THE CENTRES OF PRODUCTION
LOW COUNTRIES
The most important ccntrct of gile Icathcr productśon in morę rccent limes lay m (be Ncthcrlands. Mon ofthc gili Icathcr paneli chat surm today aic, in lact, either Flemish or Dutch. Alrcady by che fifteenth ccntury, che Lam Countrics had seemed for them-schrcs an cnviable rcpuution as che produccis ofluxury upholstay nutrrnk They nudę upestnet chat were in demand all ovcr the western world. They madę (me wooDen materiał! lukable for hangings of all kinds. The 'dotnix hangings so ficqucntly men-tioned in sixteenth-cenuiry English invcnaoriei orne kom Domick - or Toumai, as we usually cali it. Most of the Ncthcrlands were under Spanish comrol untd the scventccnth ccntury, when the Northern region won m independent* and bccame the country we know as Holland. Yct in spite of this break many of the cultural and astastic traditions remained common to beth the North and South regions.
The crafts practised in the principal commcrdal and anistic ccntrcs in the South, of which Antwerp was the most important, spread to the North during the laae sutarenth centuty. In the field of tcxtilcs, this applied to upestiy-weaving and the making of hncn damask. Much the same tectns to havc happened in the case of gik-lcather making. Mcchclin (Malina) was the most important centre in the South, but Antwetp, Lkge and Brussels ate also known to havc produced large quantitics of gik Icathcr. The principal centre in Holland was Amsterdam.
As the Spanish indusoy waned, so tbac of the Ncthcrlands prospered and finally usurped the Spanish posidon as the prindpal productr of gik leatha hangings. By about 1600 this change lud bccn complctcd, and the Netherlands dominated the field. The cradition of using the sumptuous indigenous leathers was to become so ingraincd thac the Dutch continued to cover their walls with this materiał deep into the cightccnth ccntury by which time most other countrics had come to regard gili leatha as rather unfashionable
Tradition has it that the leatha hangings industry in the Nethalands was saned by Spanish Arabs and, indced, that scems not unlikdy. Mcchclin, at leasr, is known so have bccn making (Cordovan’ leatha in the fóurteenth ccntury which, at that datę, may soli have bccn madę fiom tawed leatha, but the fint leather-gilder of whom thac is a rccord (in 1511) was named Yalcnujn Kleć and came kom Bamberg in Franconia.1 It was probably Flemish designen who cvolved the new, morę naturalistic kind of decoradon which madę its appearance in the scvcntccnth ccntury. The stylized pattems of the Moorish tradiuon, albeit softened by the gentla rhythms of the Renaissance, remained ktrmal, clearly repetidw, with marked vodcal axcs on cach individual pand. The new 1 Doodsor, G. van, TcnlmruBmi Odr MMM* 1954, pp. 74-70,
55