View of Grand Design's sixth gallery, showing drawings and prints, the painted Triptych of the Deposition, and the Vertumnus in the Guise of a Fruitpicker tapestry from the Story of Vertumnus and Pomona series
This Sunday, January 11, will be the final day to visit the exhibition Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry before its three-month run draws to a close. On January 12, Museum staff, observed by lenders' couriers, will begin to dismantle the displays and pack away the tapestries, paintings, drawings, and prints, ready to dispatch them back to their generous home collections.
This final post on the Grand Design exhibition blog presents an opportunity to pause and take stock. When we set out on the Grand Design project five or so years ago, the four curators on our team approached Pieter Coecke van Aelst from different media, each equipped with (or, arguably, weighed down by!) our respective fields' conceptions of the artist. On this blog, Nadine Orenstein, Stijn Alsteens, and Maryan Ainsworth have laid out their thinking when reassessing Coecke's work and selecting loans in preparation for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. I have also had a chance to present my own approaches to Coecke's art and biography. By giving such prominence in the exhibition to his tapestry projects, we celebrated the works that took his designs to their most audacious heights, in terms of massive scale, of illusionistic spatial acrobatics, and of precious raw materials. Although—as the exhibition and its catalogue seek to emphasize—Coecke was successful across media, it was above all the tapestry projects that brought his designs to the palace walls of the most splendid collections, and powerful political leaders, of his day.
Our exhibition was never intended to be the final word on Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Instead of answering every question and setting his attributed oeuvre in cement, we four Grand Design curators sought instead to reintroduce this great artist to the general museum-going public and to prompt scholars and specialists already familiar with certain aspects of his work to take a step back and gauge this remarkable man's contribution to sixteenth-century art as a whole. In more abstract terms, following the lead of our director, Thomas P. Campbell, and his landmark 2002 exhibition Tapestry in the Renaissance, Grand Design furthers the effort to reintegrate tapestry studies into the general art historical narrative. In this instance, however, our focus has been on design and process; the transmission of artistic ideas to a range of practitioners; and the translation of these ideas across media, from ink and chalk drawings, via distemper-painted cartoons, to their ultimate representation in wools, silks, and precious metal-wrapped threads.
View of Grand Design's third gallery, showing the Triptych of the Resurrection and the Arrest of Paul tapestry from the Story of Saint Paul series
After years of traveling, honing our theories and loan lists, physically readying works for display and preparing the catalogue, and after the challenges of exhibition design and installation, the exhibition was ready to share with our visitors. Having known Coecke's art for so long as independent works dispersed across the globe, we were incredibly excited to see them all gathered together under one roof. During installation, as we watched the exhibition come together, there was also an element of trepidation: reunited, would these "old friends" get along? The actualization of an exhibition puts to the test all the stylistic theories and attributions ventured in the catalogue.
Happily, that remarkable synergy does vibrate through the Grand Design show: whether tapestries, panel paintings, prints, or drawings, the same artistic personality is recognizable at the core of these works in Coecke's use of bright light and distinct shadows to create incredible spatial effects; his interest in formal devices as gateways between viewers and represented scenes; shared poses and facial types; his diligent mindfulness of how designs would translate across different materials; and even, as Nadine Orenstein observes, in characterful quirks like the repeated use of cushioned caryatids. Experiencing these sixty-eight works together, we really do, I believe, enjoy a true sense of the glue uniting them: their remarkable designer, Pieter Coecke van Aelst.
Top left: Detail from Holy Family panel painting. Top right: Sacrifice at Lystra cartoon fragment. Lower left: Detail from the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek tapestry from the Story of Abraham series. Lower right: Detail from the Gibeonites Trick Joshua tapestry from the Story of Joshua series
As was our hope, one of the results of bringing together so many works after centuries apart has been the confirmation or elucidation of particular notions. Perhaps most striking, at least to me, has been the reiteration of the key filter of the weavers' interpretation of the painted pattern and how the choices the weavers made could dramatically alter the translation of Coecke's design. Equally skilled weavers used their materials differently. In the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek, for example, Willem de Kempeneer's weavers muted the palette of blues, reds, and greens, interspersing the whole with gilded-silver metal-wrapped threads, thereby allowing a golden haze to envelop the entire scene; Jan Dermoyen's Joshua set, on the other hand, is characterized by a brilliant, bright rainbow palette, within which the areas of gilded silver are used as sparkling highlights.
By displaying, side by side, various tapestry editions of the same series that were woven in different workshops, it becomes clear quite how much scope weaving directors had in shaping the ultimate appearance of the tapestry, from biasing one raw material above another, to manipulating the weaving via techniques like hatching; incorporating slits to cause minuscule shadows in service of the illusion of modeling; or creating luscious, almost three-dimensional basket-weave. Having already conjectured in the catalogue that Coecke designed the different borders for his tapestry series, the discernible stylistic progression of borders particularly apparent throughout various editions of seven of the series currently gathered together in the Tisch Galleries reinforces this belief.
Detail from the Sloth tapestry from the Seven Deadly Sins series
With thanks to the Museum's Education Department, the exhibition has hosted visitors of all ages, occasioning a specially commissioned shadow-puppet performance by Caroline Borderies, and acknowledged Coecke's business acumen and entrepreneurship in a SPARK conversation with modern-day marketing guru Seth Godin. To culminate the exhibition's run, our visitors are invited to attend a symposium, co-hosted by Parsons The New School for Design, which will take place on January 10 and 11 at the Met (free with Museum admission) and on Parsons' 13th Street campus. The symposium will acknowledge and celebrate the continued relevance of a designer like Coecke to design practice today. Papers by experts across many fields will also address stylistic and iconographic trends, like Coecke's clearly key role in the development of strapwork ornamentation visible in his tapestries' borders and the frontispieces of his printed books, and his status as a founder of the Mannerist style. Issues raised by the exhibition, like his role in the tapestry industry and the importance of his travels to Constantinople and to Italy, will be revisited. Additional topics will range from analysis of Coecke's stained-glass projects to exploration of the organization of his painting workshop, probing the question of assistants, and the identities of his artistic followers.
Although this is the final post on the Grand Design blog, the topic of tapestries will continue to flourish in monthly posts on Now at the Met, the Museum's main blog, as part of our ongoing #TapestryTuesday series.
Detail from the God accuses Adam and Eve After the Fall tapestry from the Story of the Creation series