Friday 12 April 2013

Netting pictures.

A good week ago, I received a comment/question on one of my netting posts regarding pictures of netting and the persons doing said technique (thanks Christina!).

As to who did netting - that is rather hard to answer. There is a bunch of netting finds from Sint-Truiden which might indicate it was done in a convent, but as usually, nothing is certain. There are not so many well-documented pictures of people doing netting either - which probably is partly due to it not actually being depicted, and partly to depictions being misinterpreted as another technique. I think I have seen netting labeled as "knitting" at least once.

That said, there are the usual sources to find pictures of netting ladies (it's mostly ladies, as far as I have seen yet). One good resource to turn to for a start, as always, is Larsdatter.

And then searching diverse picture and museum databases might yield things like this 15th century woman netting, actual nets like this one from Sint-Truiden, or pictures of nets used for fishing (very frequent due to the biblical stories around this) and hunting (like this one).

As usual, it is not too easy to find good pictures of someone doing the actual textile craft, and search terms "net" or "netting" will turn up lots of unhelpful pics as well. It may be worth a try to also look for "knitting" or "making garment" as well - there is a story about Jesus' tunic being seamless, and I know of at least one picture from the late Middle Ages where this garment is clearly made by netting.

1 comment:

Christina said...

Oh, I like to thank you so much!

This is now the second picture I know. The other one is also from the 15. century. I found it in the book "Artes Minores / Dank an Werner Abegg" (and there are much more nice paintings in it) On that painting is Mary and three templemaids and one of them is netting. Because of that , I think that netting was virtuous needlework.The women you post also wears a kind of fine clothes.

Do you know from wich country your picture is? I didn't find it right now..

Best regards
Christina