Fragment of a Hanging
5th-6th century
- Medium
- Linen and wool, plain weave with weft uncut pile and embroidered linen pile formed by variations of back and stem stitches
- Classification
- Textile
- Dimensions
- 136.5 × 88.3 cm (53 3/4 × 34 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- Egypt
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Textiles
- Credit line
- Grace R. Smith Textile Endowment
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Because many textiles made by early Egyptians were preserved in arid tombs, a substantial number of these fabrics have survived in remarkably good condition. This striking portion of a wall hanging depicts a figure standing beneath a colonnaded, arched opening. With raised arms, which perhaps once held candelabrum, he wears a traditional tunic with clavic bands (the narrow strips extending down from the shoulders, on the front and back, to the waist or hem). This woven piece is distinguished by its large size, imposing composition, and brilliant, unfaded shades of red, green, blue, brown, and yellow. The figure’s commanding frontality, solemn expression, and animated side glance, together with the composition’s bold lines and vivid colors, relate this fragment to hauntingly realistic portrait icons. Also suggestive of icons is the three-dimensional appearance of the warrior’s face and legs and the columns—an effect much easier to achieve in painting than in weaving. Woven of indigenous materials, this hanging is composed of linen warps and wool and linen wefts that create an uncut pile against a plain-weave foundation, a fabric surface less common in Byzantine textiles than the…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
