Tapestry as a Ritual Medium

Within the discipline of art history, tapestry has always been a poor relation. The perception that tapestries are no more than ‘woven paintings’ originates in a Vasarian hierarchy of the arts and the notion of the individual artist-genius. Recent scholarship has challenged these assumptions. Most notably, Thomas Campbell has used the concept of Aristotelian ‘Magnificence’, stressing the splendour and cost of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry, to propose the medium’s centrality in courtly display. However, while this approach is valuable, it also perpetuates the prioritisation of the visual, which still characterises art-historical approaches.

Drawing on research for my doctoral thesis, Tapestry and Ritual at the Court of Charles I (submission February 2026), in this paper, I will instead propose an approach to tapestry that begins with its status as a ritual medium. In medieval and early modern Europe, tapestry functioned to mark the presence of the sacred. It did so visually, through its iconography; materially, through symbolic media such as gold and fine workmanship; and, most importantly, in the way it was deployed. Through temporal, site-specific usage, tapestry was able to mark sacred space and sacred time. And while the ritual use of tapestry declined with the end of the ancien régime in Europe, traces of these embodied meanings remain in the deployment of tapestries in later domestic settings, in the use of medieval tapestries in Gilded Age America, and in the medium’s post-war revival.