Lampas Bizarre
Venice 1705
77.5 x 121cms
Red Silk, with gold
This extraordinary textile with an incredibly bold design of undulating plant forms was used by the Church for a Cloak for a statue of the Virgin. It relates to Catalogue no. 70 The Abegg-Stiftung Riggisberg Volume 1 Bizarre Seiden.
Lampas is a type of luxury fabricwith a background weft (a 'ground weave') typically in taffeta with supplementary wefts (the 'pattern wefts') laid on top and forming a design, sometimes also with a 'brocading weft'. Lampas is typically woven in silk, and often has gold and silver thread enrichment.
Bizarre Silks are a style of figured silk fabricspopular in Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Bizarre silks are characterized by large-scale, asymmetricall patterns featuring geometrical shapes and stylized leaves and flowers, influenced by a wave of Asian textiles and decorative objects reaching the European market in these decades. Bizarre silks were used for both clothing and furnishings. As a description, the term was first used by Dr. Vilhelm Sloman in the title of a book, Bizarre Designs in Silks published in 1953 in Copenhagen.
