The exhibition celebrates the first 50 years of the Prato Textile Museum. An exceptional donation, from the Florentine physician Giovanni Falletti, give birth to this exhibition. Thanks to over 50 years of passionate research, he has preserved and collected textile artefacts, embroidery, books, prints, jewellery, historical weapons and ritual masks from Europe and many Asian and African countries.

Silk Treasures. Textile Masterpieces from the Falletti Donation is the first exhibition formed with works from this substantial collection that has extraordinarily enriched the Museum heritage. Exhibited in the hall specifically dedicated to historical textiles, the exhibition unfolds along a chronological path that spans four centuries of great textile manufacturing and crosses styles, productions, materials and subjects, exceptional witnesses of European production from the 15th to the end of the 18th century.

These fabrics were used to make sumptuous secular robes for the aristocracies of the time. Thanks to their enormous prestige and value, they were later donated to religious institutions that reused them to make sacred vestments such as chasubles, dalmatics, copes: an extraordinary custom of reuse that allowed the conservation of textile masterpieces, some wonderful examples of which are displayed for the public in the exhibition.

To facilitate an understanding of the historical and technical content, the exhibition hall includes two media tables that use different methods and languages to narrate the fabric-making process and the how the art of silk developed up to the pre-industrial period. Digital microscopes offer a closer look at the internal structure and intricacies of the woven velvet, damask, brocading and lampas (figured silk fabrics). Lastly, graphic reproductions alongside the textiles illustrate the development of the main decorative motifs used by the workshops between the 15th and 18th centuries. Reproductions of important paintings alongside textiles from the same period make the different functions of these precious silk masterpieces immediately apparent.

The exhibition display

The figured velvet from the 15th century on display represents the absolute excellence of Italian major manufacturing centres. A more serial but no less artistically interesting production from the Florentine area is that of figured textiles, whose function was to adorn certain precise parts of liturgical vestments. Established as more economically accessible than or nué embroidery, a highly refined, expensive and very slow technique, this type of textile ornamentation was gradually replaced by applique embroidery in the 16th century.

In the 17th century, Italian textile manufactures were experiencing a critical period due to the shrinking European market caused by wars, famines and plagues; they therefore reorganised with a more varied range of products and designs that used less silk than the classic golden drapes of the previous century.

During the century, fabrics and luxury goods imported to Europe by the East India Companies as simple souvenirs became models to be imitated for their unusual colour palettes, accentuated naturalism and unusual composition of decorations. This time it was France that led the tastes of European textile manufacturers, thanks to the reforms applied to the luxury goods sector by Louis XIV and his Minister Colbert. La Grand Fabric in Lyon, France was the most proactive textile mill, and the one Italian textile manufacturers looked to in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century. The exhibition itinerary devotes special attention precisely to this important period full of experimentation and artistic innovation, presenting textiles historically referred to as “bizarre” “dentelle” or “Revel”, designations that indicate specific types of designs.

Concluding the exhibition is a nucleus of 18th-century embroidery made using different techniques, similar in style and composition to the decorations of the figured textiles. Like fabric, embroidery required dedicated designs according to function and purpose. The artefacts of exceptional artistic value include rare Sicilian embroidery made with coral beads, an expression of refined Sicilian distinctiveness in 18th-century Italian decorative arts.