Museo San Marco, Venice

Museo di San Marco, Venice. Museo di San Marco, Venice.

The San Marco Basilica in Venice, Italy, houses a small number of important medieval and later textiles and garments. Their location in the basilica is indicated in a separate digital map (click here).

The textiles include two allegedly Byzantine embroideries. One of these dates to the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, and carries an embroidered representation of the Lament over the Dead Christ, lying on the unction stone. The second one of roughly the same date has an illustration of two archangles, Michael and Gabriel, the contours of a kneeling figure in the lower right hand corner, and an embroidered text (in Greek) identifying the donor. Both embroideries were carried out on a silk ground material with gold and silver thread, further decorated with pearls, stones and vitreous pastes.

In the mid-eighteenth century the embroideries, or what was left of them, were removed and fastened to lengths of yello taffeta with extra polychrone embroidery. 

Digital source (retrieved 11th August 2020).

Source illustration (retrieved 19th June 2016).

WV

Last modified on Tuesday, 11 August 2020 18:02