Fragment of a Hanging with Bearded Figure

This fragment consists of an incomplete, frontally standing figure. The beard, woven in striking, still bright blue loops, reveals the figure to be a male person. His head is shown frontal and he lifts his right arm. This part of the fragment seems to terminate in his right hand: four red horizontal lines placed one above the other, which may indicate his fingers, appear to be closed around the remains of an object. The textile along his right side and underneath his right arm is missing. Most of the left side of the figure is lost, including the left side of his face. The lower legs and feet are missing as well. Some red and purple loops indicate his left shoulder and it appears that the left arm, when complete, was directed downward, with the hand placed in front of the left hip: a few (perhaps four?) short lines that may represent fingers—similar to those appearing in the position of his right hand—are discernible.

Two items of his costume can be recognized: an outer mantle and a tunic beneath it. The mantle is wrapped around his hip and covers his upper legs, ending near the knees. The outline is given in purple, while the surface of the garment is indicated in pink and red. The mantle appears to be worn as a himation: it was therefore probably wrapped around the man’s body and thrown forward over his left shoulder, hanging down his left side and draping over his left forearm. Remains of purple and red loops along the left side of his body would coincide with this reconstruction of the garment.

Underneath the mantle he wears a beige long-sleeved tunic outlined in red. On his breast, above the upper edge of the himation, two vertical narrow stripes in violet can be seen, shown at the typical place of a tunic’s clavi. Below the bottom edge of the himation these stripes continue down to a short horizontal red line, possibly the bottom hem of the tunic. The color and narrowness of these vertical stripes prove that they must be part of the clavi, not his legs. Just underneath what is probably his right hand are two short horizontal purple lines indicating the typical decoration of the end of a tunic’s sleeve.

The face of the man is defined by very large features. His hair shows the same blue loops as his beard. Red and beige loops are used to model his cheek. The remains of two thick straight vertical lines indicate his nose, with a horizontal line connecting them below. It is very likely that the vertical lines originally continued upward above his eyes, as, for example, in another Dumbarton Oaks fragment (BZ.1953.2.101a–b); this is still visible over his large right, purple eye, underneath the purple eyebrow. Three colors are used to indicate his mouth: a wider curved purple line and short lines in pink and red above and underneath it.

It is not possible to give any suggestions about the reconstruction of the figure’s left arm and hand. His right hand appears to have been holding an object. This might have been a lance, a long stick with a cross, or a candle.

The fragment must have been part of a bigger weft-loop weaving. Hangings with different iconography and figure style survive in many fragments today, scattered around museums worldwide. This technique was very popular in late antique to early Islamic Egypt, as the contents of tombs tell us. A special delight was taken in the bright colors manifested by the woolen loops. However, only rarely is a find spot more precise than “Egypt” documented, so we cannot draw conclusions regarding the location of specific workshops. We cannot even be sure whether these weavings are an Egyptian production at all, as textiles could be transported so easily. Moreover, relatively few textiles outside of Egypt survive, allowing little comparative evidence.

As mentioned above, these pile weaves show figures in different contexts, either as part of lively narrative scenes or as isolated saints, sometimes in multiple registers. As to the style of figures, their mobility and their plasticity, different groups can be identified. Some are vivid renderings with figures moving naturalistically in different directions against well-defined backgrounds.See, e.g., the expressive figures in London, British Museum, 1889.0511.1: A. Effenberger, Koptische Kunst (Vienna, 1976), plate 109; Moscow, Pushkin Museum, 5195 and 5196: L. Kybalová, Die alten Weber am Nil: Koptische Stoffe (Prague, 1967), 57–59, figs. 6–8. Others exhibit more static figures placed frontally against flat grounds.See a fragment in the private Bouvier Collection, Fribourg, inv. S 57: A. Stauffer, Textilien aus Ägypten aus der Sammlung Bouvier (Bern, 1991), 73, no. 2, and another fragment in Moscow, Pushkin Museum, 6679: R. Shurinova, Coptic Textiles: Collection of Coptic Textiles, State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Moscow 1967), no. 139. This latter fragment shows the closest parallel to the garment of the standing figure in the Dumbarton Oaks piece.

The fragment in Dumbarton Oaks discussed here must have belonged to the second group. Unfortunately, so far neither a suggestion for localization nor for the compositional context can be given. As to the current state of research the date for this hanging could be anytime between the third and seventh century.

To my knowledge no intact hanging similar to the one discussed here has survived. Therefore it is impossible to determine the original size of the hanging that this piece came from, or its place within that hanging’s composition. However, the size of the figure itself and the technique do speak for it having come from a furnishing textile, such as a wall hanging, curtain, or blanket.

If the reconstruction of the figure’s garment suggested above—long tunic and himation—is correct, then there is no indication that he was a military figure, as Thompson assumed, probably because she identified the mantle as a chlamys.D. Thompson, “Catalogue of Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection” (unpublished catalogue, Washington, DC, 1976), no. 27. However, the two clavi, which are visible on his breast, do not make this reconstruction plausible. The costume proposed here is typical of biblical figures and saints in late antique and early Byzantine art, including so-called Coptic art.

Comparing the features of the face shown here to the head on another fragment at Dumbarton Oaks, BZ.1953.2.102, there are analogies that suggest that both fragments come from the same hanging. Most striking, and to my knowledge not to be found on other fragments, is the way the lips are articulated. The way the parallel lines of the nose continue into the red lines underneath the eyebrows also differs from other depictions.

—Sabine Schrenk, March 2020