MIDDLE-RHINE, POSSIBLY MAINZ, LATE 15TH CENTURY

This important tapestry depicting the arms of the four noble families Schwalbach, Rolshausen, Buseckh (Buchseck or Busseck) and Hohenweissel forms part of a set that included at least two further apparently identical tapestries that were formerly in the collection of Albert Figdor (d. 1927), one of the greatest Viennese collectors of the pre-World War II period. Betty Kurth in Die deutschen Bildteppiche des Mittlealters, 1926, p. 148 ff., plate 182, illustrates these two additional tapestries which seem to have been in a distressed condition. She mentions that they originally formed part of the collection of a 'Dorfkirche' (village church) near Giessen (Kloster Hachborn), just north of Frankfurt but that the panels were purchased by Figdor from Schloss Eisenbach near Lauterbach.
It is interesting to note that the use of several representational coat-of-arms in a tapestry appear also in a group of four hangings that were formerly in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, and which are also attributed to 1450-75 and the middle-Rhine region based on the coat-of-arms (Drache, Greif und Liebesleut, Mainzer Bildteppiche aus spätgotischer Zeit, Mainz am Rhein, 2000, p. 28, fig. 20). Other tapestries of this type include one, albeit of simpler weave, attributed to Halberstadt, in lower Saxony, and 1520, which was in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, and another formerly in the collection of Albert Figdor which is attributed to Brunswick or Westphalia and circa 1600. (H. Göbel, Wandteppiche, Die Germanischen und Slawischen Länder, Leipzig, 1934, part 3, vol. II, fig. 70 and 74b, respectively).