Chasuble

This garment is almost certainly a dealer's composite object, assembled at the end of the nineteenth century: though resembling a priest's chasuble, it is unconventionally large, and combines patched and repaired very low quality, thin, soft and relatively modern velvet with a much older set of very fine embroideries. This beautiful green and gold embroidered orphrey was created using the difficult, expensive and time consuming or nué technique, in which delicate gilded silver metal threads were laid parallel, horizontally across the ground fabric, with fine colored silks stitched over and around this support; the flesh areas of the figures are rendered only in colored silk threads. The four roundels represent Saints Sebastian and Catherine of Alexandria (on the front) and Saints Augustine and Michael (on the reverse).