| Description |
“Section of a tunic neck band (?) (sic). The fragment is a polychrome band with one plain border and one jeweled border of rectangular ‘gems’ in plain settings. The design motifs are flower sprays and a nude female dancer with a narrow, green scarf draped over her left arm and a basket or cornucopia of flowers held in her raised right hand. The figure and the borders are worked in beige, light green, and black on a dark rose-red ground. The band is woven in tapestry on linen warp with wool and linen weft, 10 x 58 [warp : weft per square cm]. One border is worked in such a manner as to give a three-dimensional effect, accomplished by overpacking (sic) the weft, thus causing the surface to pucker. There is a double row of twining on one end. All yarn is S-twist. Ninth or tenth century. Remarks: The piece was reused in antiquity. Nudity, as mentioned earlier [CAS 0389-2539], had connotations of purity. A tunic fragment in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art acc. no. 38.753, is decorated with a nude woman dancing in an area defined by a representation of a chain supporting a jeweled cross (Thompson 1971:82-83). [Regarding textiles in this group, DL Carroll # 41-72 (CAS 0389-2382, -2384, -2389, -2390, -2391, -2392, -2393, -2396, -2399, -2401, -2405, -2409, -2410, -2411, -2414, -2415, -2416, -2417, -2419, -2420, -2422, -2423, -2424, -2427, -2434, -2435, -2436, -2453, -2454, -2457, -2579, -2580, -2581, -2582, -2599):] After the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century, Coptic textile design changed its character, moving ever more distant from its classical Roman and Greek sources. In part, this was a reaction against Byzantine culture, associated in the Coptic mind with oppression. Contributing to the change may have been Islamic prohibitions against depicting human and animal figures. Such figures when they appear in Coptic textiles of the later periods become increasingly abstract to the point of being virtually unrecognizable.†[From Looms and Textiles of the Copts by Diane Lee Carroll (San Francisco, CA: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 11, 1988); Catalog # 54, pp. 136, 160.] |
