Noble Retinue in a Landscape

This tapestry’s design belongs to the style of the “small-figure genre”, popularized towards the end of the century in part to compensate for vagaries of weaving execution threatened by the migration of weavers during the civil and religious unrest in the Habsburg Netherlands during these years. Stylistically, Noble Retinue in a Landscape appears to be a later work and may prove to be a useful example of van Herzeele’s work after he had relocated to Antwerp for the last eight years of his life. Bearing in mind the Italian patrons of the Victorian and Albert Museum’s van Herzeele-woven five-part Landscape with the Arms of the Contarini family of Venice (127-130, a – 1869), as well as the Genovese patron, Andrea Doria, of the Doria Grotesques, and the inclusion of the arms of Cardinal Montalto (subsequently Pope Sixtus V) on the Story of the Sabines and the Romans, it is possible that, upon further investigation, Noble Retinue in a Landscape, with its Italianate border, might likewise have been an Italian commission.