In the Eye of the Beholder: ‘Seeing’ Textiles in the Early Modern Interior

Abstract

This article explores the physical, cultural and aesthetic conditions for perceiving textiles in early modern England, in order to reconstruct contemporary responses to them. It begins by arguing for the level of explicitness of the engagement with the senses in printed materials on this subject. Focusing on sight, it then considers the depictions of the senses in the interior design at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire, and Knole, Kent, in relation to religious and moral ideas about the ‘eye of faith’, to Humanist representations of sight as a sense associated with women and to the élite mastery of the senses. The article then opens the subject out to consider different ways of ‘seeing’ textile furnishings in this period and the kind of visual responses they invited — it explores fading eyesight and looking glasses, times of day and mirrors. Finally, it suggests that textile objects functioned as perks and as evidence of loyalty and proximity to the Crown, and points to the lack of distinction between new and second-hand pieces, even among high-ranking members of society, and to the sight and appreciation of inventory makers whose descriptions give access to their sense of the most obvious features of textiles, most notably colour and lustre. 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling for seeing this article to completion. Their generosity, skill and care have made it a pleasure to work with them. The comments of the two referees were also invaluable and they have played a key part in shaping this article.

Notes

¹ W. Salmon, Polygraphice, or the Arts of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning etc (London: 1675), book 3, chapter 15.

² See also C. Woolgar, The Senses in the Late Medieval World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); M. Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); W. de Boer and C. Göttler eds, Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013) and D. Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004).

³ This theme runs through Philip Stubbs’s work The Anatomie of Abuses (London: 1581). For an analysis of the Elizabethan sumptuary legislation, see L. Jardine, ‘“Maketh thy doublet of changeable taffeta”: dress codes, sumptuary law and “natural orders”’, in L. Jardine ed., Still Harping On: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), pp. 141–68.

⁴ H. Gee and W. H. Hardy eds, Documents Illustrative of English Church History (London: Macmillan, 1896), pp. 417–42; T. Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 41.

⁵ See also S. Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); W. S. Melion and L. P. Wandel eds, Early Modern Eyes (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010) and D. Lindberg, Theories of Vision: From Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

⁶ A. Morrall and M. Watts eds, English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 284.

⁷ J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London: 1690).

⁸ A. Strickland, Letters of Mary Queen of Scots and Documents Connected with her Personal History, i (London: H. Colburn, 1842), p. 224.

⁹ J. A. Muller ed., The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 485.

¹⁰ The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 2, 1547, Harley MS 1419, fols 126r, 130r, British Library, London.

¹¹ R. Braithwaite, Essaies vpon the Five Senses with a Pithie One Upon Detraction (London: 1620), p. 57. For a fuller discussion, see Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, pp. 264–66.

¹² R. Braithwaite, The Heavenly Exercise of the Five Senses (London: 1635).

¹³ C. Nordenfalk, ‘The five senses in late medieval and Renaissance art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xlviii (1985), pp. 1–22. Within the Plinian tradition, animals and birds symbolised the senses, with the sharp-sighted eagle being associated with vision. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 13.

¹⁴ Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 13.

¹⁵ For the link between mirrors and pride, see W. Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower (London: 1484); M. Offord ed., Book of the Knight of the Tower, Early English Text Society, supplementary series, no. 2 (1971). For mirrors and vanity see the figure of Vanity, represented by a young woman admiring her reflection in a hand mirror in Jean Bondol and Nicholas Bataille, Apocalypse Tapestry, 1377–1382, 24 × 6.1 m, Musée de la Tapisserie, Château d’Angers, Angers, France.

¹⁶ The Mirroure of the Worlde, 1476, MS 283, fol. 67v, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford.

¹⁷ After George Glover, Visus, from The Five Senses, print on paper, published in London by William Peake, 1640s, acc. no. 1847,0723.3, British Museum, London.

¹⁸ A. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 396.

¹⁹ A. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 101–02.

²⁰ Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Sight, 1617, oil on panel, 65 × 110 cm, Museo el Prado, Madrid, PO 1394.

²¹ Cornelis Cort, Sight from The Senses, after Frans Floris, published by Hieronymus Cock, 1561, engraving, acc. no. 28.4(58), Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

²² M. Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 16; Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration, p. 102.

²³ R. Sackville-West, Knole (London: National Trust, 2001), p. 15.

²⁴ Salmon, Polygraphice, book 3, chapter 15.

²⁵ Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, pp. 146–47.

²⁶ E. Clive-Rouse and A. Baker, ‘The wall paintings at Longthorpe Tower, near Peterborough, Northants’, Archaeologia, xcvi (1995), p. 45. With very grateful thanks to one of the referees for this example.

²⁷ For a further comparison, see also H. L. Meakin, The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), especially chapters 4 to 6.

²⁸ L. Worsley, Bolsover Castle (London: English Heritage, 2012, first published 2000), p. 1.

²⁹ The paintings in the Anteroom were modelled on the prints the Four Temperaments, c. 1595, by Pieter de Jode (1606–1674), after Martin de Vos (c. 1532–1603), which were updated to reflect current fashions. Prints from this set can be found in the British Museum.

³⁰ T. D. Raylor, ‘Pleasure reconciled to virtue: William Cavendish, Ben Jonson and the decorative scheme of Bolsover Castle’, Renaissance Quarterly, liii (1999), pp. 402–39.

³¹ B. Jonson, Loves Welcome (London: 1634), lines 1–2, in Ben Jonson’s Underwoods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 159.

³² Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, pp. 192–93.

³³ See a fragment of a wall painting from Park Farm, Hilton, Huntingdonshire, 1632, painted plaster, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum number: W.28-1946.

³⁴ Depictions of the senses were not restricted to textiles — they were found on other types of objects, including ceramics, glassware and floor tiles.

³⁵ Sight, c. 1500, 274 × 355 cm, Musée National du Moyen Age, previously the Musée de Cluny, Paris. Five of the tapestries depict the five sense and the sixth is known by the words woven in the border, A mon seul désir.

³⁶ The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 2, 1547, Harley MS 1419, fols 6r, 30r, 68v, 209r, 219r, 347r, British Library.

³⁷ Ibid., fols 123r–v, 125r, 129v, 245r, 447r. None of Henry VIII’s embroideries or needlework were recorded as depicting the senses either.

³⁸ M. M. Brooks, English Embroideries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in the Collection of the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004), pp. 13–14.

³⁹ S. M. Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance: The Hardwick Hall Textiles (London: The National Trust, 1998), p. 66.

⁴⁰ This followed the view expressed by Aristotle in his Metaphysica (980a, 24–28). See R. Sorabji, ‘Aristotle on demarcating the five senses’, The Philosophical Review, lxxx, no. 2 (1971), pp. 55–79. Beyond Aristotle, see D. F. Appleby, ‘The priority of sight according to Peter the Venerable’, Medieval Studies, lx (1998), pp. 123–57; M. Camille, ‘Before the gaze: the internal senses and the late medieval practice of seeing’, in R. S. Nelson ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223.

⁴¹ B. Smith, Key of Green: Passion and Perception in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 125–28.

⁴² Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, pp. 266–69.

⁴³ J. Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1976), pp. 53–54.

⁴⁴ See, for example, K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 285, n. 119. Linked to this was the nature of the royal gaze as noted in Proverbs 20: 8, ‘A king that sitteth in the throne of judgement, scattereth away all evil with his eye’. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 12.

⁴⁵ The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 1, 1547, MS 129, fol. 152v, Society of Antiquaries, London.

⁴⁶ Ibid., fols 9v, 201v.

⁴⁷ By this period spectacles had become affordable to the middling sort. See, for example, a print showing a schoolmistress wearing spectacles, A. Bosse, La maistresse d’escole, c. 1638, print, 26.1 × 32.8 cm, ART 264811, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington (Online). Available from: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGERCM1~6~6~713698~149209:La-maistresse-d-escole--graphic----?qvq=q:A.%2BBosse;lc:FOLGERCM1~6~6,BINDINGS~1~1&mi=7&trs=13 [Accessed: 13 November 2014].

⁴⁸ P. Paolini, Allegory of the Five Senses, c. 1630, oil on canvas, 125.1 × 173 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, acc. no. 37.2768.

⁴⁹ M. Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994); M. Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype, 2008), pp. 23–48; S. Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 30–31, 39–41, 52–54; D. Russell, Emblematic Structures in Renaissance French Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

⁵⁰ G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: 1589), book 2, chapter 58.

⁵¹ Over 2,000 editions were available in the seventeenth century, a further indication of the scale of demand; Meakin, The Painted Closet, p. 126.

⁵² Strickland, Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, ii, p. 308.

⁵³ W. Murdin ed., A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Elizabeth I, Transcribed from the Original Papers, Left by William Cecil Lord Burghley, and Deposited in the Library at Hatfield House (London: W. Bowyer, 1759), pp. 46–51; M. Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), p. 75.

⁵⁴ Murdin ed., A Collection of State Papers, p. 57.

⁵⁵ The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 2, 1547, Harley MS 1419, fol. 124r, British Library.

⁵⁶ Bath, Emblems for a Queen, pp. 60–62. See also F. Dennis, ‘Resurrecting forgotten sound: fans and handbells in early modern Italy’, in T. Hamling and C. Richardson eds, Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meaning (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 191–210.

⁵⁷ Sackville-West, Knole, p. 73.

⁵⁸ M. A. Hayward, The 1542 Inventory of Whitehall: The Palace and its Keeper, i (London: Illuminata for the Society of Antiquaries, 2004), pp. 95–105.

⁵⁹ Smith, Key of Green, pp. 85–90.

⁶⁰ Woolgar, The Senses, pp. 157–59.

⁶¹ See, for example, M. C. Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 13–52. Also Smith, Key of Green, chapter 3.

⁶² The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 2, 1547, Harley MS 1419, fols 398r–400v, British Library.

⁶³ The inventory of Elizabeth I’s wardrobe of the robes, 1600, Stowe MS 557, fols 18r, 18v, 20v, 24r, 37v, 42v, British Library.

⁶⁴ M. A. Hayward, ‘Symbols of majesty: cloths of estate at the court of Henry VIII’, Furniture History, xli (2005), pp. 1–11.

⁶⁵ T. P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 231–34, 238, 241, 332.

⁶⁶ C. Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), especially chapter 3.

⁶⁷ See, for example, The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1633), English embroidered binding, C.17.b.11, British Library.

⁶⁸ The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, 1544, MS Cherry 36, summary catalogue number 9810, Bodleian Library.

⁶⁹ Holy Bible, 1651, T.44 to B-1954, Victoria and Albert Museum.

⁷⁰ J. Ayres, Domestic Interiors: The British Tradition 1500–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), chapter 2.

⁷¹ P. Thornton, Seventeenth Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 268–81.

⁷² Ibid., pp. 66–67, 74–80, 249, 296.

⁷³ The fascination of the mirror and its reflection is evident in Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on oak, 82.2 × 60 cm, National Gallery, London, NG 186. The mirror in the centre of the painting provides the viewer with an image of two people, one of whom might be the artist.

⁷⁴ With grateful thanks to Tara Hamling for this observation.

⁷⁵ Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 20. This is described as being ‘in the rufe of the bed’ suggesting that this scene was on the celure, decorating the internal ‘roof’ of the bed, which was visible to anybody lying in the bed.

⁷⁶ Sackville-West, Knole, p. 73.

⁷⁷ See, for example, T. Woodcock and J. M. Robinson, Heraldry in National Trust Houses (London: National Trust Enterprises, 2000), pp. 23–36.

⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 13, 114.

⁷⁹ M. A. Hayward, ‘Rich pickings: Henry VIII’s use of confiscation and its significance for the development of the royal collection’, in T. Betteridge and S. Lipscomb eds, Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 29–46.

⁸⁰ See, for example, The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 1, 1547, MS 129, fols 54v, 69r, 89v, Society of Antiquaries and The 1547 Inventory of Henry VIII, part 2, 1547, Harley MS 1419, fols 6v, 40v, 216r, 264v, 301r, British Library.

⁸¹ A. R. Jones and P. Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 26–32.

⁸² Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, pp. 128–29.

⁸³ Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance, fig. 69, pp. 15, 70.

⁸⁴ Frye, Pens and Needles, p. xviii.

⁸⁵ S. Frye, ‘Sewing connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot and seventeenth-century anonymous needleworkers’, in S. Frye and K. Robertson eds, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 178.

⁸⁶ H. Gamon, A Funeral Sermon upon Ladie Frances Roberts or The Praise of a Godly Woman (London: 1627). For more examples see Brooks, English Embroideries, p. 17.

⁸⁷ Jacopo Tintoretto, Esther before Ahasuerus, c. 1546–1547, oil on canvas, 207.7 × 275.5 cm, Royal Collection, King’s Gallery, Kensington Palace, RCIN 407247.

⁸⁸ For example, unknown maker with initials S. C., David and Bathsheba, tent stitch on a linen ground, 36.8 × 48 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, WA 1947.191, 310. See also M. D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 191; Frye, Pens and Needles, p. 139.

⁸⁹ Frye, Pens and Needles, pp. 139–40.

⁹⁰ W. Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Act 5, scene 5, ll. 62–65).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Hayward

Maria Hayward is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton. She works on textiles and clothing in the Tudor and Stuart periods.