Label
During the Renaissance, ornamental needlework emerged as a craft for women of leisure to display personal accomplishment and refinement.
Religious subjects were favored by European embroiderers through the nineteenth century. The Holy Family's Rest on the Return from Egypt, shown here, is a late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century work embroidered on silk. The outline of the design and the figures were hand painted directly onto the silk. A variety of fibers, threads, and stitches allowed for great intricacy in the needlework. French knots, in wool, were used to produce a coarse and raised effect in the leaves of the tree above Joseph's head, while finer stitches in silk chenille and silk floss are seen in Mary's dress.
The source of this subject, the Holy Family's Rest on the Return from Egypt, is the 14th-century Meditations on the Life of Christ. Once thought to be by St. Bonaventure, this work is now attributed to John of Caulibus, a Franciscan friar from Tuscany. When Jesus, Mary, and Joseph approached the end of the desert, they were eagerly greeted by John the Baptist, who, though himself still a child and guiltless, had begun to do penance there.
The Holy Family lingered for a while with John, enjoying physical and spiritual refreshment. In this interpretation of the episode, John is shown with his attribute of the staff bearing a banderole with the Gospel verse (John 1:29) that is part of the Communion rite of every Mass: Ecce Agnus Dei, "Behold, the Lamb of God," the proclamation whereby John fulfilled his divinely ordained mission of identifying Jesus as redeemer of the world.Label Type
Credit LineLabel
Saint Joseph's University Purchase