This chasuble from red-golden Italian brocade fabric with pomegranate-motifs is decorated at the front and back with finely worked embroidered forked crosses showing scenes from the lives of St Crispin and St Crispinian in addition to the Throne of Grace. The chest-piece at the front shows both saints as the patrons of shoemakers at work in their workshop. The shafts of the orphreys at the front and back narrate the story of their martyrdom under architecturally shaped baldachins.
(Photo: Svein Skare)
The embroidery is carried out in gold thread in seed-stitch and dyed silk in split stitch technique. The techniques, the composition of the figures and the baldachins show strong similarities to Northern Netherlandish embroideries from the same period. Their production in the early sixteenth century was concentrated in Utrecht and Amsterdam.
(Photo: Svein Skare)
The chasuble may not have originally belonged to the church of Hjørundfjord. The iconography and selection of saints indicates that it was a commissioned piece, probably by the shoemakers’ guild in Bergen, who possessed a side altar in St Hallvards’s church in that town (demolished in the sixteenth century). After the Reformation, in the 1560s, some objects from the town churches of Bergen became spread to churches in the diocese, and it is likely that the chasuble reached Hjørundfjord this way.
During restoration work in the 1950s, two perforated template drawings on paper were discovered attached as stiffeners to the back of the embroideries before these were applied to the chasuble. They had served as templates for a baldachin and a flower- and lozenge-pattern. In the embroidery workshops, such reusable templates were employed to simplify and accelerate the production process. The template was placed on the support and the motif was transposed with the help of charcoal powder rubbed through the holes. Faulty or worn-out templates could be used as filling material.
Northern Netherlands (embroidery and composition), northern Italy (fabric), 1500-1510
From Hjørundfjord (Sunnmøre), in the museum since 1864
Silk, brocade, paper
H 130 x W 117 cm (chasuble)
H 39 x W 24 cm (template)
H 18 x W 12.5 (flower motif)
Inv. no. MA 51