The Goal

The project I intend to undertake is the creation of a personal impresa following the compositional aesthetics suitable to the Elizabethan era while employing the stitches in use at this time. The goal is to undertake this project while recording my hours (and the light levels at which I work) to calculate a rough cost in candle expenditure based on household expenditure record (nerd alert!). This is partially based on an interest in historical textile production more generally, but also a particular interest in the nature of time and its relationship to embroidery as a practice.

The object I plan to make is an ornamental throw pillow for the furnishment of my bed using an impresa of my creation. The personal emblem seems just the right motif for use on bed furnishings, given the fact that, historically, the bed has always been the most costly piece of household furniture (where beds were even available), and as historian Lucy Worsley has pointed out in her TV documentary series If Walls Could Talk and Tales from the Royal Bedchamber, it also set the stage for life's most important events: birth, death, marriage, and so on.

My bed is no exception (although, allow me to clearly underscore that I was not born in this bed!); it is a site where I spare no expense, preferring (wherever possible) to employ natural fibres, regardless of cost. For one thing, it is a king sized bed, which means that of course I cannot live without my four pillows, Egyptian cotton sheets, two goosedown duvets, and stuffed animal.

Last year, I spent several months crocheting a king sized throw out of 100% Peruvian highland sheep's wool -- let it be known that it cost me approximately $280 CAN to purchase sufficient quantities of fibre! Additionally, I recently undertook my very first ever upholstering project (yelp!) in order to to achieve a more harmonious aesthetic, so I covered up my gaudy second-hand headboard with a more opulent looking discount upholstery fabric. Clearly, the bed is the kind of furniture in which one (and myself especially) invests quite heavily.

You may be wondering what an impresa is. An impresa  can be considered someting like a maker's mark, or a pictorial signature, using combinations of text and imagery -- often imagery which is drawn from the natural world, such as plants, animals, and inanimate objects, etc. Unlike other forms of heraldry, which are often hereditary, personal ciphers were selected or constructed by the individual using symbols representative of the self.

On the emblems from which many impresas were drawn, textile historian Margaret Swain writes:

[the interest in] emblems, those pictures with a Latin motto offering a moral thought or contemplation, is today almost incomprehensible to us, even with an English translation of the motto. In the seventeenth century, emblems and emblem books, from which some these designs originate, were a part of the educated man's or woman's intellectual equipment. They were recognized and solved, just as some today enjoy solving the recondite clues of crossword puzzles (1970: 20).

Hence why these emblems were also known as ciphers, since the iconography of these compositions reflect a careful coding of personal and cultural values. For example, Venetian painter Titian took the she-bear licking her cub into shape with the motto  natura potentia ars (art more powerful than nature) for his impresa (Fortini Brown 1997:62). This is a depictive reference to the poetry of Virgil, in whose work can be found a simile describing the way in which the cub is born without form and must be licked into shape by its mother (Fortini Brown 1997). The imagery functioned as an allegory for the way in which Titian himself gave shape to something greater than the raw materials provided by nature (Fortini Brown 1997). Access, albeit limited, to a version of Titian's impresa can be found here.

Another example is the cipher of Mary Queen of Scots, as well as that of her mother Mary of Guise. Mary's cipher appears on her signet ring, her book stamp, a cushion housed at Hardwick Hall, and on "several of the applique panels of green velvet of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk" (Swain 1970:20), aka. the Oxburgh hangings. It consists of the overlaid Greek letter Φ (a reference to her first husband Francis II), and the letters MA (Swain 1970). One of the Oxburgh panels depicts this monogram topped by a crown and "flanked by thistles, surrounded by her motto-anagram: 'SA VERTU M'ATIRE'" (its strength draws me) (Swain 1970: 20), meaning "Its strength draws me." Curiously, it seems as though Mary worked variations of her cipher; some contained this motto-anagram, while others employed the pictorial imagery of a lodestone turning towards the pole in conjunction with this motto (Digby 1963).

Mary's impresa as seen on the Oxburgh Hangings. Canvas applique in silk and gilt thread using tent and satin stitch, applied on a green velvet ground. Dated to 1570.
Image courtesy of Marie-Stuart.co.uk

 and reproduced from the book by Margaret Swain.

Mary's mother adopted the phoenix with the phrase en ma fin git est ma commencement  (in my end is my beginning) as her personal device (Swain 1970). It has been suggested that this is a reference to the process of forging a new life after the loss of not one but two husbands (Swain 1970). 

A phoenix on the Oxburgh Hangings enclosed in a cruciform using canvas applique, silk and gilt thread in tent stitch, applied to green velvet. Dated to 1570.
Image courtesy of Marie-Stuart.co.uk

 and reproduced from the book by Margaret Swain.

 So the function of the impresa  appears to be two-fold: for one, it communicates something about the self to others, who must draw upon cultural, visual, literary, and religious references (as well as their personal knowledge of that person) in order to cipher its meaning. Additionally, it also seems to be an affirmation of the self and a personal ethos, a guiding principle, and a prescription of how to act and think.


Being a person who already subscribes to belief in animal signifiers, I have taken as my personal motif the hippocamp (water horse).  When my horse Bailey (pictured here, splashing in sheer delight) died in 2008, I memorialized her in a tattoo I designed based on this Celtic knot. Since I have been riding horses from the age of six, and am a Pisces  by birth as well as a fifth generation inhabitant of an island city, the hippocamp seemed a natural fit.

Swain has described the way in which impresa design is "intensely personal," and the way in which many designs depicting creatures from the natural world "were taken from Historiae Animalium published by C. Gessner in 1551, whose half-mythical animals served as pattern sources to decorators as well as needlewomen" (1970:20). For this reason, I have elected to do the same.

Hippocamp, as depicted in Conrad Gessner's book. 

Image courtesy of University Press Scholarship Online.

The design will be executed in my hereditary colours of blue and gold (drawn from my patrilineal descent). Luckily, I am spared from rendering the myriad complexity of Celtic knotwork! Even still, I have my work cut out for me (no pun intended). Fun fact: Mary herself even worked a seahorse based on this illustration, and it can be seen in the Oxburgh hangings housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum today.

 

One half of a cruciform applique panel worked on canvas with silk and gilt thread using tent and satin stitch. Dated between 1570 and 1585.

Image courtesy of the The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sources Cited

Digby, George Wingfield

1963 Elizabethan Embroidery. London, England: Faber and Faber.

Fortini Brown, Patricia
1997 Art and Life in Renaissance Venice. London, England: Lawrence King Publishing Ltd. 

Swain, Margaret
1970 Historical Needlework: A Study of Influences in Scotland and Northern England. London, England: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd.