A New Light on the Story of the Trojan War’s Tapestries

Ancient history and myth were intertwined with medieval romances and Christian ideals as
subjects for art and literature in the mid-fifteenth century. Thus, as Asselberghs (1970) and
more recently McKendrick (1991) have demonstrated, the complex narrative of the Trojan
War tapestries was based not on Homer’s Iliad, but on more recent retellings, such as Benoît
de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae,
which highlighted the chivalric deeds of heroes such as Hector and Achilles.
In the mid-1460s, Pasquier Grenier, the foremost tapestry merchant of Tournai, began
production of an eleven-piece set of tapestries illustrating the Story of Troy that would enjoy a
great success with princely patrons in succeeding decades, including Charles the Bold,
Charles VIII, King of France, Henry VII, King of England, or Matthias Corvinus, King of
Hungary. The series enjoyed similar popularity in Italy, where sets were acquired by the
dukes Federico Montefeltro and Ludovico Sforza. With the survival of whole or partial
preparatory drawings for nine of the eleven tapestries, as well as seventeen extant tapestries or
fragments from various sets, it is possible to reconstruct the order of the series. We’ll see that
the series is unique and well documented.
This paper aims to re-examine the Story of the Trojan War in the light of current research.
Furthermore, our investigation on the Story of Hercules series will bring us to reconsider
some tapestries neglected until today. Thus I would like to focus particularly on three
fragments now extant at Tournai (TAMAT) and Omaha (Joslyn Art Museum). These pieces
could provide evidence of tapestries that depict an earlier part of the story of Troy.