Chasuble

Unknown

16th century · Silk with metal thread or nué · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This tabard-like garment is a priest's chasuble. Probably tailored in the seventeenth century, it combines a very fine, high-quality white silk damask with older, repurposed sixteenth-century needlework. This beautifully worked embroidery on a red velvet ground provided an orphrey strip on the chasuble's reverse, decorated with figures of the Virgin and Child, John the Baptist, and Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata, each set within niches. In the mid-twentieth century, the orphrey strip from the chasuble's front (16.32.321b) was repurposed a second time, removed from this garment and temporarily applied to another, fragmentary sixteenth-century chasuble (56.166a,b).

Artist

Unknown

Date

16th century

Medium

Silk with metal thread or nué

Culture

Italian or Spanish

Department

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Credit line

Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1916