that the interpretation and combinations of motifs do not appear to be Indian in their final form. Nor does it seem likely that the quilts were made in Portugal, for while the Portuguese began to imitate the embroidered Bengali bedcovers at horne in the seventeenth century, and dozens of these early embroidered Portuguese bed quilts (colchas) survive, scattered in public and private Portuguese collections, no parallel tradition or collections exist for silk quilts,(10) Teresa Pacheco Pereire, the textile curator at the Museu National de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, has never seen any reversible silk quilts in her country. Where, then, did these quilts originate?