Embroider: the history of the embroidery

The origins of this Art that we call Embroidery him pardon in the antiquity, but it is known that you/he/she has existed before the painting. It, without doubt, it had beginning when some woman of the caverns discovered that you/he/she could lace together some skins with striscioline of skin, somehow to regulate, creating so, the bases of the embroidery. It is a natural footstep to go over and to discover that you/he/she could also adorn (to embroider) the skin and to make her/it attractive and different from the others. This has also developed a type of ownership. The men of the caverns could easily take his/her own skin in the middle of different others in a heap learning to recognize the technique of lacing of his/her own companion and the form of decoration.

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 of the art of the embroidery, created for objects of daily use, they succumbed to the strain of the time, for which today trace of their existence doesn't remain, what embroidered objects as centrini, sweaters and jobs could be to embroidery similar. Therefore we cannot exactly establish 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 has a base very ancient popular historia.

The embroidery was a simple way to valorize and to personalize, to increase dignity and prestige, the suits worn by the people to give them a prominence that could be in political or religious circle.
In Sicily, the birth of the embroidery goes up again around the year thousand, period domininato from the Saracens, that made to build real laboratories of weaving and embroidery, Thiraz and Rakam, that embroidered ceremonial mantles of great merit. The word embroidery derives from the Arabic headword raqm (racam) that means "sign, sketch."

During the period dominated by the Norman ones, particularly during Roger's II kingdom, the mastery of the ebroiderers and weavers it is so appreciated that their creations are worthy of Popes and Emperors. How testimony, the crowning Mantle of the Sacred Romano Impero, has been embroidered with gold and pearls, test incontestable test of the created masterpieces, with a motive for camels attacked by tabby lions, to mirror, separated by a palm by dates, symbol of the tree of the life. It was orderly in 1133 and delivered the following year in 1134; it is everything preserved in the Kurstgeveben Museum in Vienna (museum in Vienna of the embroidery) now.
The technique of embroidery and the decorums have very probably been brought near the other great courts of the Peninsula by the same maestranzes Arab-sicule, forced to run away on the end of the century XIII following the revolution of the Evenings.
Ornamental motives are, in that epoch, still limited to few elements fitomorfi (tree of the life, lily) and zoomorfi (griffons, parrots, eagles), made in schematic and essential way.
As single example, reported to I furnish him, it stays fundamental the tapestry of Bayeux, said also of the Regina Matilde. Realized between 1066 and 1077, on raw flax cloth with colored wool, with simple points of embroidery, what the point grass and chain, the Norman conquest of England from Guglielmo the Conqueror.
The representation is spontaneous and long live and it is imagined both is a fighter himself to draw her/it for the schematic, but effective figures. The monumental measures, meters 70 for cm. 50, do a really only and rare piece of it, in the context of the Romanesque profane embroidery.

In the XIV century, England can boast of a good school of embroidery, said Opus anglicanum, characterized by the use of silk policrome and from the great refinement of the jobs. In the jobs they are represented for the more symbols than the ancient one and of the New Will and histories of Saints, with a clear didactic function.
In the mantle of "Syon-Cope", the disposition of the Saints is in concentric circles, the figures are contained in octagons with arcs, the empty spaces are filled by angels. The characteristic of these manufactured articles is given not so much by the points of embroidery used, that don't vary very from a country to the other, but from the style with which the characters are represented, since they are outlined in way "terrestrial", with theatrical attitudes.

The Church assigns the assignment of religious building to the embroidery. The material that the medioevo offered for the subjects was inexhaustible: not only figures of the Old one and the New Will, but also the increasing team of Saints introduced an endless abundance of interesting and marvelous events that you/they brought to the faithful building and wonder, but also fear and emotion. From the Middle Ages up to the XVI late century, the embroideries are often carriers of popular traditions and poetry, but also of deeply rooted legends in the mind of the people.

Also in Germany the embroidery has ancient origins; here we find the Opus Teutonicum, characterized by the white embroidery on white, with a great variety of points to create an embossed effect. Perhaps this type of job was invented for sopperire to the lack of the precious colored silks and to face, with the manual ability, to the pomp of the color. With this technique tablecloths of altar were prepared, Lenten cloths, wine glass veils.

Also in Switzerland an embroidery produces him, that over that to develop an ornamental purpose of I furnish, as the tapestries generally, also a protective purpose against the cold: the noble women, the bourgeois and the nuns realize him/it in the convents, so much that the used (stings simple and oriental cross) point will be also said "monastery."

In Italy, since Three hundred, they are documented laboratories in the whole peninsula and particularly in Florence. The art is known as Opus florentinum. Many finds of "painting to needle" they typically attest a great quality and a certain Italian spatial ariosità.
Especially in four hundred and in five hundred, the collaboration is documented among the "great arts" and the "smaller arts", so it happens that great teachers of painting as the Botticelli and Bartholomew of Giovanni, prepare the cardboards for the ebroiderers that then will transfer them on pluvials or paliotti.
The art of the embroidery was masculine prerogative, its was the name of the shop, nevertheless there are tests document them that they also prove the female presence and not only monachal.
Particularly it was the preferred pastime of the noble dames, and it is for these that in the '500 are published the first books of models of embroideries. One of the most ancient publications seem to be The burato, book de embroiders, of Alex Paganino, without date, but probably of 1527. They will follow of Giovanni Tagliente "Esemplario novo" that it teaches to the women to "cuscire, to recamare and to draw."
Great success will also have the work of Giovanni Ostaus, "You true perfettione of the sketch of various fates of embroideries", that will be riedito various times, in 1557 and in 1591. The beautiful proposed sketches introduce both geometric sketches, inspired to the games decorated us of the gardens to the Italian, but also to the doodles and arabesques orientaleggianti, and to the elegant wanted fitomorfe, of grapevine with clusters of grape and vine tendril, of oak with acorns, of pomegranates. The used points are the written point, the flat point, the point paints, the grass, the chain, the curl, using thin threads of silk policromi and precious metals.
Some of the epoch there was room for documentations iconografiche in the plentiful pictorial portraiture: I am so a lot of well visible the embroideries of silk color rust, blue, redhead, black or with spun of gold, to underline unsticks him and the wrists of the day white uniform.
In I furnish him, on backs and seats of slacker, it is imitated with the needle, to point cross or to small point, the effect tapestry of the "tapisseries" Flemings and Italian.

In France the reorganization of the limbs and the craftsmanship determined by the aware politics of Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister of Luigi XIV, it gathers in an only place, where the manufacture of tapestries of Gobelins had existed, all the laboratories destined to produce only for the king. Under the direction of the painter Her Brun, from 1663, a équipe of famous artists, among which sculptural, architects, cabinetmakers, engravers, weavers and ebroiderers, are gathered in her/it "Great Fabrique" to create furnishes him of the sumptuous insides and the personal wardrobe of their sovereign.
The fashion of the embroideries involves the "noble et virtuous women" European, that continue to find in this art a material and spiritual way to escape from the family quotidianità. To Venice it deals even him with embroidery sister Arcangela Tarabotti, the writer feminist shutters litteram.
They spread anywhere the Institutes of religious that welcome abandoned girls to teach them a work, of embroideress or merlettaia, and to help then her, also with the contribution of a dowry put aside in years of job inside the college, to worthily insert him in society.

In the Seven hundred one it is assisted to an increase of embroideries straight, even if perhaps less in relief and thick.
You/he/she is primarily used for the masculine attire, "vests" and "velade" they become wealthy of auro-silky bas-reliefs along the bottoneries and on the buttons, around the pockets, to underline the edges of the unsticks, the clefts, lapels, on the paramanis of the shaped sleeves. They are for the more flowers, of all the typologies, to bunches, to garlands shoots, woven to ribbons, knots of love, tassels, shells and feathers.

As for I furnish him they grow the occasions to use embroidered surfaces: it is for example assisted to the creation of a variety of unknown chairs in precedence as the "canapès", the "Bergeres" with headrest, the footrests, the screens, and finally the beds, with canopy, draperies, valances, buonegrazie. It is the triumph of the small point, of the allegorical and mythological representations, of the grotesque ones you enrich of exotic animals. This job to points counted on canvas is the easiest of all the embroideries, so that all the dames of the world were hocked a lot you. The same Maria Antonietta realized tapestries of this kind that it destined to his/her apartment from Hunting to the Tuileries.
A new "Rebirth" of the art of the embroidery of it will have in the eight hundred, matter that we will shortly take back.