Unknown Maker, Italian

Incredibly laborious to craft, velvets and pattterned silks represent the height of technical and artistic refinement for the Renaissance period. Their expense can be traced to the materials they were made from, including silk fibers, real gold threads, and rare natural dyestuffs. Green silk velvets like this were among the costliest to create, requiring both blue and yellow dyes and two complete dye cycles.

This pattern, the "branched pomegranate cloth of gold," was often featured in paintings of the Madonna or used in ecclesiastical vestments like this chausuble. Its orphrey, or central panel, repeats an intricately woven image of the Madonna standing on a crescent moon, also known as the apocolyptic Madonna after a reference in Revelations 12:1,