Verdure, 1545

Museum Tucherschloss und Hirsvogelsaal, HI Te 002
Tapestry /verdure with doubled alliance coats of arms of Tucher and Straub, 1545

The tapestry was made for the initial furnishing of Tucherschloss and shows two coats of arms of the couple who built it, Lorenz II Tucher and Katharina Straub. The arms of alliance, framed by leaf wreaths with a band around them, each bear the date 1545. A crane, squirrel and jumping hare, two bulbous vases shimmer through the strong foliage on the meadow with flowers and animals at the bottom.

Tapestries depicting coats of arms were virtually obligatory in princely collections. Ideally, they represented the rank and power of their owners and could be placed anywhere as mobile objects. Not infrequently they were produced as larger series, such as the Emperor Karl V eight-part series made in Brussels around 1540. (Wien, Kunsthistorisches Museum).

Nine more tapestries have been preserved with this verdure, some of which were woven based on the same cartoons (HI Te 003 to HI Te 011). The weavers only made minor adjustments in each of the different pieces. One of the verdures (HI Te 007) has a so far undeciphered weaver’s mark and the town mark from Enghien (Hainaut). The uniform use of the same template cartoons allows the origin of all tapestries in this series to be localised to Enghien, which experienced its great heyday in the middle of the 16th century and produced numerous verdures with coats of arms.

Andrea Mayerhofer-Llanes