Much of the spectacle of the fifteenth-century French throne came from the cloth that hung behind the sitter rather than the chair. The ciel and dossier formed a ceiling and backdrop that delineated the ruler within a space of significance. The composition and scale of these objects described in textual sources is wide-ranging but all invariably are luxurious. The canopy extended the body of the user, often holding a material connection to their dress (The Banquet of Charles IV, Grandes Chroniques de France, Ms. fr.2813, fol. 473v, 1378, BNF), obliterating the self, breaking down the interface between the person and their surroundings, not to camouflage, but to extend the remit of the body and authorial power. The canopy stands between dress and micro-architecture, demanding a method that approaches costume and furnishing within a coherent visual and material system (Weddigen, Van Tilburg 2011). These ciel and dossier are numerous in royal and ducal inventories; made of silk, often embroidered and occasionally tapestry, their performative and recyclable nature have left very few extant today (The Dais of Charles VII, Louvre). Ciel and dossier have close parallels in church inventories in the frontier, and dossier that hung above and below the altar, framing the sacred space at the epicentre of the church and characterising it to suit the movements of the liturgical calendar. Here too, the richness recorded in textual sources is hard to envisage when the survival of such objects is inconsistent and fragmentary.
The Three Coronation Tapestry was made to hang above an altar, it depicts the coronation of Mary at the centre flanked by two Old Testament types featuring Queens and thrones. Its design suggests a self-consciousness of the role of dossiers straddling the ceremonial dressing of the altar and the spectacle of an enthroned ruler. While it reframes the altar as the throne of the Virgin, both representing and re-enacting enthronement, it has a secondary agenda concerning the throne of France. Made for the Cardinal of Lyon between 1476-88, Charles II of Bourbon, its abundance of bejewelled courtiers bonds this tapestry to a courtly idiom: It was most likely made with reference to the Cardinal’s sister-in-Law, Anne de Beaujeu, who was striving for regency of France on behalf of her brother Charles VIII. This tapestry offers a fulcrum to explore the overlapping use of canopies in courtly and heavenly construction of power. The textile canopy is an understudied object type at the boundary of architecture and dress. To see what we have been missing by overlooking it, my approach re-examines the source to distinguish what this medium can tell us that other sources cannot.
keywords: spatial dramaturgy, textility, extending bodies, constructing sovereignty
Cleland, Elizabeth. “Small-Scale Devotional Tapestries” Decorative Arts 16, (Spring-Summer 2009): 115-140.
Kiening, Christian and Martina Stercken, ed. Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Brepolis, 2019.
Weddigen, Tristan, ed. Metatextile: Identity and History of a Contemporary Art Medium, Berlin, 2010.
Weigert, Laura. Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity, Cornell, 2004.
Jessica Gasson
https://courtauld.ac.uk/people/jessica-gasson/
PhD student, The Courtauld Institute (September 2020-April 2024)
Thesis Title: Woven Complexity: Understanding the textiles represented at the Burgundian Court, c.1420-c.1490
Supervisor, Professor Susie Nash, CHASE funded
Teaching Co-ordinator and TA The Courtauld Institute (2021-22)
Collection Cataloguer, National Museum of Scotland (2019-2020)
MA Fine Art: First Class Honours, Edinburgh University (2013-2018)
Much of the spectacle of the fifteenth-century French throne came from the cloth that hung behind the sitter rather than the chair. Between architecture and dress, the ciel and dossier delineated the ruler within a space of significance. The canopy is an understudied object type; this paper explores what we have missed by overlooking it. The Three Coronation Tapestry’s design suggests a self-consciousness of the role of dossiers straddling the ceremonial dressing of the altar and the enthronement of a ruler and offers a fulcrum to explore the canopy’s role in constructing courtly and heavenly power.