Veil of Saint Anne

This large rectangular textile, long known as “the veil of Saint Anne”, is a fine linen cloth decorated with a tapestry strips in silk and gold thread in the centre and at the ends. The central strip, decorated with intertwined rings, is punctuated with three roundels placed at different heights; the largest, at the top, is incomplete. It gives rise to two horizontal stems with bifid endings and contains an illustration. The two others contain two addorsed chimeras. Inscriptions in red silk encircle the roundels. At the ends of the piece, the strips are arranged in three separate registers, a wide medial register and two thinner registers. On the medial register is a succession of medallions, sometimes circular and containing a quadruped, sometimes polygonal and containing two addorsed birds. Blue inscriptions on a gold ground edge this frieze.

The circumstances in which the cloth was brought to Apt are unknown. Its arrival in Provence seems to be linked the First Crusade (1095–99), in which took part Raimbaud de Simiane, the lord of Apt, Guillaume de Sabran and Isoard, the town bishop. It is mentioned in Histoire du diocèse d’Apt (1714): it belongs to the relics of Saint Anne whose cult had developed in France in the twelfth century. In 1851 the orientalist Etienne Marc Quatremère deciphered its Kufic Arabic inscriptions with straight and high ascenders. Georges Marçais and Gaston Wiet finished identifying them in 1934. It is an Arab cloak (‘abā), woven in Fatimid Egypt. The inscriptions contain the names of Caliph al-Must’alī (1094–1101) and of the minister al-Afdal, the name of the royal workshop of Damietta (tirāz workshop) and the date of production: 1096/1097[1].

The craftsmanship is Egyptian: the warp yarn is spun in S twist, that is, anticlockwise. The inclusion of a decorative tapestry in a linen cloth perpetuated a process that the Copts of Egypt had already used during the Byzantine period, when coloured wool had not yet been supplanted by silk. Damietta specialised in a fine cloth known as qasab or muqassab because the small spindle on which the gold thread for tapestries was wound was made out of reed (qasab). The workshops of the Nile delta, with a Coptic labour force, produced an impressive quantity of fabrics every year. The cloths were reserved for the caliph’s use when they bore, inside a band, his name, titles, praise and the name of the sovereign’s private workshop (tirāz al-khāssā). The fabrics produced by the public workshops (tirāz al-‘āmma) were sold in aid of the treasury.

This garment was an honorary robe (khil’a), given by the caliph to his favourites. Its motifs belonged to the court repertory: crowned chimeras, the Persian tree of life (hom), birds drinking from a cup and palmette leaves. This repertory was influenced by ancient Sassanid silks whose themes, very popular under the Abbasids and Fatimids, spread throughout the Mediterranean region.

Like the Cadouin shroud, which also, it seems, arrived in France during the First Crusade, the Damietta cloth was venerated as a relic. In the cathedral of Apt, it was rolled into a ball in a glass bottle (in the same what that remains were displayed) and taken out during the feast days of Saint Anne. It bears witness to the close association between medieval Near Eastern textiles and Christian worship.