printing, it was an improvement on all methods then known, and much quicker and more exact than any form of stenciling or hand-painting.
The fragment adjudged by Weigel the oldest of the ten specimens illustrated in the book, is a bit of red silk, woven and printed during the last ten years of the twelfth century. He says that we must search for its origin where silk fabrics were most extensively manufactured; that it must have been made by Moorish artisans of Almeria, Grenada and Seville in Southern Spain, or by Saracens in Sicily in the rich manufacturing cities of Palermo[1] and Messina. Printed fabrics of silk, cotton, linen, and woolen stuffs were subsequently made in Lucca, in Genoa, and the free cities of Northern Italy.
The art of staining cloth with colors is older than history. Homer writes about the magnificent colored cloths of Sidon; Herodotus mentions the garments of the people of Caucasus, which he says were covered with figures of animals; Pliny describes the decorated linens of the old Egyptians.[2] The Spanish invaders of Mexico brought back statements that all the people of the New World were clothed in cotton cloths
- ↑ Moorish authors tell us that in the days of the last Norman kings of Sicily, ten thousand silk looms were in active operation in Palermo; but this statement is an oriental exaggeration of a fact that required no embellishment. Others say that Jewish and Italian traders carried these silks to Italy, Germany, and the North of Europe. The earliest silk-weavers of Palermo were the captured inhabitants of Greece who had been taken there in 1147.
- ↑ Pliny says that the colors were produced by dyeing, but the garments described by Herodotus could not have been made by this process. We have to infer that they used some form of impression. Breitkopf tells us that the colored cloths of the Egyptians were made by printing. His conclusions seem reasonable when we consider how largely engraved stamps were used by the Egyptians for printing upon clay, and how short was the step from printing on clay to printing on cloth. The art of staining, printing of stenciling cloth with bright colors by different processes, has been practised in Hindostan from a very early period. The antiquity of the Indian manufacture may be inferred from the European adoption of Indian names. The English word chintz, and its German synonym zitz, are derived from a Hindostanee word that means both a colored printed cloth and a flower. The word calico is from Calicut, the town on the Malabar coast from which calico was first exported to Europe.
