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Embroidery is essentially decorative. As illusion, it is hobbled by the pattern of stitches, which could never attain the fluidity of line and shading that paint or wash gave. Refined as it is, with its or nue or "shaded gold" method of gold thread couched with varicolored silks, a roundel like the 16th century Spanish Adoration of the Magi (based, probably, on an unidentified Renaissance painting) is almost too limited in technique for the painting style it simulated. But in flat pattern, Renaissance and later embroiderers could and did achieve magnificent results—sometimes lighthearted and almost naive, as in the wool stitching of flowers, fruits and leaves on a white linen 18th century French dalmatic (or tunic); more often, of laboriously achieved splendor: the peacock displaying the green silk and gold-and-silver cord eyes and rays of his tail on a 16th century French chasuble, or the coiling festoons of gold grapes with silk chenille leaves that some anonymous craftworker applied to a 19th century Italian vestment.
Copes, which are worn instead of the chasuble for nonEucharistic ceremonies such as marriages or baptisms, tended to have an allover, continuous design. Typical is the exaggeratedly baroque fruitings and blossomings of what appears, on an early 18th century brocade, to be the Garden of Eden, seen against a blue satin sky. But with chasubles, a different convention arose. This sprang from the tailors' way of seaming together strips of fabric, which were then reinforced with a decorative vertical band called an orphrey. Orphreys might be relatively simple—as on the Met's heavily restored 14th-15th century Spanish chasuble, with its complex design of formalized pomegranates in woven velvet split by an embroidered ornamental band with figures of St.
Lucy and St. Barbara. Or they might turn into an iconographical picnic: witness the orphrey-like cross on a heavy Dutch tapestry chasuble from 1570, depicting the children of Israel gathering manna (which floats, in white stylized roundels, from the sky), with Moses' bulrushes below, heraldic crests on both sides, and a motto that reads "We are bent, not broken by the waves."
Compared with such elaborate efforts, the most artistically significant vestments of modern times—Henri Matisse's chasubles for the chapel he designed and decorated at Vence—seem almost transparently simple: a collage of patches. Yet their airy lucidity of color, their instinctive brightness, attests to a different type, but not a lower intensity of faith.