The art of embroider

The embroidery is one of the most ancient handicraft activities, despite its products has not reached our times. Fragments of going up again embroideries to ancient Egypt exist, but it is probable that this art has had origin in China, from where it was propagated in the rest of the world. In Europe the first testimonies go up again only in the first Middle Ages.

In the art to populate the techniques of embroidery you/they were handed down in the time with gradual loss of originality and with the acquisition of local characteristics but the manufactured articles, created for objects of daily use, they succumbed to the strain of the time, for which today trace of their existence doesn't remain. We cannot exactly establish then if the embroidery is a going up again popular tradition to remote times, or if is initially developed instead with the extension of a fashion reserved to the most well-to-do class that could afford is the expense for the materials is the necessary time for the execution. They are saved in fact only some elegant Byzantine embroideries that certain you/they cannot be defined of popular art, both for the preciousness of the materials employees, both for the use that did, primarily ceremonial. We can hypothesize however that, as the painting, also the embroidery to hand has a base very ancient popular historian.

In Italy, the embroidery is born as one of the expressions of the Saracen culture. Not by chance the first school of embroidery has center to Palermo and goes up again a first years of the second millennium. And' only in the twelfth century however that the embroidery spreads in Europe. They go up again to the centuries 13° and 14° the most monumental jobs of embroidery known, that is the French arazzeria, English, German and, in smaller measure, Italian - not to confuse with the real tapestry that is an artistic technique of weaving. Meanwhile the Italian school, detached him by the taste initial orientaleggiante, it sets the center of the activity to Florence and it creates some true masterpieces in different techniques from the tapestry.

To Florence it was active Raffaellino of the Politeness, while the shop of the embroidery with more orders it was that of the Walled ones in the street Ghibellina, that furnished the ecclesiastical hangings for the greatest solemn occasions. The greatest fifteenth-century order was that for the Baptistery, between 1466 and 1480. Vennerono embroidered pluvials, dalmatiche and planets on which you/he/she was brought in 26 scenes the life of san Giovanni Battista, realized by Paul by Verona, Coppino of Giovanni from Malines, Peter from Venice and others on sketches of Anthony Pollaiuolo. In 1477 around you/he/she was realized by Francis Malocchi the embroidery paliotto offered to Assisi by Sisto IV with figures of Anthony Pollaiuolo. To halves the century, Phillip Maria Viscounts he/she called to his/her court a Florentine artist to direct the laboratories and many Venetians to work near of him, for which the Florentine style and that Venetian were met in decorations arabescate of taste orientaleggiante. They are examples of it the 1491 Varese paliotto and that of Saint Maria of the Graces.
You also developed the embroidery in white and the embroidery to threads counted that it will give then origin to the lace.

Today, the art of the embroidery is practically disappeared, leaving the interest to level of hobby.