Embroidery on velvet. Spain, 16th century

Embroidery on velvet. Spain, 16th century.
Embroidery in silver and gold thread on velvet.
Measurements: 55 x 480 cm.

The artist has embroidered on a piece of red velvet a band of imaginative grotesques presided, in the center, by a hybrid mask of monstrous aspect. This mask combines goat horns with a vegetable mustache and beard, which connects it to the medieval figure of the "Green Man", a decorative motif with a very long European tradition in all artistic genres, from architectural sculpture to manuscript illumination. Notwithstanding this iconographic connection with the Middle Ages, both the style of the mask and the rest of the vegetation is clearly Renaissance. It is basically composed of large acanthus leaves, curly and fleshy in appearance, accompanied by large flowers between which ropes are intertwined. Both the central mask and the flowers and leaves have been made in relief, that is, including under the embroidery filling material. The relief, as well as the bichrome of the silver and gold threads against the red of the background, gives a sculptural aspect to the piece, as if it were the transposition to the embroidery of an architectural bas-relief. The entire piece is framed by a band of trimmings with geometric decoration.