#emmacormack

[professorpski]

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilemuseum St. Gallen

This well-illustrated book edited by Emma Cormack and Michele Majer accompanied an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center gallery and was named best art book of 2022 by the New York Times. It is a serious study in multiple chapters by various authors covering the rise of lace as an industry in early modern Europe, going through the centuries and the different traditions and countries, up to the modern era. If you are interested in the development of lace, you will find it fascinating. It is being sold at a substantial discount online when I last checked.

Here you see a woodcut from 1556 that offers up a pattern for lace; then a needle-lace and bobbin-lace collar which may be date from 1600 and or 1880, which is the most intriguing dating; a portrait from the chapter on how lace showed up--stiff and regal--in Spanish portraits in the 16th and 17th; lastly bobbin-lace coverlet from Brussels which has palm trees as well as the more common flora.

The exhibition can still accessed online here and it offers many images as well as some video of lace-making: https://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/threadsofpower/