Blog

On a trip to Zamora, in the Museo de la Catedral,  I found a splendid tapestry entitled Tienda de Aquiles, which belongs to the Series of the Trojan War, made in the workshop of Tournai, perhaps by Pasquier Grenier, in the last third of the 15th century, with wool and silk and measuring 467x690cm. In it we can see a scene in which a horse appears, with a very interesting detail that is the visual embodiment of what we talked about in a previous text in this blog: "And, to continue, a player from 1370. One has to imagine the desire to invent the artefact, and 2". There we spoke of a text by Guillem de Torroella:

Detail of the horse with sleigh bells (Photo: Jaume Ayats).

When Guillem arrives on the island, he is presented with a horse (a palafrén) that surpasses anything imagined in beauty, ornamentation and values. He devotes pages to describing the marvel. And in one of the pages, he describes the petral, that is, the piece that the horse carries on its chest (beware, it is the Catalan of the time!):

            Pitral non vis anch per a ell,
            Car fayt fo ab encantamén;
            Cent cascavells hi hac d’argén
            Asauts e de bella faysó,
            Que no eron semblant de so
            la un a l’altre ne de vots,
            Más acordar los vírets tots
            Al pas del palafrè amblan,
            A notar un lays de Tristan,
            Que molt és plasent per ausir.

This set of tapestries from Zamora shows four horses adorned with strips of large bells on their faces and chests, as well as on their backs and haunches. All these could amount to a total of forty per beast. We can therefore well imagine the sound and musical effect of each movement of the animals. We have, therefore, a Flemish tapestry from the end of the 15th century that magnificently represents this sound effect of the Catalan poem from the end of the 14th century.

You can discover here a short note about horses and sleigh bells.

Real size of tapestry (Photo: Mª Carme Montaner)