Saint Veronica

Bernard van Orley

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Small-scale devotional tapestries like this one were popular among the most elite collections of Europe. One buying trip for twelve such textiles cost Queen Isabella of Castile the equivalent to ten years of the salary she paid the ship’s master on Christopher Columbus’s transatlantic voyage in 1492. A tapestry comparable in size and subject to this one belonged to Isabella’s granddaughter, the Habsburg Queen Catherine of Portugal. The sixteenth-century appeal of this tapestry lay in the skill of its weavers—who rendered the folds of Veronica’s mantle in silver thread, tackling the challenging effect of watery reflections—and in its compelling design. The life-size Veronica, head overlapping the border, seems to step out of the textile and into our space. [Elizabeth Cleland, 2017]

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art