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14 THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 24, 1926 [[image]] [[caption]] The Back of a Rare Fifteenth Century Spanish Chasuble. Photo by Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [[/caption]] By Walter Rendell Storey More than connoisseurs, owners of home with wide spaces of rough plaster are responsible today for the great demand for velvet embroidered copes and chasubles and the secular Spanish "reposteros" or embroidered family coat-of-arms. Spain and Italy are being ransacked for these rich and colorful fabrics, so that American homes may have an authentic old Italian or Spanish touch in their decoration. In these fabrics, banners and vestments one may still find - if one has a penchant for the old - sixteenth century examples. This is remarkable, considering that a piece of wood furniture four hundred years [[article cut off]] [[article resumes]] ored silks and with silver and gold thread. Other pieces of ancient decorative church vestments are the chasuble, a circular or oval-shaped garment with an opening in the centre for the head, decorated with long bands of heavy embroidery, and the dalmatic, a long robe with sleeves partly open at the sides. In the ancient Latin examples of these garments that we now treasure there is a richness of color and splendor of ornament that suggests all the love of color and of rich fabric so characteristic of these Mediterranean peoples. Equally interesting are the stoles and scarfs - long strips of cloth in yellows, reds, light green and pink, heavily embroidered at the ends. [[article cut off]] RARE CHURCH VESTIMENTS SOUGHT FOR WALL SPACES Spanish and Italian Ecclesiastical Embroideries Give Rich Mural Effects - Artistic Linoleum and Silver Birds Perhaps one may prefer instead of a cope or chasuble the decorative possibilities of a bit of old danmask, brocade velvet or plain silk. Beautiful pieces of the work of ancient looms may be picked up and adapted to make uses. A piece may make a small hanging to enrich by contrast a pottery bowl on the top of a cabinet; a fragment may form a table runner, or a larger piece may be hung proudly on a library wall. In these ancient embroideries the quantity of gold and silver thread used is remarkable. It was to supply this precious metal for the thread that some of the bullion from America of the sixteenth century was un- [[cut off?]] from a portiere, perhaps, with an embroidered decoration salvaged from some other ancient piece. Often a precious example of weaving or embroidery may be inserted into a larger bit of modern brocade or velvet and thus be preserved while serving as a covering for a console table or a runner for a splay-leg Spanish table. The desire for more individual floor effects and the demand that floor decorations fit accurately into period interiors have developed a new form of floor covering. This is the indented tile linoleum floor that simulates in appearance fabrics and other materials used in the furnishing of a room. These modern floor coverings, deriving their decorative motifs as they do from carpets and tiles, have had to overcome the well-founded prejudice against the imitation of one medium by another. But they are achieving their end by adapting their borrowed designs so successfully that they are liked in spite of this handicap. The early Greek who first built a temple of stone instead of the usual wood doubtless had a similar prejudice to surmount. He did it successfully, as did also the maker of pewter vessels when he copied the design and decoration of silverware. [[image - scene of a room]]
