Dalmatic front

Responding to the Gilded Age's enthusiasm for Renaissance style, this garment is a pastiche, created out of repurposed crimson velvet furniture upholstery– thinly piled, with previous wear marks and tack holes clearly visible– paired with what was then brand new, late-nineteenth needlework. These needlework panels, that representing Saint Luke applied to one side of the garment and Saint Mark to the other, were very competently executed by talented professionals, their design and technique emulating sixteenth-century examples, but with thinner, shinier metal-threads and garishly bright sewing silks. Though shaped as an oversized tunic-like dalmatic worn by a Catholic priest, this "vestment" was most likely assembled by a dealer to appeal to the art market rather than for use within an ecclesiastic context.