AUDENARDE.Fantastic animals Exceptional,... - Lot 36 - FEE - Stanislas Machoïr

  2. Result
  3. AUDENARDE.Fantastic animals Exceptional,... - Lot 36 - FEE - Stanislas Machoïr
  4. Lot n° 36 
Lot n° 36
Go to lot
Estimation :
20000 - 30000 EUR
AUDENARDE.Fantastic animals Exceptional,... - Lot 36 - FEE - Stanislas Machoïr
AUDENARDE.Fantastic animals Exceptional, very important, fine and rare tapestry from Audenarde (Flanders), 1st part of the 16th century. In silk and wool. Renaissance period. Some oxidation and natural wear. Restorations of maintenance. Nice freshness of the colors. Woven in Brussels in the second half of the 16th century. Height 280cm - Width 430cm Woven in Brussels in the second half of the XVIth century, the tapestry looks more like a bestiary mixing: animals of our countries, fantastic and exotic animals in an exuberant and wild composition. The XVI° century sees prospering the wars of religion and the birth of the great discoveries. Artists (English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Flemish) went to Italy and came back with new ideas and techniques. Charles V and Francis I alternated periods where they fought each other with periods where they competed more peacefully through their common passions: hunting and tapestries. In this turbulent century, where religious schisms were tearing Europe apart, they tried to find new explanations of the world and of myths, in often symbolic descriptions of nature. Thus, beyond the simple representation of marvellous landscapes, inspired by the zoology plates in vogue, the Flemish weavers wanted to illustrate moral stories. Sometimes these animals are engaged in a battle with a relationship to Christ or the human soul. Thus: Good and Evil, God and Devil, weak and strong, are embodied in the features of real, exotic, mythological or sometimes monstrous animals. Here, the tapestry is more fabulous than the 8 panels of the Serrant Castle hanging or even the 44 panels of the 3 Jagiellonian hangings of Wawel. The landscape with luxuriant vegetation, where tree ferns rub shoulders with palm trees and other plants, presents us on the left in the foreground: a dragon fighting a phoenix, is it to suggest the fight of the devil against Christ who died and will resurrect (concomitance between the time of Easter and the astrological sign of Aries, March 21-April 20). This fight takes place under the gaze of an elephant bird (Aepyornis Maximus, measuring in reality 2.50m high), a fabulous animal, a species now extinct, which lived in Madagascar and whose discovery by the Portuguese in the year 1500, undoubtedly impressed the European populations of the time. Just to his right a red ibis, fire bird par excellence, looking for its food in a swamp on the edge of which a moorhen defends its nest against a monitor. On the far right a ram seems to be there as if to represent the astrological sign to which this panel is attributed. In the background, in the undergrowth, we can see a marsupial, which was a very strange animal at that time for the inhabitants of Flanders, and on the whole width going to the left, many more "common" animals: ducks, deer, unicorn, owl, squirrel, wild boar, wolf-hawk (lynx), deer, lion, heron, wolf, rabbit, and even an aurochs, to signify that this is the world in which we live In the rich borders, which cleverly overflow onto the main panel, grotesques, birds and other animals and characters, fruits and flowers, each more extraordinary than the next, and astrological signs appear. Without doubt the author of these cartoons, probably from
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue