Flemish lace pieces in the documents of the State Archives of Rome: Lace for the Popes 

In Bruges, lace is usually associated with the 19th century where lace was mainly made by poor lace-makers who had their work sold through ‘koopvrouwen’ (female merchants) and local traders. Yet there was already a flourishing lace production in Flanders from the late 16th century that also went abroad. It was mainly Antwerp, a port city, that was an important center for the export of lace.

The clergy have always been an important buyer of lace for their liturgical vestments and church linen. In this exhibition, we get the first glimpse into the Vatican's purchases of Flemish lace in the early 18th century thanks to a few accounting cahiers from the Reverenda Camera Apostolica to which the original lace samples are still attached. These never shown authentic documents give us a fascinating picture of the life and tastes of papal Rome in the 1700s. The precise dating of the bundles enabled our lace experts to correctly situate all these different laces in time, around 1700, when Old Flemish lace gradually developed distinctive techniques associated with different centers of production.