"Acupictores": "Needle Painting" in the Middle Ages

In Utrecht I visited "Secrets of the Middle Ages in Goldwork and Silk," the Catharijneconvent Museum's amazing exhibit of medieval liturgical garments. The two images below have been borrowed from the Museum's website for the exhibition. I encourage you to visit: the English link gives you the basics:
https://www.catharijneconvent.nl/english/the-secret-of-the-middle-ages/,
the Dutch more detail:
https://www.catharijneconvent.nl/bezoek-ons/tentoonstellingen/Het-geheim-van-de-Middeleeuwen/. Certainly the photos speak all languages. Coincidentally, I had just taken a goldwork course via the Embroiderers Guild in London Ontario, so it was especially exciting to see these amazing works.

Goldwork is a form of embroidery using - you guessed it - gold threads, or more accurately some sort of fibre wrapped in some form of gold to make various types of gold thread. This gold thread is laid on the fabric and stitched down (called "couching") in the desired pattern. For example, in the detail below, the pearls (also couched) serve to edge gold thread couched with red, further set off by blue embroidery.

The chasuble below is an example of the various richly brocaded fabric imported from Italy (as all expensive fabric seems to have been and still is - see my post on the Utrecht fabric market!), to which was added a goldworked "Koelner Borte" - the band with embroidered images. Do check the Catharijneconvent website and hover your mouse over the images to enlarge these beautiful details! Apparently a full set of such liturgical garments, four in all, could cost more than major renovations to the building, or a new organ, and were counted among a church's most valuable possessions.    

There's an interesting twist to the role of these garments in religious history. During the iconoclastic riots in the Protestant Netherlands much religious art was destroyed - stained glass windows, statues, paintings. The garments, however, could be and were more easily rescued. Because they were not really used until Catholicism was once again openly permitted (mid-19th century), they did not wear out and disappear as they had in other countries. And so the Netherlands has one of the largest collections of medieval religious garments in Europe.