SESSION: How to Research Tapestries

The panel addresses the recent calls for a renewed research method in field of tapestry studies.

As Guy Delmarcel (2012) argues, “every type of artwork has different research needs. […] the art of tapestries contains specific aspects that led to the employment of its own method of research”. These “specific aspects” and research method for tapestries will be investigated in the panel.

Tapestries have usually been approached and studied as “woven paintings”. However, these luxurious and complex artefacts are far more complex. Indeed, tapestries are the result of entrepreneurial efforts, materials, trade, crafts and manufacture. The session reflects on how to study and research tapestries as an independent and autonomous medium rather than “woven paintings”. It aims to bring together different and new theoretical approaches to study tapestries in terms of production, manufacturing processes and material culture. We encourage papers from different historical and geographical contexts.

Session Convenors:

Carlo Scapecchi, Arden University

Session Speakers:

Cecilia Ruggeri, University of Lausanne

Materiality and the Construction of Luxury in Raphael’s Tapestries

Recent scholarship has called for new methodologies in tapestry studies that examine tapestries as material artefacts embedded in networks of production and commerce rather than as mere transpositions of painted compositions. Drawing from my doctoral research, this paper analyses Raphael tapestries through the lens of materiality, production history, and commercial circulation, with particular attention to the role of the weaver and the preparatory drawing process within Raphael’s workshop.

In the editiones princepes of Raphael tapestries, the value of works produced in the workshops benefited from the aura and reputation of the Italian master. From the 16th to the 18th century, such works functioned as dominant luxury objects for courtly society; their value derived not solely from their artistic reference but from the intricate interplay of precious materials (gold and silver thread, silk, wool), specialized skills, fabrication techniques, and commercial networks. My paper will explore how the “Raphael brand” was constructed through material choices and manufacturing decisions across European workshops, particularly Flemish and French manufacturers. I will present unpublished archival documents concerning colour treatises and dye production for wool threads, demonstrating how material observation and technical processes shaped the final products.

By examining the Raphael tapestries’ production history through material choices and collaborative practices across workshops, this research advances an understanding of tapestry as a medium defined by distinct methodologies and highlights its central role in the construction of elite culture and luxury in early modern Europe.

Helen Wyld, National Museum of Scotland

Tapestry as a Ritual Medium

Within the discipline of art history, tapestry has always been a poor relation. The perception that tapestries are no more than ‘woven paintings’ originates in a Vasarian hierarchy of the arts and the notion of the individual artist-genius. Recent scholarship has challenged these assumptions. Most notably, Thomas Campbell has used the concept of Aristotelian ‘Magnificence’, stressing the splendour and cost of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry, to propose the medium’s centrality in courtly display. However, while this approach is valuable, it also perpetuates the prioritisation of the visual, which still characterises art-historical approaches.

Drawing on research for my doctoral thesis, Tapestry and Ritual at the Court of Charles I (submission February 2026), in this paper, I will instead propose an approach to tapestry that begins with its status as a ritual medium. In medieval and early modern Europe, tapestry functioned to mark the presence of the sacred. It did so visually, through its iconography; materially, through symbolic media such as gold and fine workmanship; and, most importantly, in the way it was deployed. Through temporal, site-specific usage, tapestry was able to mark sacred space and sacred time. And while the ritual use of tapestry declined with the end of the ancien régime in Europe, traces of these embodied meanings remain in the deployment of tapestries in later domestic settings, in the use of medieval tapestries in Gilded Age America, and in the medium’s post-war revival.

Xanthe Op de Beeck, KU Leuven

Koenraad Brosens, KU Leuven

Experiencing Material Affordances: Introducing Empirical Methods in Tapestry Studies

This paper contributes to the session’s call for renewed methodologies in tapestry studies and responds to the broader material turn in art history, which still lacks sufficient tools to engage with the materiality of artworks and how they are perceived. We present our explorations with a data-driven approach to understanding how tapestries function as unique artworks and material media. To better grasp the affordances of the tapestry medium, we argue that complementing theoretical frameworks with empirical methods is a necessary step.

We present our methods and experiences from two empirical studies with tapestries, one at the Royal Manufacturers of Tapestry De Wit in Mechelen and one at Mudac in Lausanne, featuring tapestries from the Fondation Toms Pauli collection.

For these studies, we used a mixed-methods design – combining eye-tracking data and surveys – that is commonly employed in the fields of Empirical Aesthetics and Perception Studies. These two domains include research on art perception but have neglected tapestry and textile art completely. They frequently draw conclusions about art in general from studies focused exclusively on painting, thereby reinforcing the notion of tapestry as merely a woven painting.

Our studies explore the effects of and correlations between touch and knowledge of materials, labour, and production processes, and observe how they influenced the engagement, appraisal, and material awareness of both experts and non-experts.

We will conclude with a critical reflection on the scalability, transferability, and methodological challenges of applying empirical approaches to tapestry studies, highlighting both potential and limitations.

Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Colonial Latin American Textiles as devices of Time and Space. The exhibition of textiles at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino.

In 2024, an exhibition of archaeological, colonial and ethnographic Andean textiles took place at the Chile’s Pre-Colombian Art Museum. The highlight of the exhibition was colonial tapestries from the viceroyalty of Peru. As the curator, and along with the co-curator Nilda Callañaupa, a quechua weaver from Cusco, we chose the concept of Contact to name and articulate the exhibition. The study of these textiles reveals contact among materials, traditions, technologies, actors, iconographies and uses. But most relevant, contact among contrasting times and spaces materialize in them as well. Therefore, I propose here to understand tapestries as devices of Time and Space and more specifically, of times and places. These interactions of times and places lead us to reflect on two historical-geographical concepts that contextualize the objects and propose an interpretation of them. The first of these is heterochronies, and the second is cultural geography.

Through the research and its materialization in the exhibition, we wanted to offer alternatives to the Western linear concept of time and entertain other ways of thinking about and materializing time. We were interested in including other ways of looking at time and space, variables that have been appropriated by Europe and Western Christian culture, which often ignores the contributions of other cultures, as the author Jack Goody argues in his book “The Theft of History”.