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Golden needle-lace panel, possibly an antependium (altar frontal) or trimming for an alb

VR-All-Art

Textilmuseum St. Gallen

292.6 x 74.5 cm

Museum Collection

Nestled within the larger design of this golden needle lace are five scenes that tell the story of the founding of a Cistercian monastery, which can be identified by its characteristic architecture and the habits of the monks and nuns. In the first scene, on the far left, five nuns greet an entourage of courtiers and soldiers attending a lavishly dressed man, possibly a king. Second, in a garden, a crowned queen with two maids and a child holding her dress train delivers a message to a kneeling man. Third, a man with a halo stands on a hill with a flag emblazoned with the cross of Saint George; smoke or fire billows around him, and he is observed from below by a monk. Fourth, a monk addresses six richly dressed seated men. Finally, on the far right, eight men pray in a garden or field; one points to a dove circling overhead. These featured scenes suggest that the lace was probably commissioned either by or for the monastery. From the details of the clothing worn by these figures, we know that the lace was created between 1695 and 1710. Examining a thread from the darker elements of the lace, conservators have concluded that the lacemakers used brass-wrapped silk to create the piece’s distinctive color and sheen.

Exhibitions with this piece

Threads of Power

Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

Two contrasting perspectives inform this exhibition’s title. In the first, lace is an exalted handmade commodity signifying the wealth, taste, and prestige of its wearers—men and women at the pinnacle of the European social hierarchy from the sixteenth century onward. In the second, lace shows us the unequal balance of power between those who design, sell, and wear lace and the lacemakers themselves. Surviving examples of costly handmade lace thus enable us to envision the material worlds of the powerful, as well as connect us to the lives of the highly skilled, poorly paid lacemaking women whose names are no longer known to us. Crafted from expensive materials like linen and silk thread, and incorporating many hours of painstaking labor, early lace proved so inherently valuable that it was passed down through generations and modified when fashions changed. Since the mid-nineteenth century, antique lace patterns have been faithfully copied using machine technologies. The threads of lace thus link past and present and trace a network that runs through cities, nations, empires, and continents. Throughout the five centuries since its inception, despite transformations in use, form, fashion, and manufacture, lace has persisted as a global textile. St. Gallen, located in eastern Switzerland, has been an important center of textile production since the fifteenth century. The city is home to the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, established in 1878, which houses an extensive collection of historical lace, thanks in large part to early twentieth-century donations from Leopold Iklé (1838–1922), a local textile manufacturer. Drawing on this rich repository, Threads of Power traces the history of European lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to today.

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Other works by Textilmuseum St. Gallen