Chasuble Back

This luxuriously decorated back panel of a chasuble, a sleeveless vestment worn over a priest's white linen robe, is an example of the bold floral patterning typical of early-18th-century French brocades. In its rich designs and realistic shading, this textile exhibits the decorative style of Jean Revel, one of the leading French textile designers of the period. He introduced a new weaving technique which mimicked the three-dimensional appearance of natural objects on cloth. Using the hatching of overlapping weft threads, Revel constructed an optical illusion of intermediate tones called points rentrés.