“Patchwork” is a loaded term in some circles. It is so associated with modern American-style patchwork that it can be a shock to learn that although “written records are few and far between… patchwork is a more ancient occupation than can be proved by any record; it must have come before writing.” Even more surprising, the technique usually associated with humble housewives piecing scrap blankets for their families was once the means to produce luxury clothing, domestic items, and equipment for European nobility. The evidence is scattered, and only a handful of examples survive, but patchwork was known and practiced for hundreds of years before the first calico quilt was every pieced.
Like quilting, patchwork seems to have come to Europe along the Silk Road. The first surviving examples were found by Sir Marc Aurel Stein in the Cave of Thousand Buddhas in Dun Huang along the Silk Road. The cave had been a major pilgrimage site and was crammed with well preserved fabric and wood artifacts thanks to the dry climate. Most of the finds were dated to between 600 and 900 CE. The most significant textile finds included votive hangings carefully pieced of rectangular scraps of silk brocade and damask torn from pilgrims’ garments, patchwork banners, and a small silk relic bag. The relic bag, pieced in rows of squares and triangles, is so elaborately pieced that it could be Victorian fancywork rather than the labor of a long-dead monk.
Patchwork first seems to have made it to continental Europe by the late 12th century. A French poem, La Lai del Desire, describes a bridal bed as being deck with a “quilt…of a check-board pattern of two sorts of silk cloth, well-made and rich…Around appears the new flower” – clearly patchwork, with either an embroidered or appliqued border. Moreover, the poem shows enough familiarity with the British Isles that it may have been written by a resident of Scotland or England. This implies that patchwork was familiar at least in court circles no later than 1200, possibly much earlier.
The first widespread use of piecing in medieval Europe seems to have been in heraldry and heraldic garments. Fields grew more elaborate as more and more families began claiming arms, and what better way to depict countercharged arms on a banner than to piece them? The most famous example of this is possibly the quilted and pieced jupon of Edward, the Black Prince (1330-1375). When he died young in 1375, his grieving father had his helmet, sword, shield, and jupon, or quilted jacket, raised over his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. They remained there until removed for safekeeping during the Second World War, when they were examined, conserved, and replaced with exact replicas in the late 1940s.
The jupon itself had faded badly after nearly six hundred years’ exposure to air, sunlight, candle smoke, and a narrow escape at the hands of the Puritans, but close examination proved that it had originally been pieced of quartered dark red and royal blue silk velvet, with the royal arms of England embroidered on linen and appliquéd in place. The entire garment was heavily channel quilted and stuffed with cotton for an extra layer of protection during battle.
Military patchwork was quickly followed by civilian clothing pieced in squares, rectangles, and diamonds, especially in Italy. Raphael, one of the three greatest artists of the Renaissance, included patchwork in religious art (The Mass at Bolsena, 1512) and portraits (Elisabetta Gonzaga, early 16th century), as did the Venetians Carpaccio (Knight in a Landscape, 1510; The Healing of the Possessed Man, c. 1500) and Lotto (Pieta, 1508; Woman with Drawing of Lucrece, 1530).
The greatest lover of pieced clothing among Renaissance artists was unquestionably Luca Signorelli (c. 1441-1523). Several of his greatest paintings show men in pieced hose and doublets, including two massive fresco sequences for Monteoliveto Monastery and Orvieto Cathedral. Some of the pieced clothing is so bizarre as to seem like an invention, but most is well within the Italian norm. The best known and most readily accessible Signorelli patchwork painting is his Calvary (1504), part of the Kress Collection at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. One of the soldiers tormenting the dying Christ wears a relatively subdued pieced doublet of perpendicular gold, white, and black stripes arranged in what today would be called the Split Rails pattern, while his companions are all sporting vertically pieced hose in red, yellow, white, and black. Signorelli may modeled his soldiers on a mercenary company in the latest landesknecht fashions, or possibly on the ubiquitous condottiere.
It was in the late 1490s that Signorelli went from showing the occasional bit of patchwork to truly glorying to the artistic potential inherent in the colors and patterns of patchwork. Perhaps the best example can be found in the Life of St. Benedict sequence in Monteoliveto Monastery outside of Florence (1498-1499). The fresco cycle depicts the pious legend of St. Benedict’s encounter with the barbarian ruler Totila (better known as Attila the Hun), and how Totila was converted when St. Benedict saw through his attempts to disguise his identity. Totila appears throughout the cycle with his band of warriors, all dressed in the latest Italian fashions as per the conventions of the time. Their brightly colored and patterned clothing seems to be a deliberate contrast against the stark white of St. Benedict and his monks, and may be a veiled comment on the more extreme fashions of contemporary Italy. The soldiers figure most prominently in the paintings where St. Benedict first discovers his ruse and then recognizes the real Totila.
Two paintings are particularly of note for depicting pieced clothing. The first shows two soldiers in pieced hose reacting to St. Benedict’s fury at being deceived. One wears pieced hose with puffs on the thighs and red and blue squares at the knees, while a companion’s hose are diagonally pieced in brown, red, white and blue from waist to just below the knees, then vertically striped to his feet.# The contrast with St. Benedict and his plainly dressed monks is stark, to say the least.
Signorelli saved the best for the next scene in the cycle, where St. Benedict confronts the real Totila. No fewer than five soldiers are in increasingly elaborate pieced clothing:
1. Pieced hose of red, gold, white and blue: vertical band of red and gold squares, then a strip of white, then a strip of blue;
2. Hose of ochre, black and white, with vertical stripes to below the knee and diagonal stripes below to the foot;
3. Hose of blue, red, black, ochre and white, with vertical stripes to knee and chevron stripes below;
4. Hose of red, blue and white, pieced in a chevron pattern to below knee, then appliquéd or painted flames of red on white down to foot; and, last but not least:
5. A complete outfit, each section pieced separately, as follows:
i. Left leg: vertical stripes of red and green to just below buttocks, then a white horizontal band, then red and green vertical stripes to just below knee, then garter band tied with a bow knot, then zig-zag piecing in red and blue on calf to foot;
ii. Right leg: clamshell pattern in white, black, green, gold and blue over buttocks to upper thigh, then red, gold and white horizontal stripes to just below knee, garter tied with bow knot, then calf in half red/half white vertical stripes; and
iii. Doublet: left back pieced in blue, brown and gray vertical stripes, right back in diagonal stripes, laced together with bow knots at intervals.
The frescoes are so brightly colored that some of the paintings were later altered to show the soldiers in silver plate armor that completely wrecks the contrast between the garish piecing and the severe white robes of St. Benedict’s monks. Fortunately the frescoes were restored to their splendid vulgarity so that all can wonder just how anyone, even a battle hardened mercenary, could possibly have stood to wear scratchy wool clamshells in such a delicate area.
Signorelli’s other major fresco cycle, the Apocalypse Cycle in the Brizeo Chapel in Orvieto (1499-1504), also depicts pieced clothing, albeit far less gaudy than that in the St. Benedict cycle. The colors are not so bright, nor the mix of patterns so extreme - a man in red, gold, white and blue striped hose watching the “Signs of the End of the World,” another in hose and doublet pieced of red, green, yellow, blue and white present at the “Destruction of the World” and a companion in green and gold pieced hose may seem gaudy in context, but compared to Totila’s soldiers they are positively subdued.
Northern Europe also had patchwork clothing, although the colder climate dictated less leg and more outer garment. A notable example is the gray and white checkboard cote worn by a fleeing spectator in Hans Holbein the Elder’s Retable of the Gray Passion (1498). This series of twelve paintings, now owned by Prince Joachim von Furstenburg, is done entirely in grisaille except for the faces and hands of the figures. The cote appears in a panel showing Christ emerging from the tomb, and is worn by a figure that may or may not be a thief; the piecing is in even rows of squares and rectangles, and seems to have been done by the yard rather than the garment.
The most dramatic example of Northern patchwork was never painted. The story has it that Katarina von Mecklenburg, wife of Henry the Pious of Saxony, was so religious that she refused to be painted until her husband succeeded his brother as Duke of Saxony. Unfortunately, she did not wear the amazing dress she wore on her wedding day in 1512 when she sat for her portrait:
“It was very strange and composed of several hundred pieces; the principal colors were red and yellow and there were lines half an ell in length and a quarter in width set close together, and other lines, two fingers in breadth, going crossways; parts of it looked like a chessboard and in other parts four colors had been sewn together in the form of dice, namely rose red, yellow, ash color and white. Such a dress must have caused much labor and was all patchwork.”
That such a dress would have been extraordinary goes without saying; not only does the description contain references to at least two separate piecing patterns, there is evidence that the dress may have set something of a fashion at the Saxon court. A 1513 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder shows a woman in a dress with sleeves pieced in a sawtooth pattern of red, yellow, white, and a rich chocolate brown. Although it is unlikely that these sleeves were actually part of Katarina's wedding dress, it is tempting to speculate that they were inspired by her gown.
Pieced clothing had reached the Low Countries about the time Katarina married into the Saxon ducal family. Jan Gossaert, called Mabuse, painted a servant wearing a pieced doublet into his 1510-1515 work The Adoration of the Kings. The servant stands just behind Baltasar and wears a doublet of green and white cloth, with broad bands of gold trim at the sleeves and neck. The doublet appears to be pieced of two different weaves of cloth, a smooth white and a texture green similar to a modern faille, with a pieced skirt of the textured green with yet another type of cloth in a blue gray.
A far more significant painter than Mabuse depicted pieced clothing in his work. In addition to the ubiquitous pieced hose in his paintings illustrating folk sayings, Pieter Brueghel the Elder included a jester in pieced motley in his morbidly great “Triumph of Death” (1568). Unlike most of the revelers in the painting, the jester is well aware of Death sweeping in from the left, and is shown diving under a table in a fruitless attempt to escape. His red and white pieced coat is as bright as a checked tablecloth in an Italian restaurant, and seemingly based on an actual garment; Brueghel carefully painted a separate binding on the edges of the side slits of the jester’s coat, which scarcely would have been necessary with a patterned cloth as opposed to pieced fabric.
For all this evidence of early patchwork, very little has survived. Besides the occasional heraldic or military piece, such as the Black Prince's jupon, only two precious examples of domestic piecing have come to light so far. The first is a simply pieced throne drapery found at the bottom of a refuse shaft in Budapest in 2000. The drapery, which may originally have been quilted, is of red, blue, white, and yellow silk stitched together to depict the arms of the Hungarian and Angevin dynasties. Hungarian scholars speculate that the drapery was made for a wedding between two royal families late in the 14th century; court records state that silk in the same colors was brought from Naples to Budapest around the same time, so it is quite possible that the imported Italian silk went into the heraldic cloth made to symbolize the new marital alliance.
The second survivor is far more complex, and has a much more interesting history.# Bishop Antonio degli Agli, 5th century humanist and associate of Cosimo Medici, died in 1477 and was buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria del'Impruneta, about fifteen kilometers south of Florence. His tomb remained untouched until 1944, when Allied bombs struck the church and knocked the lid off his sarcophagus. When the tomb was examined soon after the war, the church authorities found that the Bishop's head rested upon a small patchwork carella, or cushion.
The cushion, which was damaged by organic matter from the Bishop's body, is about a foot square, and may have been originally used to cradle Bishop Agli's favorite books as he read. The front is pieced of about thirty types of taffeta, satin, silk velvet, and damask in eight-pointed star patterns, while the back is pieced in a much simpler pattern in various colors of wool. Italian scholars believe that the cushion was made by Bishop Agli's niece, Deiainara degli Agli, who supervised her uncle's burial. It was conserved in 1990 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the main conservation and restoration facility in Tuscany, and is currently on display in Impruneta, along with a lacis veil found draped over Bishop Agli's face. The first article in English on this important artifact was written by yours truly and is set to be published later this year in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 8.
Patchwork quilts may or may not have been known in medieval Europe, but the skills to piece simple patterns certainly were. The pieced clothing of the late Renaissance had set the stage for the transition from pieced clothing to pieced bedclothes, which is exactly what seems to have happened. Silk patchwork was well established in northern Europe and the American colonies by the early 18th century, and was practiced by everyone from royalty to the burgeoning middle class. And though patchwork patterns certainly reached their apogee during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and Canada, there is no trace of indigenous American patchwork until well into the 1780s, with the vast majority of patchwork patterns originating in the 19th and late 20th centuries.
Although there is no way to be certain, it’s very possible that the origins of America’s greatest contribution to needlework lie in a votive bag on the Silk Road, or a Crusader’s countercharged banner. The Hungarian patchwork only surfaced in 2000, and the Impruneta cushion is all but unknown outside of Europe. Who knows what clues to the medieval patchwork tradition may wait in English country house attics, or obscure European museums?