Oriental Luxury Cloths in Late Medieval Europe. Transfer - Adaption - Reception

• Applicant: Professorin Juliane von Fircks, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 232752651

The project is focused on vestments and other textile artefacts of the 14th century preserved in European museum collections and church treasuries which were made of splendid oriental silks. They were worn and used by Popes, Emperors, kings, the aristocracy and the wealthy patricians of the major trading towns. For the first time, not only the transfer of these luxurious cloths from Asia to Europe but also the complex process of adoption by the European élite will be examined. Based on the biographies of the textile objects, the transformation from the panels of cloth leaving the loom to high-prized functional artefacts owned by European users shall be reconstructed. Further, the investigation will ask for the ways the motifs and ornaments were reinterpreted and reframed in different western contexts. It will be shown that the adoption of the foreign textile material by different social groups is an expression of the growing cross-cultural network and exchange between orient and occident in the late middle ages. To define the concrete role and the wider meaning oriental silks had in Christian Western culture the representation of foreign cloths in panel-painting, book-illumination, and literature of the time will also be examined.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants