THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
A BRUSSELS HISTORICAL TAPESTRY FRAGMENT

Details
A BRUSSELS HISTORICAL TAPESTRY FRAGMENT
LATE 16TH EARLY 17TH CENTURY

Woven in wools and silks and depicting the siege or Tyre from the series of Alexander the Great, depicting Alexander before Tyre with an Ambassador of the city kneeling before him and with various other soldiers in the background, within foliate-trailed borders to the sides and a blue and white outer slip, re-weaving and patching, reduced in size and lacking borders, with later blue and white outer slip
107½in. x 74in. (273cm. x 188cm.)

Lot Essay

This tapestry is the ninth panel of a series of eleven tapestries chronicling the life of Alexander. The original series, woven in the late 16th Century, is preserved in the Royal Spanish Collection and is illustrated in P. Junquera de Vega, C. Herrero Carretero, Catalogo de Tapices del Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, 1986, Vol. I, pp. 248-262 (this panel being p. 258). The Spanish series was woven by Jakob Geubels I (d. 1605), Jan Raes (d. 1631) and Andre Blommaert. It is believed that the cartoonist of the series is from the circle of Michiel Coxie (d. 1592), a Flemish artist, who led the Vatican Tapestry factory with his father Barent van Orley until 1532. The story is inspired by Plutarch's Vitae illustrium virorum graecorum et romanorum and this panel shows how the Ambasssador of Tyre offers his city to Alexander the Great to avoid a siege and raid of the city. The complete panel shows Alexander's soldiers banquetting to the left

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