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Embroidered Belt, fragment
Serbia, 14th century
Trustees of the British Museum, London (M&LA 1990, 12-1,1)
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•• Byzantine visual and written sources attest to
the extensive use of textiles in the ecclesiastical, domestic,
and public spheres, including their use as garments, tapestries,
banners, and curtains. In the public sphere, we learn from the
Byzantine historian, Niketas Choniates (d. 1217), that processional
routes in Constantinople were adorned with embroideries representing
holy figures. The anonymous author, known as Pseudo-Kodinos,
writing in the mid-fourteenth century, attests to banners with
imperial and religious images accompanying public processions
on church feast days. Such public displays of textiles contributed
a sense of opulence to the solemn imperial processions.
We have inherited a limited number of Late Byzantine textiles
used as clothing. Rare survivals include a man’s belt,
now divided between the Hermitage and British Museum, as well
as woolen and silk fragments recovered from Byzantine burials
excavated in the palace church of Hagia Sophia at Mystras (Greece),
the capital of the Late Byzantine province known as the Despotate
of the Morea. We are able to glean further information about
the style and type of textiles employed in Late Byzantine dress
from surviving portraits of the period, including
manuscripts
and monumental paintings in fresco and mosaic.
Visual Expressions of the Faith
Liturgical Objects | Manuscripts
and Frescoes | Miniature Mosaic
Icons | Vestments and Textiles | Painted
Icons
Themes in Late Byzantine Art
1. Introduction | 2. Peoples
of the Byzantine Sphere | 3. Visual Expressions of
the Faith | 4. The Byzantine Sphere
and the Islamic World | 5. The
Byzantine Sphere and the West
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