Thursday, March 13, 2008

Vestments for Masses for the Order of the Golden Fleece





15th century, Burgundian. Imperial Treasury, Vienna.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Magnificent, aren't they? Fr Joseph Braun in his standard work on paraments always refers to them as examples of the very best there is.

Anonymous said...

How beautiful although it does look as though they are displayed in a museum and perhaps not used?

Fr Z would love these and incidentally where has his blog disappeared to? It was there last night but has been replaced with a shopping site with the same initials.

Fr Ray Blake said...

Pelerin, Fr Z can be found by clicking my blogroll. The vestments are in the Imperial Treasury, Vienna.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, father - have tried a few other blog rolls as well as yours but no success. the advertising site has now been replaced by the classic 'site unobtainable' or words to that effect. Fr Z has vanished!

Fr Ray Blake said...

Pelerin,
Ihave just connected to his blog, no problem, but he says,


"Expect some problems with the blog for some hours.

For those WDTPRS vets around here, remember my problems with my old hosting service over a year ago?

Apparently they didn’t do all that they were supposed to do to keep my domain registered, even though it is all paid up.

Fun huh?

I don’t know how this happened, but expect problems."

Anonymous said...

I see Fr Z has returned - love his comment about people will think he is running a dating agency from the Sabine farm!! The chances of this shopping/dating firm having the same initials as wdtprs must be one in a million - I'm glad he saw the funny side of it.

Theres a very funny comment telling people what the writer managed to do having accessed the other wdtprs site too.

TomTallis said...

As a matter of interest from a sometime resident of Vienna, those vestments are no longer used because at the ripe old age of about 600 years they're simply too fragile.

What you can't see in most pictures is the literally thousands and thousands of seed-pearls that have been sewn on the vestments some of which fall off every time they're moved. Almost every figure is outlined in tiny pearls.

The vestments are also very heavy; with each having about 10lbs of gold thread, most of which can't be seen.

According to the Schatzkammer's guidebook, these remain, to this day, the most expensive paraments ever made. They took about thirty years to make, and in some places there are thousands of stiches per inch.

They're a marvel to behold and if you ever go to Vienna pay them a visit. The Shatzkammer is in the Hofburg (the imperial palace of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Habsburgs - that's how they spell it). Admission is reasonable and there are good guidebooks available in English.

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