A Catalan Tapestry in New York?

Abstract

In 1928, after visiting an exhibition of tapestries in the Manufacture des Gobelins, Marthe Crick-Kuntziger could not resist the "pleasure" of posing the following hypothesis: that an altar frontispiece with the instruments of the Passion aligned over a flowery background, completely woven in gold and silver thread, was produced in Spain, specifically in Barcelona. As it turns out, this appraisal had already been made by Lluís Tramoyeres, who had contemplated the work eighteen years previously in a retrospective exhibition of Valencian art, and who considered that it must be of Catalan manufacture.1 In any case, this suggestive conjecture has been widely refuted. The objective of this short paper is to recuperate it and refine it: the tapestry, currently preserved in the MMA (acc. no. 52.34), must have been manufactured in the Crown of Aragon around 1480-1510, perhaps in the workshop of the master weaver Joan Marroquí.