Brussels tapestry workshops produced tapestry from at least the 15th century, but the city's early production in the Late Gothic International style was eclipsed by the more prominent tapestry-weaving workshops based in Arras and Tournai. In 1477 Brussels, capital of the duchy of Brabant, was inherited by the house of Habsburg;[1] and in the same year Arras, the prominent center of tapestry-weaving in the Low Countries, was sacked and its tapestry manufacture never recovered, and Tournai and Brussels seem to have increased in importance.
The only millefleur tapestry to survive together with a record of its payment was a large heraldic millefleur carpet of very high quality made for Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy in Brussels, of which part is now in the Bern Historical Museum.[2] Sophie Schneebalg-Perelman's attribution[3] to Brussels of The Lady and the Unicorn at the Musée de Cluny may well be correct.[4]
- ^ The mille-fleurs panel with the arms of Charles the Bold in the Musée Historique, Berne, which is generally agreed to have been woven in Brussels, must predate his death in January 1477.
- ^ Souchal, Geneviève (ed.), Masterpieces of Tapestry from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century: An Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 108, 1974, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), ISBN 0870990861, 9780870990861, google books
- ^ Schneebalg-Perelman, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts 70 1967, noted in H. Osborne, ed. The Oxford Guide to the Decorative Arts, s.v. "Tapestry".
- ^ Other 15th-century tapestries attributed to Brussels include the Allegory of the Virgin as the Source (Louvre), Virgin and Child with Donor ca 1600 (Musée des Tissus, Lyon), The Story of the Virgin (Madrid)