LATE 16TH CENTURY, PROBABLY AUDENARDE

Details

A FLEMISH MYTHOLOGICAL GAME-PARK TAPESTRY
Late 16th Century, probably Audenarde
Woven in wools and silks, depicting Eurydice bitten by the Snake, with a gathering of ladies picking flowers, flanked by Eunjdice, with a deer hunt in the distance, in a wooded landscape, reduced in width, lacking borders, in later green and blue slip, patched repairs and areas of reweaving throughout, especially to left-hand side, top right-hand corner rewoven
93 in. (236 cm.) high x 133½ in. (339 cm.) wide

Special notice

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Lot Essay

Eurydice, a wood nymph and the wife of Orpheus, while fleeing from an unwelcome suitor (Aristaeus) stepped on a snake and died from its bite (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, Verses 1 - 10). It is thereafter that Orpheus descended into Hades and convinced Pluto to allow her to follow him back to earth. It was his music that swayed Pluto but she could only come under the condition that he did not look back at her until they reached the upper world. But at the last moment he did so and Eurydice vanished forever.

A similar tapestry incorporating a nearly identical figure of Eurydice, but in reverse, is illustrated in I. De Meüter and M. Vanwelden, Tapisseries d'Audenarde du XVIe au XVIIIe Siècle, Tielt, 1999, p. 178. Its borders are very closely related to tapestries that bear the Audenarde town mark; it can thus be attributed to the same weaving centre.

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