The painstaking job of restoring some of the world’s finest ancient tapestries, stitch by stitch, is not for the highly strung or restless.
Returning to its former glory the kind of creation that adorns a cathedral wall or is displayed at a world-renowned museum can take more than a year for tapestry restorers at Royal Manufacturers De Wit.
Tucked away in an elegant medieval monks’ residence in Belgium, head restorer Veerle De Wachter and her white-coated, all-female team of 15 labor away with needle and thread, adding thousands of stitches to a single piece.
Photo: AFP
“Someone who is nervous or excitable would never manage it,” she told reporters, seated in front of a vast wall stacked with bundles of thread, a colorful reminder of the days when the company produced its own tapestries.
The work calls for a demanding degree of focus, knowledge of fabrics and thoroughness, she said.
“You need a calm person, who can work in a concentrated manner without being distracted with what’s going on around them,” she said.
As well as the traditional meticulous craftsmanship, resuscitating the faded scenes and preparing them for the future ravages of time requires modern technology.
Museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in Russia, entrust the restorers with their finest pieces in cotton and silk, some with strands of silver and gold.
Based in the northern Flemish town of Mechelen, the Royal Manufacturers De Wit was founded 1889 and is the biggest restorer of tapestries in the world, based on the value of the pieces it restores.
These have included legendary works such as The Lady and the Unicorn, a series of six tapestries woven in wool and silk in Flanders in the Middle Ages, on display at the Cluny museum in Paris.
There is also a collection of 29 enormous tapestries from Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Malta which the restorers have been gradually working through in the past dozen years in a project estimated to cost US$1 million.
Difficult to transport due to their enormity, the 17th century Flemish tapestries have been sent to Royal Manufacturers De Wit in pairs.
First cleaned of dust, the artworks are then washed with an enormous spraying machine. Only once they are dried do the restorers set about their work.
Restoration overtook tapestry making as the mainstay of the business about 40 years ago.
“At the end of the 1970s weaving workshops had a very hard time because tapestries were too expensive and no longer in fashion,” said Yvan Maes De Wit, great-grandson of the firm’s founder, accounting for the shift toward restoring and conserving historic tapestries.
The company came up with new cleaning techniques, using a combination of suction and spraying to protect the fibers against strain. Washing dyed cloth is a very risky step in the restoration process, as cotton often frays and silk disintegrates over time and in light.
The restorers have also had to develop expertise in removing huge tapestries from their hanging places, a delicate task given their size, weight and fragility.
De Wit recalls the stress of a “very dangerous operation,” to remove a 9m by 14m tapestry suspended 25m high in the entry hall of the UN Headquarters in New York, using “gigantic scaffolding.”
Meanwhile, his team of restorers, silently hunched over their work, seated on benches in a vast white room, is known, above all, for having an “eye for color.”
The company also makes its own silk and cotton threads to match the original historic colors as closely as possible.
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