‘Grand Design’
CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times
Less than two decades into the 21st century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has already mounted three spectacular shows of European tapestries. The latest is “Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry,” which handily lives up to the standard set by its epic forerunners, the 2002 “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence” and the 2007 “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.”
And as with the first two, there is a good chance this one will repeatedly make you gasp, whether at the size or realness of the images, their human dramas and sumptuous surfaces, or simply the immense open space that forms the exhibition’s spine. Flanked by tapestries on walls that angle slightly into your path, it has an air of baronial pomp that might almost be pierced by trumpets heralding the arrival of, say, Henry VIII of England — a devoted Coecke collector — accompanied by the ladies and gentlemen of the court.
“Grand Design” is the first major exhibition at the Met to concentrate on the work of a single tapestry designer. As such, it clarifies the tapestry-making process while also revealing the expressive power and stylistic consistency possible in works made by scores of hands other than the artist’s.
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Coecke (pronounced COOK-ah) was born in 1502 in the small Flemish town of Aelst, and died in 1550, after a relatively brief but intensely productive career. Adept at conveying his ideas through drawings, Coecke is usually credited with combining in tapestry the compositional and spatial clarity of Italian Renaissance art with a Northern European penchant for detail. He lived in an age when tapestries were arguably the No. 1 status symbol of all two-dimensional art forms. They were certainly more expensive and labor-intensive than panel paintings and frescoes, although costs varied according to the quality of the wool, dye and craftsmen. Weavers usually worked in teams of five; it took a single man two months to finish a square yard of a tapestry. Those in this exhibition are as big as 16 by 26 feet.
And unlike paintings or frescoes, tapestries were essential to comfort. Frequently woven with gold and silver threads, they caught and refracted candlelight, a bit like mirrors, but with a gentler shimmer. They preserved warmth and muffled sound in drafty castles. And like other forms of figurative art, they added beauty, offered powerful storytelling and provided moral lessons.
Coecke was, as this exhibition demonstrates, something of a polymath. Elizabeth Cleland, the show’s curator, lays before us a cornucopia of 19 immense tapestries that represent all eight sets he designed. There are seven examples of his panel paintings, made by him rather than the many assistants in his large workshop in Brussels. The show is especially unusual for including both sketches and more-finished drawings for several tapestries (present and not), as well as rare examples of the large cartoons, actual-size drawings in reverse that guided the weavers.
There is also one of Coecke’s designs for stained-glass windows; examples of best-selling books on architecture that he translated; and a 15-foot-long, foldout woodcut that traces his 1533 journey to Constantinople and the Levant, undertaken with three dealers hoping to interest the Ottomans in Flemish tapestries. That didn’t work out, but in Italy, he saw Giulio Romano’s Hall of the Giants in Mantua, and works by Raphael and other contemporaries in Rome.
Equally important, in the Levant, Coecke sketched the indigenous flora, expanding upon an abiding interest in accurate renderings of nature that gave his tapestries an added dimension. Nature — snowy mountain peaks, all kinds of plants and flowers, and especially trees (and their bark!) — seems like the real star of some of Coecke’s woven scenes.
Tapestries are almost enduringly strange and familiar. We know their images and themes from paintings, and in true High Renaissance fashion, those here move between the biblical and the mythological. But their large scale and intricate surfaces overwhelm. They are feats of craft that win us over as art but frequently overshadow other art.
The ancillary works in this show illuminate Coecke’s talent, especially his transmedia sense of design, but his paintings seem of passing interest: tightly composed yet confusing, with overheated colors, at least in this context. Most of the paintings hang in the opening gallery and are quickly forgotten as you become immersed in the first set of tapestries, four compelling woven scenes from the life of St. Paul. These show that even before the trip to Italy, Coecke was cutting back the crowds typical of northern tapestries, focusing on the gestures, expressions and anatomies of a few prominent figures.
At the center of “The Conversion of Saul,” designed when Coecke was still in his 20s, the saint crouches in a pose recalling the classical statue “Dying Gaul,” while an unusually patriarchal Jesus (with stigmata, but also white beard and hair) flies above, resembling Michelangelo’s version of God in the Sistine Ceiling. “The Martyrdom of St. Paul” — now he has the white hair and beard — is a sensation of headless bodies in complex poses and bodiless heads rendered in near-perfect perspective.
Between these two textiles, the scene of “Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books” introduces another Coecke signature feat: smoke, which will become alive with small demons and color in the four tapestries here from the Seven Deadly Sins set: Pride, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. Its fabulously billowing plumes inevitably signal the entrance to hell, always at the left or, in Italian, sinistra edge.
Then there is the dazzling “Saint Paul Seized in the Temple of Jerusalem,” which shows our anxious hero being hustled out by lavishly robed congregants and met by six-packed centurions from the Roman garrison. Parts of the setting are implicitly hallucinatory, especially the Christmas red-and-green-veined marble steps and columns. The resemblance to Abstract Expressionist brushwork may prompt the question: “What drugs were these guys on?”
And nowhere are we more conscious of the relentless attention demanded by tapestry weaving. The weavers did not have the option of resorting to blank passages of paper that drawings allow or the empty, loosely worked backgrounds of paintings.
After the sturm und drang of Paul’s life, the Deadly Sins and scenes from the life of Joshua, the exhibition’s relatively serene final gallery covers the last decade of Coecke’s life. His preoccupation with plants and architecture converge in three tapestries depicting the story of Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons, and his attempts to woo Pomona, the goddess of orchards, by assuming various disguises. She is unfazed in the scenes here, where he appears as a fruit picker, shepherd and vintner. In each, the two are seen conspicuously alone on porticos opening onto verdant yet orderly orchards or gardens, receding to woods beyond.
A similar wealth of greenery appears in a final biblical scene in which another Michelangelo-esque God, garbed in red, ushers Adam and Even from Eden.
Coecke may not be a great artist. The show’s opening text panel characterizes him as “an artistic entrepreneur and a pioneering designer.” But you will leave this show with little doubt that, thread by thread, he made tapestries breathe with a brilliant new life.