Ghostly Fragments, Hidden Meanings: Towards a Social Life of the Musician Textile

Iris Bednarski, McGill University

Beneath the glow of hanging lamps, two women appear to share a musical encounter. They take their places, seated, and gaze out at each other with a fixed concentration in their wide eyes, while their steady hands clutch large tambourines against tunics marked by a delicate cross pattern. Together, they begin to play. This is the scene that decorates a series of large roundels on the thirteenth-century Andalusi musician textile, fragments of which are housed in major art institutions across Europe and North America (fig. 1). 

At first glance, the fabric exhibits a distinctly Andalusi program that points to an origin in the thirteenth-century Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. Shimmering lampas weave exemplifies the rich tradition of decorative craftsmanship in al-Andalus, while courtly imagery illustrates the vibrant nightlife of Nasrid palaces. Yet these details account only for the textile’s initial function. In the early twentieth century, approximately sixteen musician textile fragments were discovered pasted throughout a manuscript at a church in New Castile.¹ While circumstances of the textile’s passage from Granada to Castile remain unknown, the consumption of Andalusi luxury goods in Castilian daily life is well-documented.² This passage from an Islamic courtly setting to one of Christian worship signals the first of many transformations in the social life of the musician textile. Indeed, the fabric’s history is marked by a plurality of functions that reveal themselves against changing backdrops of Andalusi festival, Castilian ritual, and modern-day museum. These functional modalities assert the dynamic potential of textiles as both practical objects and conduits of greater cultural currents.³ As Igor Kopytoff writes: “[The] eventful biography of a thing becomes the story of the various singularizations of it, of classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change in context.”⁴ The musician textile’s story is one of portability and relationality, of enduring meaning and shifting function across space and time. 

The first chapter of this fabric’s lifetime begins in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. A technical analysis of the weave structure alone situates the textile as a product of the mid-thirteenth century.⁵ The fabric’s luxurious appearance and elaborate design appear typical of lampas weave, a technique that reached al-Andalus from Baghdad at the beginning of the twelfth century.⁶ Curiously, research by the Musée de Cluny reveals that the fragments are actually composed of “pseudo-lampas,” an attempt to weave lampas with a taqueté loom.⁷ Only two other known pseudo-lampas textiles exist: the chasuble and dalmatic of San Valerius, also attributed to thirteenth-century al-Andalus. Other courtly textiles of the same period exhibit similar roundels of “heavenly banquet,”⁸ such as the hanging from the Barcelona tomb of Bishop Gurb and the funerary pillow cover of Queen Berengaria of Navarre featuring two seated figures that resemble those of the musician textile.

Those examples, however, unlike the musician textile, bear only single roundels. The most complete version of a textile with patterned courtly scenes is held by the Hispanic Society of America, New York (fig. 2). This work, perhaps most similar to the musician textile, features alternating roundels marked by both human and animal subjects. Repeated motifs of decadence and celebration, the “princely cycle,” appear often throughout Islamic courtly textiles. These images of revellers, musicians, and dancers were meant to reflect the happenings of courtly festivities on an immersive scale.⁹ The size and quantity of the musician fragments, compounded with their display of the princely cycle, suggest that the fabric was once a palatial furnishing work — likely a curtain.¹⁰

Aside from their innate value, silks like the musician textile were essential to the aesthetic experience of medieval Iberia. Lisa Golombek writes of “the draped universe of Islam” to convey the ubiquitous presence of textiles in Islamic societies.¹¹ Furnishing textiles in particular dictated movement, altered sightlines, and enhanced architecture in courtly spaces.¹² Beyond spatial regulation, such textiles enhanced the lavish sensory experiences of courtly nightlife. Their rich illustrations offered the medieval viewer a legible, semiotic record of otherwise fleeting celebratory moments. As Cynthia Robinson rightfully notes, such fabrics are evocative of an “Andalusī lyric come to life in a garden setting worthy of description by the most discerning taifa poet.”¹³ Indeed, contemporary poetic accounts often reference the aesthetic pleasures of Andalusi textiles. One verse by Ibn Zamrak, court poet to the fourteenth-century Nasrid Sultans, addresses this confluence of space, fabric, and sensuality: “For its radiant portico, the palace / Competes with the heavenly vault / What vestments of brocade you cast / Upon it!”¹⁴ With this imagery in mind, one can easily imagine the musician textile hanging amidst the bustling festivities of a medieval Grenadian palace — the distant song of its tambourine players a memento of vibrant nightlives passed. 

The musician textile’s discovery centuries later within a church setting signals a distinct shift in ownership and meaning. While it remains impossible to determine the exact timeline of the fabric’s passage from Muslim Nasrid Granada to the Christian Crown of Castile, it is reasonable to speculate that the textile was at some point incorporated into Castilian life. Merchants in medieval Iberia circulated overland trade routes between al-Andalus and the markets of Castile, Leon, Navarre, Galicia, and Portugal.¹⁵ The sophisticated craftsmanship and precious materials of Andalusi fabrics conformed as popular commodities to standards of sartorial correctness within the Christian kingdoms of the north.¹⁶ In fact, the presence of Andalusi silks in Castilian cathedrals, treasuries, and palaces is well-documented. María Feliciano argues in favour of a pan-Iberian aesthetic in which Andalusi textiles “were neither exotic nor incongruous elements of cultural display,” but valuable items “prized and guarded,” in Castilian courtly, ritual, and daily life.¹⁷ This repurposing marks the second distinct chapter in the musician textile’s lifetime.

Andalusi textiles were especially important in the decoration of Castilian ecclesiastical spaces. By the tenth century, they had already adorned altars, noble tombs, and other Christian objects.¹⁸ Within churches, though, costly Andalusi textiles served chiefly as hangings.¹⁹ The so-called “Banner of Las Navas de Tolosa,” wrongly reputed as a spoil of war from the thirteenth-century battle of the same name, was hung in the monastery church of Las Huelgas in Burgos (fig. 3).²⁰ Similarly, a Mamluk silk cloth — though not Andalusi — is reputed to have served as a mantle for a statue of the Virgin in a church near Valencia (fig. 4).²¹ Certain decorative features of the musician textile, like the cross motifs on the figures’ tunics and their paradisiacal surroundings, are particularly conducive to a Christian setting.²² It is, therefore, plausible that the complete fabric might have also hung in such an environment following its passage to Castile. 

This does not account, however, for the fragmentation of the textile. The Barcelona Museu d’Art Medieval’s handwritten inventory from 1929 notes that the fragments were found wrapping a book binding at a church in New Castile.²³ Later scholarship, however, claims that they were discovered stacked between the pages of a thirteenth-century manuscript, apparently cut to fit under the round bosses of choir books.²⁴ This seems unlikely, as only three of the sixteen or so known fragments are cut into circular shapes — those of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan. Whatever their altered function might have been, what is significant here is the fact that the musician textile undergoes a second repurposing during its time in Castile. Here, the fabric begins a third lifetime as it is transformed from an object of sacred decoration into one of sacred wrapping.

The incorporation of textiles into medieval manuscripts was a diverse, if scarcely documented phenomenon. Christine Sciacca offers a useful survey, writing of the role of textiles “in mediating the medieval reader’s experience of text and image,” and, in a similar vein, the significance of curtains in liturgical and devotional practices.²⁵ Textiles inserted within manuscripts served both to protect precious illuminations and to shield the medieval viewer from powerful imagery. Chemise book bindings made of textile, similarly, provided a protective covering and might have been associated with the early Christian practice of covering the hands while holding sacred objects.²⁶ The incorporation of the musician fragments into a Castilian book of worship, therefore, points to a protective intention of some sort. Islamic textiles, moreover, were especially popular as book coverings — often imported by Christians into Western contexts for this very purpose. The spine of the Mondsee Gospel Lectionary, produced in eleventh-century Germany, for example, bears a particularly remarkable damask silk covering likely of Islamic origin (fig. 5).²⁷ So, in all possible ways, the musician fragments point to wider material and symbolic trends bridging two distinct Iberian cultures.  

The dual repurposing of the Islamic musician fragments within Christian Castile attests to the greater dynamic potential of Andalusi textiles in medieval Iberia. Avinoam Shalem suggests that successful adaptation requires an alteration in function.²⁸ The medieval distinction between ornament and utility – aut decori, aut usui – allowed devout Christians to embrace the aesthetic merits of Andalusi textiles, while avoiding religious or ideological conflict.²⁹ This is not to say that these fabrics were stripped of all original cultural identity within Christianized spaces. Feliciano rightfully notes that Andalusi textiles were so desirable within Castilian circles precisely because of their unique provenance. She adds that “this is not due to a Castilian state of cultural illiteracy…but rather to a well-established taste for Andalusi luxury goods that incorporated Andalusi decorative motifs into [Castilian] aesthetic language.”³⁰ This underlines the presence of an aesthetic pluralism in medieval Iberia, while revealing how Andalusi textiles could oscillate between different spheres of representation and function. Passing from Nasrid Granada to the Crown of Castile, the musician textile blurs the boundaries between Islamic festival and Christian ritual culture. These are fabrics that resist obsolescence, that insist upon their renewed portability, and assert an enduring cultural heritage.

The fourth chapter in the textile’s lifetime unfolds within contemporary museums. After their discovery in the early twentieth century, various private antiquities dealers and public institutions acquired the fragments. To demonstrate the sheer expanse of terrain covered in this process of dealership and acquisition, I have determined the locations of all sixteen documented fragments. Table 1 summarizes those institutions possessing fragments. The publication and display histories of each collection’s fragment(s) vary. Regardless, these vast networks of acquisition reinforce the musician textile’s global portability. Today, the fragments enjoy a fourth repurposing as art objects across a variety of institutional contexts, in Spain and beyond. 

This current chapter in the musician textile’s lifetime raises important questions surrounding the dynamic potential of textiles in modern-day museums. The many shifting functions of the fabric present a particularly difficult case. Information on the musician fragments’ provenance and history varies by institution and is often conflicting. This is not unusual, considering the general lack of documentation for textiles acquired by Western collections prior to the mid-twentieth century.³¹ Contemporary challenges of textile exhibition compound these historical acquisition problems. As Tristan Weddigen notes, “the reconstruction of a premodern ‘textile discourse,’” is often obscured by the unidimensional, modernist, “paradigm of perspectival transparency.”³² Indeed, modern museums are confronted with the impossible task of recapturing that ubiquitous “draped universe of Islam” in a “post-textilic” environment.³³ This is exacerbated by the demanding exhibition conditions of textiles, including climate control and the need for regular rotation.³⁴ All of these challenges complicate the renewed portability of textiles in a modern context, threatening to close a final chapter in the musician textile’s lifetime. 

This paper has established four distinct phases in the musician textile’s usage across the past millennium. My aim in doing so is to construct a dynamic biography of the fabric, an approach indebted to the methodology outlined in Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things. Commodities have life histories. They are culturally controlled, shifting “between socially regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions.”³⁵ The politics of value are not static, but fluctuate over time. As such, an object’s meaning is informed by the codes of a specific group at a specific moment. The musician textile is especially conducive to such a study given the cross-cultural context of medieval Iberia, but also because of the fabric’s unique materiality. Textility in and of itself allows for constant repurposings and efficient transitions between cultural spaces. 

Eva Hoffman situates dynamic potential as inherent to the textile medium. The portability of these fabrics is predicated upon their unique potential for movement and indeterminacy.³⁶ Unlike most art objects, textiles can be cut and folded, carried and stored across geographic boundaries all while preserving their value. This openness facilitates efficient cross-cultural exchange, enabling textiles to define and redefine the aesthetic experience of their surroundings. With this in mind, Hoffman calls for a reconceptualization of cultural space in which “movement is inherent in the nature of the object and…through movement the coordinates for identity may be defined.”³⁷ This notion of relational identity is crucial to understanding the musician textile’s lifetime, but also to ensuring its renewed portability. Current scholarship focuses largely on the fabric’s initial production and function. While this approach is not without merit, it risks obscuring centuries of the musician textile’s rich history. To maximize the dynamic potential of these fabrics, as Hoffman suggests, we must resituate focus from origins to paths of circulation. It is this process I hope to have initiated for the musician fragments.

Textiles are an inherently human medium. Like us, they react to their surroundings, change over time, and accumulate stories. The musician textile tells four stories. As a palatial curtain, ecclesiastic hanging, sacred wrapping, and museum artefact the fabric adopts a multiplicity of identities across shifting networks of understanding. In doing so, the fragments attest to the dual capacity of textiles as both functional objects and conduits of greater cultural currents. The enduring dynamic potential of the musician textile demands recognition. These are ghostly fragments imbued with hidden meanings — in constructing their social life we can begin to see them as animate once more.

Acknowledgments

This paper is the product of meaningful exchanges with art history professionals in Montréal and beyond. I would first like to express my gratitude to Dr. Cecily Hilsdale of McGill University for undertaking independent research with me and for offering her attentive mentorship throughout the course of my work. I am also indebted to the staff of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, especially Dr. Laura Vigo and Dr. Chloé Pelletier, for allowing my study of their collection and for so generously welcoming me into their private conservation spaces. Of equal importance to my project is the support of museum professionals internationally. I would like to thank Ned Lazaro of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Julia Perratore of the Met, and Catherine Depierraz of the Abegg-Stuftung for their gracious correspondence. I am especially grateful to Anna Homs Forcada of the Museu d’Art Medieval, Barcelona for granting me access to private museum archives. Much like the musician textile, without these complex encounters this project would not exist.

Endnotes

1. Object file for Fragment of the Musician Textile, MEV 8536, Museu d’Art Medieval, Barcelona, Spain. ↩︎
2. For the use of Andalusi textiles in Castilian courtly, ecclesiastic, and daily life see María Judith Feliciano, “Muslim Shrouds for Christian Kings? A Reassessment of Andalusi Textiles in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Life and Ritual,” in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, eds. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Boston: Brill, 2005). ↩︎
3. The term “dynamic potential” used in this paper is borrowed from Eva Hoffman’s essay “Pathways of Portability,” a formal discussion of which will follow. ↩︎
4. Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 90. ↩︎
5. Pilar Borrego Díaz, “Análisis técnico del ligamento en los tejidos hispanoárabes,” Bienes Culturales, no. 5 (2005): 107-108. ↩︎
6. Corinne Mühlemann, “Made in the City of Baghdad? Medieval Textile Production and Pattern Notation Systems of Early Lampas Woven Silks,” Muqarnas Online 39, no. 1 (2022): 1. ↩︎
7. Sophie Desrosiers, Soieries et autres textiles de l’Antiquité au xvie. Siècle (Paris: Musée National du Moyen Âge Thermes de Cluny, 2004): 296. ↩︎
8. Cristina Partearrovo Lacaba, “Estudio histórico-artístico de los tejidos de al-Andalus y afines,” Bienes Culturales, no. 5 (2005): 60. ↩︎
9. Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen, “Man with Goblet,” in Medieval Islamic Symbolism and the Paintings in the Cefalù Cathedral (Brill, 1986): 29. ↩︎
10. Carole Hillenbrand, “Merits of Jerusalem (Fada’il al-Quds),” in Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven, eds. Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016): 107. ↩︎
11. Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Content and Context of Visual Arts in Islam, ed. Priscilla Soucek (Pennsylvania: College Art Association of America and Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988): 25. ↩︎
12. Olga Bush, “The Textility of the Alhambra,” in Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism, eds. Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, and Basile Baudez (New York: Routledge, 2023): 141. ↩︎
13. Cynthia Robinson, “Love localized, science from afar: the image program of the Hadīth Bayād wa Riyād,” in Medieval Andalusian Courtly Culture in the Mediterranean: Hadîth Bayâd Wa Riyâd (Routledge, 2006): 88. ↩︎
14. Emilio García Gómez, Poemas árabes en los muros y fuentes de la Alhambra (Madrid: E. García Gómez, 1985): 116. Translation in Olga Bush, “A Poem is a Robe and a Castle: Inscribing Verses on Textiles and Architecture in the Alhambra,” in Textiles as Cultural Expressions: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America (Honolulu, 2008): 2. ↩︎
15. Olivia Constable, “Al-Andalus and the Christian commercial network,” in Trade and traders in Muslim Spain: the commercial realignment of the Iberian peninsula, 900-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 44.
    ↩︎
16. Feliciano, “Muslim shrouds for Christian kings,” 118. ↩︎
17. Feliciano, “Muslim shrouds for Christian kings,” 102, 131. ↩︎
18. María Judith Feliciano, “Medieval Textiles in Iberia: Studies for a New Approach,” in Envisioning Islamic art and architecture: essays in honor of Renata Holod, ed. David Roxburgh (Boston: Brill, 2014): 47. ↩︎
19. Avinoam Shalem, “Part Two: The Attitude Towards Islamic Objects in Church Treasuries,” in Islam Christianized: Islamic portable objects in the medieval church treasuries of the Latin West (Germany: Peter Lang, 1998): 162. ↩︎
20. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Almoravid, Almohad, and Nasrid Periods,” in Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (New York: Abrams Books, 1992): 326-327. ↩︎
21. Esin Atil, “Textiles and Rugs,” in Renaissance of Islam: Art of the Mamluks (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981): 232-233. ↩︎
22. Hillenbrand, 108. ↩︎
23. Object file for Fragment of the Musician Textile, MEV 8536. ↩︎
24. For the first reference of this claim see Florence Lewis May, “Silk textiles with Mudejar and Gothic patterns (14th century),” in Silk textiles of Spain, eighth to fifteenth century (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1957): 139. ↩︎
25. Christine Sciacca, “Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts,” in Weaving, veiling, and dressing: textiles and their metaphors in the late Middle Ages, eds. Kathryn Rudy and Barbara Baert (Brepols, 2007): 161. ↩︎
26. Frederick Bearman, “The Origins and Significance of Two Late Medieval Textile Chemise Bookbindings in the Walters Art Gallery,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 170. ↩︎
27. Anna Muthesius, “The Silk over the Spine of the Mondsee Gospel Lectionary,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 37 (1978): 67. ↩︎
28. Shalem, 143. ↩︎
29. Shalem, 131. ↩︎
30. Feliciano, “Muslim shrouds for Christian kings,” 118. ↩︎
31. Jennifer Ball, “Rich Interiors: The Remnant of a Hanging from Late Antique Egypt in the Collection of Dumbarton Oaks,” in Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection, ed. Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams (Washington, DC, 2019), https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/essays/ball.  ↩︎
32. Tristan Weddigen, “Materiality,” in The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 36. ↩︎
33. Olga Bush appropriates the term “textilic” from Anthropologist Tim Ingold in her chapter “The Textility of the Alhambra” to refer to a mode of being “logically and ontologically prior to architectonic design.” ↩︎
34. Rini Hazel Templeton, “Display of textiles in museum collection,” paper presented at Heritage Conservation Workshop, National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology, Delhi, 2012. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318014663.  ↩︎
35. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” in The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 17. ↩︎
36. Eva Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” in Art History 24, no. 1(2001): 17. ↩︎
37. Hoffman, 42. ↩︎

About the Author

Iris Bednarski is a fourth-year Honours Art History student at McGill University specializing in the material culture of the medieval Mediterranean. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Canvas: McGill’s Journal of Art History & Communications and a contributor to the Digital Flores Bernardi Project at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University. Outside of school, Iris enjoys drawing and going to the movies.