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But in Paris in 1302, by instigation of the Provost Pierre le Jumeau, there were associated with these tapissiers or workmen, ten others, for the purpose of making high-warp tapestry, and these were bound with all sorts of oaths not to depart from the strict manner of proceeding in this valued handicraft.
Pity it is, the time had not been long enough for more remains of it to have come to us than those that scantily supply museums. After the Gothic perfection came the great change made in Flanders by the introduction of the Renaissance. It came through the excellence of the weavers. It was not the worth of the artists that brought Brussels its greatest fame, but the humbler work of its tapissiers.
But this little city, too, had to go down before the hard conditions of the Conqueror. Louis XI, in 1477, possessed himself of the town after the death of the last-famed Burgundian duke, Charles the Bold, and under his eccentric persecutions the guild of weavers scattered. He saw too late his mistake. But other towns benefited by it, towns whither the tapissiers fled with their art.
There is always preserved a staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that; and the tapissiers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State consumes the products. That is the Republic's way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings.
Therefore, a tapestry under approximately thirteen feet might escape the order. But that was the day of large tapestries, the day of the Italian cartoonists, and important pieces reached that measure. The guild of the tapissiers in Brussels, once started on restrictions, drew article after article, until it seemed that manacles were put on the masters' hands.
But there was also a chef d'atelier who was an artist weaver, and he directed this matter and all others when the artist of the cartoons was not present. Under him were the tapissiers who did the actual weaving, and under these, again, were the apprentices, who began as boys and served three years before being allowed to try their hands at a "'prentice job" or essay at finished work.
The weavers, the tapissiers of that far-away time in Flanders are intensely appealing now when their beautiful work hangs before us to-day. They send us a friendly message down through the centuries.
But that is just where the fault lay and continued, the inability of the Gobelins ateliers to understand that the two must not be confused. The same false idea that caused Winterhalter's portraits to be copied, gave to the modern tapissiers the paintings of the high Renaissance to reproduce.
Tapisseries des personnages have, as the name implies, the human figure as the prominent part of the design. The shuttle or bobbin of the high loom is called a broche, and that of the low loom a flute. Weavers throughout Europe, whether in the Low Countries or in France, were called tapissiers, and this term was so liberal as to need explaining.
Germain, turning out from his looms productions which were of sufficient excellence to be confused with those of his father's most profitable factory. Chronologically this fact belongs later, so we return to the influence of Henri IV and the master gentleman tapissiers, De la Planche and Comans.
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