The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Bulletin

Fragment of a Tapestry Hanging (Rucklaken)
German (Upper Rhineland, Basel), about 1410-z20
Wool on linen
332I/z x 83/4 in. (85x75 cm)
The Cloisters Collection, I990
1990.Z11
This fragment of a hanging, produced about 14IO-20 by the
earliest known Basel tapestry workshop, represents a fabulous
lionlike beast with pointed teeth, clawed feet, and scaled rump.
The beast wears a collar hung with small bells and a leash that
was held in the hand of a now-missing figure. The piece was
cut from a Riicklaken, or tapestry weaving hung in a domestic
interior at frieze level. Such hangings were not only decorative
but offered a measure of warmth as well.
Our fragment was cut from the right end of a larger piece of a
Riicklaken now in the Benedictine monastery of Muri-Gries,
near Bolzano. The restored arm at the left belonged to a
stylishly dressed youth. A more complete series of fragments
based on the same cartoons is in the Historisches Museum,
Basel. Therefore we know that our Riicklaken originally consisted
of at least six highly imaginative beasts being led by
three childlike, courtly couples dressed in elaborate costumes.
These fabulous creatures, derived from those illustrated in
the Physiologus and bestiaries, are symbols of vices related to
concupiscence. That they are tethered or otherwise subdued
suggests that the couples posed with them have likewise tamed
their libidinous cravings, but the childlike aspect of the couples
and the whimsically patterned beasts suggest a certain insouciance
and an unaffectedness that make the apparent innocents
seem very much at home with their natural desires in the
surrounding idealized and untrammeled world.
Our fragment and the pieces in Basel and Bolzano are, in
terms of conservation, technique, and completeness, the finest
of the early Basel group to survive.
TBH
Ex coll.: Benedictine Abbey of Muri, Canton Aargau (until I841);
Peter Vischer-Passavant, Schloss Wildenstein, near Bubendorf,
Baselland; by descent to Peter Vischer-Milner-Gibson (until I989).
Bibliography: Rudolf F Burckhardt, Gewirkte Bildteppiche des XV.
und XVI. Jahrhunderts im Historisches Museum zu Basel, Leipzig,
1923, pp. 8-9, fig. 9; Bette Kurth, Die Deutsche Bildteppiche des
Mittelalters, Vienna, I9z6, vol. i, pp. 85-86, z12-213; vol. 2,
pl. z29c; Important European Sculpture and Works of Art (sale cat.),
Sotheby's, London, July 3, I990, pp. 6z-64, lot I iob.