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| Tapestry (Flanders) Rhetoric ca. 1650-1700 silk, wool Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
Hand-woven pictorial tapestries are a burden nowadays in large museums. They require elaborate preservation. They are awkward to store and display. And the public finds them boring. Oil paintings and frescoes also present major preservation problems, of course, and also require large dedicated spaces, but the difficulties are compensated by their massive popularity. Hardly any modern person can tolerate the sight of a tapestry gallery – with its monotonous, dark, heavy sameness of tone and texture and its heavily filtered lighting – for more than a few dutiful minutes. And this despite all the historical lectures in the world pointing out that tapestries were in their day more valuable than most paintings, and more prized by most owners. Drawings, on the other hand, scarcely existed as art objects in the days when tapestries flourished. For the mainstream then, a drawing was no better than a means to an end, often destroyed in the course of producing a finished work in some other medium, or discarded at the end of the project. But the prestige of drawings has now risen (proportionally) as far as the prestige of tapestries has fallen.
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| Thomas Blanchet Doubting Thomas 1670s drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (Flanders) Crowning of Atalanta ca. 1650-85 silk, wool, gold thread Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Gilles-Marie Oppenordt Designs for three Obelisks before 1715 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (Flanders) Feast of Cleopatra ca. 1650-1700 silk, wool Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Girl with dead pigeons ca. 1765-70 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (France) Denunciation of Haman 1759 wool, silk Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Charles Le Brun Design for portière with arms of Fouquet 1659-60 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (Flanders) Birth of the Virgin 1518-19 wool, silk Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Erasmus II Quellinus Design for Triumphal Arch 1657 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (France) Feast of Esther 1764 wool, silk Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Sebastiano Ricci Infant Moses trampling on Pharoah's Crown 1720s drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Tapestry (Flanders) Music ca. 1650-1700 silk, wool Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Hendrik Goltzius Bacchus, Venus and Ceres 1606 drawing on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |