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It has created tapestries and brocades for castle and palace, and invented cheap substitutes for these costly products, so that the smallest and poorest house as well as the richest can cover its walls with something pleasant to the eye and suggestive to the mind.
And along the shore front docks had been built, there were business warehouses and shipping plying to and fro, for the trade with more southern ports was brisk. There were some noted taverns where one might see foreign sailors, and shops that displayed curious goods. There was damask Floreells silk, brocades and lutestrings done up in fair boxes, as you found when you entered.
The Murison pearls and the famous diamond tiara that her father had given her mother years ago had come to Annie, but they were eclipsed by the Von Behrens family jewels, and these were all hers, with the laces, and the ivories, and the brocades. Life could give nothing more to Annie, but not many women would have made so much of what Annie had.
It was no wonder, then, that her countenance bore marks of the keenest anxiety as she trod the halls of that dim old mansion, with its dusky corners rich with bronzes and the glimmering shine of ancient brocades, breathing suggestions of loss and wrong; or bent her wrinkled forehead to gaze from the windows for the coming of one whose footsteps were ever delayed.
The dearly purchased gold was thus lightly squandered by many, while others, more prudent, melted their portion into sword-hilts, into scabbards, even into whole suits of armor, darkened, by precaution, to appear made entirely of iron. The brocades, laces, and jewelry of Antwerp merchants were converted into coats of mail for their destroyers.
He informed Heemskerk of the arrival in the straits of Malacca of an immense Lisbon carrack, laden with pearls and spices, brocades and precious-stones, on its way to Europe, and suggested an attack. It is true that the roving Hollander merely commanded a couple of the smallest galleots, with about a hundred and thirty men in the two.
"Now, as for this pretty doll, my little Alice," said Grandfather, "I wish you could have seen what splendid dresses the ladies wore in those times. They had silks, and satins, and damasks, and brocades, and high head-dresses, and all sorts of fine things. And they used to wear hooped-petticoats, of such enormous size that it was quite a journey to walk round them."
Venice indeed was practically an Oriental city; her skilled workmen learned their arts in Egypt and Mesopotamia; her bazaars were filled with the products of the East, with the dimity and other cloths and silks and brocades of Damietta, Alexandria, Tinnis, and Cairo, cotton from Ba'lbekk, silk from Baghdād, atlas satin from Ma'din in Armenia; and she introduced to Europe not only the products of the East, but their very names.
The objects were of Japanese manufacture, and consisted of specimens of rich brocades and silks; of their famous lacquered ware, such as chow-chow boxes, tables, trays, and goblets, all skilfully wrought and finished with an exquisite polish; of porcelain cups of wonderful lightness and transparency, adorned with figures and flowers in gold and variegated colors, and exhibiting a workmanship that surpassed even that of the ware for which the Chinese are remarkable.
All Europe, in this same period of the Renaissance, had been undergoing to a greater or less degree this social transformation, but the looms of Valencia and Granada furnished the silks and brocades which other countries bought with eagerness, and Spain may be considered very properly as the home of all this courtly show.
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