Title

The Vices Beset the Man. Tapestry from the Cathedral of Palencia

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Object history

On March 18, 1519, when the canons of the cathedral of Palencia met, "the said gentlemen ordered the treasurer and workers to buy up to two hundred and fifty rings of the tapestry that they deemed necessary for the said church due to the lack and need for it", documentation contained in the chapter minutes preserved in the archives of the cathedral of Palencia. According to what is stated, the temple had a shortage of cloths and, considering that their possession brought magnificence, they wanted to acquire them. Taking into account that a Castilian vara has 1.2 Flemish anas ("çinco varas de Castilla por seys anas de Flandes", according to the documents in the General Archive of Simancas), and that a vara, three feet, is 835.905 mm, it was about one hundred square meters of tapestry.

The disposition does not specify how many tapestries were to be acquired, although from the dimensions they had, about sixty anas each (about twenty-five square meters), it seems that they had already decided that they were going to buy four cloths. This must have been so because in 1524 it is noted that there were "quatro tapices grandes nuevos buenos de LX anas de ras", representing the story of the Vices and Virtues. Given the time it took to manufacture a cloth, it is more than likely that they were not commissioned, but were acquired from a merchant, perhaps at the important Feria de Medina del Campo, and hence before five years had elapsed since the purchase agreement, they were documented in the cathedral.

We do not know how much they cost, but due to their size they must have cost a considerable sum. However, fifteen years after their acquisition, the former bishop of Palencia, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, died as bishop of Burgos, and left to his last see and to that of Palencia two sets of four cloths each. Those of Bishop Fonseca were of a larger size "quatro tapices grandes de ochenta anas" and in 1624 were inventoried as "historias del Testamento Viejo y Nuevo" (stories of the Old and New Testament).

The cloths purchased according to the agreement of 1519, although lacking marks for their style, were manufactured in Brussels around 1515. After their entry into the cathedral of Palencia, they must have continued to hang in the cathedral, although there is no information that allows us to know where, since they continued to fulfill their task of giving magnificence, while the four donated by Bishop Fonseca were placed in the chapter house, where they remain today.

In the first decades of the 20th century the traffic of Spanish works of art was considerable. Without a law to protect the patrimony, each owner did what he considered and if juicy profits were obtained from their sale, there were no qualms about getting rid of the pieces. In the case of the tapestries of the cathedral of Palencia, it seems that the first interested party was Lionel Harris (1862-1943), founder of The Spanish Art Gallery (London), one of the main international antique dealers of works of art from Spain. Harris was after the cloths treasured by the cathedral of Burgos, especially the four donated by Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, two of which were eventually sold, although not to Harris, and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Harris had also shown interest in the Palencia Cathedral tapestries, although they were finally acquired by the art dealer Arthur Byne (1884-1935) for the American magnate William R. Hearst. Byne, in 1928, drew attention to the Flemish cloths of the temple, and it seems that he then dealt with the secretary of the bishopric. Three years later he received a letter from the dean of the cathedral in which he offered him four cloths: "1931. Dean of Palencia offered set of four Gothic tapestries by letter to S. A. G. Asked 120.000 ptas each. Bought By Hearst" (Archivo José A. Buces, Books Lionel and Tomás Harris, Book II, Palencia).

However, the transaction was being done in secret, for while the dean of the cathedral was negotiating its sale, this was denied by the chapter representative, Matías Vielva, present at the session of the Provincial Commission of Monuments of Palencia, where the rumor circulating about the possibility that the chapter was in negotiations to sell several tapestries was debated. Vielva stated that the canons only wanted to know the value of the tapestries, but in no case to sell them. This was not true, as the four tapestries were eventually sold to Arthur Byne, who sold them to Hearst. Hearst paid for them for $112,500, an amount he paid in two disbursements to Byne, on March 1 and September 17, 1935, to which must be added the expenses derived from their export: $114,665.53. (Hearst Archive at the C. W. Post Center). The sale was consummated without the Dirección General de Bellas Artes having any news of it until the tapestries were out of Spain.

Byne convinced Hearst to buy the tapestries with an argument that was false, although perhaps the dealer did not know it. There was some confusion between the four cloths still in the cathedral and these to determine their provenance. Byne argued that they were those given by Bishop Fonseca, when in fact they were not, since they are the ones that are exhibited in the chapter house today; however, both hangings were manufactured in Flanders at the same time, in the second decade of the 16th century, and had similar themes: those acquired by Hearst show the struggle between the Vices and the Virtues and those that remain in the cathedral of Palencia were part of a series that although in the inventory of the seventeenth century was called the Old and New Testament, in reality show the story of the Redemption of Man; those preserved in Palencia are the Vices lead Man to sin, Christ the Savior as a Child, the Virtues defy the Vices when Christ begins his ministry and Christ ascends to Heaven and Man is redeemed before God, which are numbers 2, 5, 6 and 9 of the series of ten cloths that belonged to Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca.

This theme of vices or sins and virtues became very popular in Flemish tapestry from the end of the 15th century. Based on French and German devotional literature, with very influential authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux or Ludolph of Saxony, the representation of sinful Man and his fall from grace to redemption thanks to the arrival of Jesus Christ, with the final triumph of the Virtues, was repeated many times although with differences. These are based on the merchants' interest in variety in order to find a greater number of buyers, which led them to introduce or eliminate characters from the original cartons, but also to the demands of the customers who often wanted to enlarge or reduce a series, so that the scenes had to be rearranged.

From a formal point of view, the Vices and Virtues panels do not differ from the medieval aesthetics, which involved bringing together many characters and different episodes in the same panel. However, there is a dissimilarity between the tapestries of the 15th century and those of the early 16th century due to the incorporation of a border, usually with vegetal elements. The cloths of the cathedral of Palencia bought by Hearst were auctioned after the collapse of his empire. In one of the catalogs for the sale of the magnate's collection, published by Gimbel's in 1941, the four tapestries from Palencia appear (Art objects an Furnishings from the William Randolph Hearst Collection. Presented by Gimbel Brothers New York in cooperation with Saks Fifth Avenue. Under the Direction of Hammer Galleries, New York, 1941, numbers 1203-4, p. 84). Shortly thereafter, in 1943, they were sold to French & Co. of New York for $17,250, a price well below what Hearst had paid years earlier. In 1964 they were acquired by the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire (Musée du Cinquantenaire) in Brussels, thus closing the journey of these tapestries, which were manufactured in Brussels and passed to the cathedral of Palencia, to travel to the U.S. and finally back to Brussels.

Description

Humanity beset by the Seven Deadly Sins

Fifty human and animal figures occupy practically the entire tapestry. The cartoonist follows the late medieval aesthetic, but in the center he places some dancing figures inspired by those contained in The Parnassus by Andrea Mantegna, circa 1496-97, which was popularized by an engraving by the same author, Four Dancing Muses (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), which shows an incipient influence of Italian forms.

Despite this borrowing from the Renaissance, the figures, in general, follow inherited schemes and their distribution in groups has not changed since the 15th century. In the lower left part there is a group of young people enjoying the pleasure of music and conversation; in the upper part the young people show their carefreeness and happiness while reading and conversing and there are gallant couples. However, the dancers, scantily clad and sensual, announce the tragedy that lurks. On the right side of the cloth, the Seven Deadly Sins burst forth decisively. These vices that disrupt human goodness were already described in classical antiquity, but it was Pope Gregory the Great who reduced them to seven: lust, pride, anger, envy, greed, sloth and gluttony, a classification that was accepted by St. Thomas in the thirteenth century and that had wide influence in the late medieval world.

The vices, or sins, are represented except for one case with female figures, which was common at that time. The group is led by pride, the mother of all sins, mounted on a dromedary and wearing a royal crown and holding a scepter; a male figure armed with a long spear seems to open the retinue. In the foreground, lust is shown: a woman riding a pig and looking at herself in a mirror in reference to her beauty and ability to arouse desire in men. Above her another woman on a donkey and wearing a monkey on her back, shows an inscription on the bottom of her dress: "acedia", which identifies her as laziness, or acidia. In an upper register there are two female figures riding, one a lion-like animal with claws, but with a human face, representing envy, and immediately behind a monster with a menacing crocodile mouth mounted by a woman who bears the inscription "ira", so there is no doubt who she represents. Between lust and envy appears greed. She is the only male figure; she carries a bag of money in her left hand and a rich cup in her right. A woman with a well-developed chest, placed between pride and sloth represents gluttony.

With small variations there are replicas of this cloth in the Museum of Tapestries of La Seo in Zaragoza or in Hampton Court, the palace of Cardinal Wolsey, of which only the right part is preserved but with an inscription in Latin that refers to evil and how the sins it entails are represented in the cloth.

Locations

• 1519 - 1935

  cathedral

  Palencia Cathedral, Palencia (Spain)

• 1935

  dealer/antiquarian

  Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley Byne, Madrid (Spain) *

• 1935 - 1943

  private collection

  Collection of William R. Hearst, New York (United States) *

• 1943 - 1964

  dealer/antiquarian

  French & Company, New York (United States) *

• 1964 - present

  museum

  Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, Brussels (Belgium)