Come and See the Hanging!: The tapestries at the Met are a once-in-a- lifetime event

National Review, June 3, 2002 by Roger Kimball

Now for the good news. The most extravagantly praised exhibition in New York this season is not the pathological product of some "transgressive" freak but a stunning collection of Renaissance tapestries assembled from some two dozen collections in Europe and America. Is this a trend? At least since Andy Warhol observed that "art is what you can get away with," the tony precincts of the New York art world seem to have been devoted to obliterating the line between garbage and art. How extraordinary, then, that at the very moment the Whitney Museum of American Art is parading the usual trash in its infamous Biennial Exhibition, and the Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the malevolent absurdities of Gerhard Richter, a deeply traditional exhibition a few blocks uptown should garner the lion's share of the praise.

It is too soon to say whether the grateful attention lavished on the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition -- Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, through June 19 -- signals any sort of sea change. But there can be no doubt that it is a welcome event. The exhibition is, quite simply, the most stunning exhibition in New York -- so stunning that you should be prepared to see it more than once. Many of these tapestries are huge -- they cover an entire wall -- and so crowded with narrative detail that they are likely to overwhelm viewers when first seen. You leave the galleries impressed but dazzled.

I have to admit that I was skeptical about this exhibition when I first heard about it. I mean, tapestries are perfectly okay, but . . . Sure, I like the famous Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters as well as the next person. (One of the Unicorn Tapestries -- "The Unicorn Defends Itself" -- is included in this show.) But an entire exhibition devoted to tapestries? A bit drab, surely. I read about the exhibition in advance: Ho-hum. Forty-one Renaissance tapestries from France, Italy, and the Netherlands, along with various preparatory cartoons and set- pieces about the techniques of weaving. A bit artsy-craftsy for my taste, I thought; so I was late seeing the exhibition. It was only when an artist friend rang up to extol it that I decided I must take a look. He is not a person who dispenses praise promiscuously and I cannot remember him ever being more enthusiastic about a show. Then another artist buttonholed me at a party and gave the exhibition an even hotter endorsement. Indeed, everyone I knew who saw the exhibition simply raved.

They were right to. Step into the first gallery and you are confronted by "The Death of Troilus, Achilles, and Paris," a gigantic battlefield of color, movement, and visual intensity. The eighth tapestry from an eleven-piece set, this 31-foot behemoth was woven in the Netherlands in the late 15th century. It is a swirling vortex of color and narrative, drawing the eye in and across a field of sword- and pike-bearing warriors and prancing horses. It is a scene of stylized mayhem, with punctured and decapitated heroes piled one on top of another. Patches of calligraphy serve not only to explain the action but also to embroider it, counterpointing the bloody reds and glittering blues of the figures with filigrees of ivory. Looking at this roiling explosion of form and color you think of what Jackson Pollock might have accomplished had he been able to draw.

These sumptuous wall-hangings are, in the words of the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, movable "woven frescos." They were designed to be extravagant gestures, monuments to magnificence, offerings to the god of opulence. They were not so much decorations or furnishings as declarations of potency, affirmations of affluence. Woven from the finest wools and silks and gold- and silver- wrapped thread, infused with the most brilliant dyes, these tapestries were prodigiously labor-intensive. A skilled weaver might complete a square meter of coarse tapestry in a month. Items more finely woven would be completed at the rate of 50-70 centimeters per month. A large, high-quality tapestry might take five skilled weavers from 8 to 16 months to complete. This genre proclaimed the wealth and importance of its patrons and was, as curator Thomas P. Campbell notes in his fine introduction to the catalogue, among the "most widely commissioned figurative art forms in the courts and chapels of the period." It was also one of the most expensive. The set of ten tapestries depicting scenes from the Acts of the Apostles that Pope Leo X commissioned from Raphael (who did the cartoons) for the Sistine Chapel cost five times more than the frescos Michelangelo had painted a few years earlier. Henry VIII, whose expansive collection of tapestries would have spanned five kilometers if placed end-to-end, spent lavishly on the artworks: The set of "The Story of David" that he bought in 1528 cost [pound]1,500 -- the price of a battleship, more than the annual income of all but the richest dukes.

Tapestry in the Renaissance is organized chronologically, taking us from about 1420 to 1560, the apex of the art form. Many of the works on view depict religious scenes: the Annunciation, events from the life of Christ or the Apostles, the Crucifixion, the Assumption of the Virgin, and so on. Some commemorate famous battles or portray mythological scenes. Almost all of them tell a story or recall a moral. In many cases, the once-scintillating colors have faded. But even in their somewhat diminished state these works make a powerful impression. The effect is dependent partly on the skill of the weavers -- the detail the best were able to achieve is astonishing -- partly on the quality of the design. In the hands of a Raphael, Giulio Romano, or Bronzino, the result is an amazing vibrancy. Consider "The Conversion of Saul," one of the tapestries commissioned by Leo X to decorate the Sistine Chapel. The high drama of that signal moment in the history of Christianity -- the moment when Saul, fallen from his horse and temporarily struck blind by God, awakens to his vocation as St. Paul -- is captured in a gorgeous symphony of movement abruptly translated into space. Like several other tapestries, "The Conversion of Saul" boasts a faux bas-relief band underneath the main picture; the way the woven threads replicate the effect of glinting bronze is extraordinary.