Southern Italian
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Silk embroidery on linen canvas, with a design in the style of the Barese designer Giovanni Alfonso Samarco of oversized acanthine vines and scrolling volutes with florals including roses and peonies, songbirds, and large-scale foliage. Executed in polychrome silk floss (bavella) in couched rows, the yellow ground cross-couched forming a diaper pattern resembling a false-quilted ground; lined in red satin. Formerly a vertical wall hanging, cut down and reoriented in the 18th or 19th century to be used as an altar frontal.
Several of Samarco's drawings for embroideries, now in the Musei del Bargello, Palazzo Davanzati, are very similar to the present embroidery.