Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Five - Medieval Burse

Credit here at the V&A.

A Mediaeval Burse, made in England between 1310-40. As I've said previously, I watched a documentary on the BBC earlier this year, and it talked about Opus Anglicanum. This was a particularly English way of embroidering vestments and holy objects in the early Mediaeval period, between the mid-13th century (though it's difficult to give an exact dating, obviously, most of the larger examples of the craft can be reliably dated to 1270-1330.) and the beginning of the plague years, around 1330-40. Since I saw the programme, I've been interested to find out how many extant examples there are of this extremely precious craft. As I said in my essay on the lace rochet a couple of posts back, I found a whole thesis on it, the PDF of which is freely available from St Andrew's university. It was submitted in 1995 by a student called Christine Linnell. I've used her dating for the main English copes as a guideline, as the pieces she looks at are stated to date from between 1270 and 1330 (page 11 in the PDF). I may refer to it again as I go along. The piece I'm looking at today is one featured on the documentary, and again, it's something I saw at the V&A archives. Towards the end of my study session, I was allowed to look inside some of the cabinets containing light-sensitive materials, and saw this fantastic embroidery. As was said on the documentary, the staple features of Opus Anglicanum are two-fold. The stunning gold backgrounds, made with underside couching, and the swirling silk split-stitches that make up clothing and skin tones. Here's a good example of that stitching - a close-up on the crucifixion scene where the muscle tone is defined in stitch.

This effect was also utilised in multi-coloured strips to create strands of hair:

As well as the folds in headdress and cloak:

In this detail from the right-hand panel, you can see the way the knee holds the cloak out in folds - it's just sublime work:

Here, the effect of a darker fabric has been created by using a wider range of tones to show the bulges in the material. It's also possible to see the 'fur' lining of the garment at the lower left.

As this is quite a popular piece, I don't want to post too many pictures of it here, but I will say one thing - if ever I get the time to try out this technique of split-stitching, and can find a subject with plenty of depth to depict, I mustn't rush the execution of it - these stitches are maybe 1-2mm each. What really sets this work apart is the way the artists responsible have used texture to show depth, whilst keeping the surface of the work completely flat. Perhaps, as they only had access to quite rudimentary dyes, this was born of necessity. Thinking about this concept of '2D textures' might be quite a good starting point for a simpler project.