REGARDLESS of what a man’s longing for fame may have been in the Middle Ages, he let his works pass into the world without a sign upon them that portrayed their author. This is as true of the lesser arts as of the greater. It was not the fashion in the days of Giotto, nor of Raphael, to sign a painting in vermillion with a flourished underscore. The artist was content to sink individuality in the general good, to work for art’s sake, not for personal fame.

This was true of the lesser artists who wove or directed the weaving of the tapestries called Gothic, not only through the time of the simple earnest primitives, but through the brilliant high development of that style as shown at the studio of Jean de Rome, of the Brussels ateliers, through the years lying between the close of the Fifteenth Century and the Raphael invasion.

Even that important event brought no consequence of that sort. The freemasonry among celebrities in those days showed its perfection by this very lack of signed work. Everybody knew the man by his works, and the works by their excellence.

Tapestry marks were non-existent as a system until the Brussels edict of 1528 made them compulsory in that town. Documents and history have been less unkind to those early workers, and to those of us who like to feel the thrill of human brotherhood as it connects the artist and craftsman centuries dead with our own strife for the ideal. Nicolas Bataille in 1379 cannot remain unknown since the publishing of certain documents concerning his Christmas task of the Apocalypse, and there are scores of known master weavers reaching up through the ages to the time when marks began.

The Brussels mark was the first. It was a simple and appropriate composition, a shield flanked with two letters B. These were capitals or not. One was reversed or not, with little arbitrariness, for the mark was legible and unmistakable in any case, even though the weaver took great liberties—as he sometimes did. The place for this mark was the galloon, and it was usually executed in a lighter colour, but a single tone.

So much for the town mark, which has a score or more of variations. In addition to this was the mark of the weaver or of the merchant who gave the commission. A pity it was thus to confound the two, to give such confusion between a gifted craftsman and a mere dealer. One was giving the years of his life and the cunning of his hand to the work, while the other did but please a rich or royal patron with his wares. But so it was, and we can but study over the symbols and glean at least that the tapestry was considered a worthy one, reached the high standard of the day, or it would have had no mark at all. For it was thus that the marks were first adopted. They were for the protection of every one against fraud. High perfection made Brussels famous, but fame brought with it such a rush of patronage that only by lessening the quality of productions could orders be filled in such hot haste.

Tricks of the trade grew and prospered; there were tricks of dyeing after a tapestry was finished, in case the flesh tints or other light shades were not pleasing. There was a trick of dividing a large square into strips so that several looms might work upon it at once. And there was all manner of slighting in the weave, in the use of the comb which makes close the fabric, in the setting of the warp to make a less than usual number of threads to the inch. In fact, men tricked men as much in those days as in our own.

The fame of the city’s industry was in danger. It was the province of the guild of tapestry-makers to protect it against its own evils. Thus, in 1528, a few years after the weaving of the Raphael tapestries, the law was made that all tapestries should bear the Brussels mark and that of the weaver or the client. Small tapestries were exempt, but at that time small tapestries were not frequent, or were simple verdures, and, charming as they are, they lacked the same intellectual effort of composition.

The Brussels guild stipulated the size at which the tapestry should be marked. It was given at six ells, a Flemish ell being about 27½ inches. Therefore, a tapestry under approximately thirteen feet might escape the order. But that was the day of large tapestries, the day of the Italian cartoonists, and important pieces reached that measure.

The guild of the tapissiers in Brussels, once started on restrictions, drew article after article, until it seemed that manacles were put on the masters’ hands. To these restrictions the decadence of Brussels is ascribed, but that were like laying a criminal’s fault to the laws of the country. Primarily must have been the desire to shirk, the intent to do questionable work. And behind that must have been a basic cause. Possibly it was one of those which we are apt to consider modern, that is, the desire to turn effort into the coin of the realm. All of the enormous quantity of orders received by Brussels in the days of her highest prosperity could not have been accepted had not the master of the ateliers pressed his underlings to highest speed.

Speed meant deterioration in quality of work, and so Brussels tried by laws to prevent this lamentable result, and to protect the fair fame of the symbol woven in the bordering galloon. The other sign which accompanied the town mark, of the two letters B, should have had excellent results, the personal mark of the weaver that his work might be known.

In spite of this spur to personal pride, the standard lessened in a few years, but not until certain weavers had won a fame that thrills even at this distance. Unfortunately, a great client was considered as important as a weaver, and it was often his arbitrary sign that was woven. And sometimes a dealer, wishing glory through his dealings, ordered his sign in the galloon. And thus comes a long array of signs which are not identifiable always. In general, one or two initials were introduced into these symbols, which were fanciful designs that any idle pencil might draw, but in the lapse of years it is not possible to know which able weaver or what great purveyor to royalty the letter A or B or C may have signified.

Happily the light of Wilhelm de Pannemaker could not be hid even by piling centuries upon it. His works were of such a nature that, like those of Van Aelst, who had no mark, they would always be known for their historic association. In illustration, there is his set of the Conquest of Tunis (plate facing page 62), woven under circumstances of interest. Even without a mark, it would still be known that the master weaver of Brussels (whom all acknowledged Pannemaker to be) set up his looms, so many that it must have seemed to the folk of Granada that a new industry had come to live among them. And it is a matter of Spanish history that the great Emperor Charles V carried in his train the court artist, Van Orley, that his exploits be pictured for the gratification of himself and posterity.

But Wilhelm de Pannemaker lived and worked in the time of marks, so his tapestries bear his sign in addition to the Brussels mark. Of symbols he had as many as nine or ten, but all of the same general character, taking as their main motive the W and the P of his name.

Incorporated into his sign, as into many others of the period, was a mark resembling a figure 4. Tradition has it that when this four was reversed, the tapestry was not for a private client, but for a dealer. One set of the Vertumnus and Pomona at Madrid (plates facing pages 72, 73, 74, 75) bears De Pannemaker’s mark, while others have a conglomerate pencilling.

The sign of Jacques Geubels is, like W. de Pannemaker’s, made up of his initials combined with fantastic lines which doubtless were full of meaning to their inventor, little as they convey to us. The example of Jacques Geubels’ weaving given in the plate is from the Chicago Institute of Art. His time was late Sixteenth Century.

The Acts of the Apostles of Raphael, the first set, was woven by Peter van Aelst without a mark, but the set at Madrid bears the marks of several Brussels weavers, some attributed to Nicolas Leyniers.

The desirability of distinguishing tapestries by marks in the galloon appealed to other weaving centres, and the method of Brussels found favour outside that town. Presently Bruges adopted a sign similar to that of her neighbour, by adding to the double B and shield a small b traversed by a crown.

In Oudenarde, that town of wonderful verdures, the weavers, as though by trick of modesty, often avoided such clues to identity as a woven letter might be, and adopted signs. However significant and famous they may have been in the Sixteenth Century, they mean little now. The town mark with which these were combined was distinctly a striped shield with decoration like antennÆ.

Enghien is one of the tapestry towns of which we are gradually becoming aware. Its products have not always been recognised, but of late more interest is taken in this tributary to the great stream of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

The famous Peter or Pierre van Aelst, selected from all of Flanders’ able craftsmen to work for Raphael and the Pope, was born in this little town, wove here and, more yet, was known as Pierre of Enghien. Yet it is the larger town of Brussels which wore his laurels.

The Enghien town marks are an easy adaptation of the arms of the place, and the weavers’ marks are generally monograms.

Weavers’ marks, after playing about the eccentricities of cipher, changed in the Seventeenth Century to easily read initials, sometimes interlaced, sometimes apart. Later on it became the mode to weave the entire name. An example of these is the two letters C of Charles de Comans on the galloon of Meleager and Atalanta (plate facing page 68); and the name G. V. D. Strecken in the Antony and Cleopatra (plate facing page 79).

Other countries than Flanders were wise in their generation, and placed the marks that are so welcome to the eye of the modern who seeks to know all the secrets of the tapestry before him. In the Seventeenth Century, when Paris was gathering her scattered decorative force for later demonstration at the Gobelins, the city had a pretty mark for its own, a simple fleur-de-lis and the initial P, and the initials of the weaver.

That Jean LefÈvre, who with his father Pierre was imported into Italy to set the mode of able weaving for the Florentines, had a sign unmistakable on the Gobelins tapestries of the History of the King. (Plate facing page 114.) It was a simple monogram or union of his initials. In the Eighteenth Century the Gobelins took the fleur-de-lis of Paris, and its own initial letter G. The modern Gobelins’ marks combined the G with an implement of the craft, a broche and a straying thread.

In Italy, in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, we find the able Flemings, Nicholas Karcher and John Rost, using their personal marks after the manner of their country. Karcher thus signed his marvellously executed grotesques of Bacchiacca which hang in the gallery of tapestries in Florence. (Plates facing pages 48 and 49.) John Rost’s fancy led him to pun upon his name by illustrating a fowl roasting on the spit. Karcher had a little different mark in the Ferrara looms, where he went at the call of the d’Este Duke.

The Florence factory made a mark of its own, refreshingly simple, avoiding all of the cabalistic intricacies that are so often made meaningless by the passing of the years, and which were affected by the early Brussels weavers. The mark found on Florence tapestries is the famous Florentine lily, and the initial of the town. The mark of Pierre LefÈvre, when weaving here, was a combination of letters.

When the Mortlake factory was established in England, the date was sufficiently late, 1619, for marking to be considered a necessity. The factory mark was a simple shield quartered by means of a cross thrown thereon. Sir Francis Crane contented himself with a simple F. C., one a-top the other, as his identification. Philip de Maecht, he whose family went from Holland to England as tapissiers, directed at Mortlake the weaving of a part of the celebrated Vulcan and Venus series, and his monogram can be seen on The Expulsion of Vulcan from Olympus (coloured plate facing page 170), owned by Mrs. A. von Zedlitz, as well as in the other rare Vulcan pieces owned by Philip Hiss, Esq. This same Philip de Maecht worked under De Comans in Paris, he having been decoyed thence by the wise organisers of Mortlake.

The marks on tapestries are as numerous as the marks on china or silver, and the absence of marks confronts the hunter of signs with baffling blankness, as is the case of many very old wares, whether china, silver or tapestries. Also, late work of poor quality is unmarked. Having thus disposed of the situation, it remains to identify the marks when they exist. The exhaustive works of the French writers must be consulted for this pleasure. There are hundreds of known signs, but there exist also many unidentified signs, yet the presence of a sign of any kind is a keen joy to the owner of a hanging which displays it.