BRUGES, EARLY 16TH CENTURY

The woven inscription with its dedication to St. Anatoile of Salins, together with its portrayal of an elderly woman receiving a blessing, suggests this tapestry is a rendition of number ten from a series of fourteen entitled ‘The Tapestries of St Anatoile’; the original series commissioned in 1502-06 by the canons of the collegiate church of Salins for the church choir. In the surviving archival material, held in the Archives départmentales du Jura, emphasis is laid on the Scottish origin of St. Anatoile, repeatedly described in the tapestries as ‘fils du roi d’Escoce’ / 'son of the king of Scotland' (B. Coombs, ‘The tapestries of St Anatoile (1502-1506): Burgundian perceptions of a ‘Scottish’ saint and the royal house of Scotland at the turn of the sixteenth century’, The Innes Review, 2019, pp. 1-2). Number ten in the series is described in the documentation as: ‘Comment les pauvres creatures, comme les possedés de l’ennemi, comme aussi les aveugles, boiteux, sourds et aultres entechis de diverse maladies, qui se sont rendus et rendent audit saint et le visitent devotement, s’en sont retournés et retournent guaris et quictes de leur douleurs et maladies’ / ‘How poor creatures, like the possessed, and also the blind, lame, deaf and others afflicted by various diseases, who went to the saint and visited him devoutly returned healed of their pains and diseases’ (ibid., p. 7). The inscription on the fourteenth and last tapestry in the series, as recorded in the archives, states: ‘Ces quatorze pieces de tapis furent a Burges [Bruges] faits et construits a l’hostel de Jehan Sauvage en incarnation a nostre usage l’an 1501, et furent pour Saint Anathoille, evesque de Constantinople, fils du roi d’escosse’ / ‘These fourteen tapestry panels were made in Bruges at the workshop of Jean Sauvage in 1501 and dedicated to St. Anatoile, bishop of Constantinople and son of the king of Scotland’. Only three tapestries from the original series survive, numbers eight, twelve and thirteen, now in the Louvre, and these, similarly to the one offered here, include an explanatory text in French, but additionally a roman numeral to denote the number in the series (G. Delmarcel, E. Durverer, Bruges et La Tapisserie, Bruges, 1987, pp. 170-179; fig. 2/1). The remainder of the set was commandeered by the Revolution, and used to wrap rifles sent to the army in 1793 (Coombs, op.cit., p. 3). Evidently, at least two other versions of panels from this series were woven, likewise in Bruges, but to different cartoons/designs; a copy of number twelve from the series, ‘Levée du siège de Dijon in 1513’, is in the Dijon museum. The borders of the Dijon example, and those of this tapestry differ from each other, and are not the same as the three tapestries in the Louvre. However, as possibly the only rendition of this subject from this series, this tapestry is of great historical importance.