Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Luxury Cloth
Not on view
Twelve individually woven panels were stitched together along with a fringe added to the perimeter in order to create what ranks among the most monumental cloths in the extant corpus of early Kongo textiles. According to descriptions of the Loango court, members of a nobleman’s entourage spread such large textiles on the ground for him to sit upon when gathered with others before the king. The prosperous Ulm merchant Christoph Weickmann (1617–1681) assembled a collection of some 122 works of art and natural specimens that he obtained through exchange networks of various Danish, Dutch, German, and Swedish trading companies. This impressive textile is one of three among these identified as “Angolan” that were likely produced in the Lower Congo River region.
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