Forming one’s own aesthetic judgment, that is, realizing whether a thing is beautiful or not, is necessary in order to learn to reason autonomously.
So I can say:
– I know how to look because I am trained;
– I know how to choose because I compare what I have learned with what I see, and I enrich my aesthetic judgment;
– when I formulate reasoned opinions I express my identity, I declare my belonging – I am Umbrian, I am Italian -, I measure myself against the surrounding reality, I open a bridge between the past – tradition – and the present – topicality – and I plan for the future.
All this allows me to enter into a constructive relationship with others: I set ideas and thoughts circulating; social relationship, sustained by conscious concepts, generates trust toward the other (I listen to you because I am interested in what you say, and I answer with ideas of my own), and this builds social bonds.
Nurturing trust in others is, in my view, one of the goals to be reached today in order to mend the modern social fabric
Speaking of a utensil, I understand that an object of use has a form, and this arises from its function; if I learn to decipher it, I read the history from which it comes. Once this analysis is finished, if I wish, I verify in the present the need to preserve the object’s form or to adapt it to today: is it worth producing? What role does it have in the present?

This is why it is still useful to speak of Tovaglie Perugine, to get to know them and to ask what role they might have if reproduced today according to the original models.
Museums and places of conservation are important if they manage to speak to those who visit them; and, in order to look at an exhibition in a conscious way (and not a merely enumerative one: that is, with an uncritical gaze that limits itself to registering objects as ‘important’ without really knowing how to assess why), it is necessary that the museum have an informed interlocutor, and that the visitor find in the artwork an answer to a curiosity of his own, or that the museum prompt reflections that can be applied in reality.
A modern model of museum dialogue in Umbria, in my view, is the newborn Museo della canapa of Sant’Anatolia di Narco, where, from the hemp seed to modern fabrics (even a jacket by Brunello Cucinelli), an attempt is made to tell the whole story.
It could be here, in these particular sectors, that the answer lies to an overbearing market which, in the name of profit, flattens knowledge.
To bring traditions back to the surface, not in order to make “nativity scenes” but to enrich the life of citizens with objects that carry cultural value, means to grow. I do not want two or three cloths at the price of one, but one that also tells my story.

Definition
The tovaglie perugine belong to textile production and are to be placed among popular products, that is, made on wooden looms for domestic use. In the large rural houses there was often a room, “il telarino”, where a hand loom, with a working width of 90 or 120 cm, saw workers, almost always women, take their turns at different moments of the day.

Technically we are dealing with a linen and cotton fabric made with plain weave (in many cases with a partridge-eye or herringbone binding), at whose ends, in the direction of the weft, the decorations ran. These were in bands (with gros de tour weave) or strips with geometric decorations or figurative motifs that repeated rhythmically, made with laid-in wefts.
Confronted animals, hunting scenes, the tree of life, knights, stylized sirens reduced to modules were repeated to decorate the fabrics.
The yarn of the decoration was an intense sky-blue, dyed with indigo or woad.
Indigo is a woody shrub, with beautiful flowers (red or white), living in the East; from it is extracted the dyeing substance that gives blue, by very ancient processes of fermentation.
The dye obtained with this natural colorant, as we said, produces an intense blue color; in it the yarn appears as though coated with a lacquer, since the dyeing substance remains in suspension in the water, does not dissolve, but deposits itself on the outer part of the fiber.
In the old tovaglie, tried by use, where there are abrasions, the raw state of the yarn emerges; this produces a sense of fading, which comes not from the alteration of the dye, but from the emerging of the fiber.
The Tuareg, who had garments dyed with indigo, were called “blue men” because residues of the dyeing of their garments deposited themselves on their skin.
Woad, on the other hand, is a herbaceous plant that was cultivated also in our territory; especially in the north of Umbria, many place-names preserve the term, such as Gualdo Cattaneo, Gualdo Tadino, and so on.
In dyeing with woad much more raw material is needed and the extraction of the coloring substance is more complex; the dye obtained is always the intense blue, because in woad too Isatis tinctoria is present. A great deal of woad was produced in the ancient world, even though the prime substance for obtaining blue was indigo.

Use
The tovaglie perugine have always been objects of use and populated daily life; they were: hand-towels, tablecloths, table runners, and we also find them on altars, where they completed the table for religious rites.
From the historical point of view, the indigo tovaglie are to be placed between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century; they were produced also in other regions of Italy, especially in the center, but the Umbrian corpus stands out for quality and quantity.
This production would become one of the art objects that gave Umbria its identity, under the name of Tovaglie Perugine.
It is at the end of the nineteenth century that such artifacts were sought out and studied, and this is the moment in which they would be codified. They are spoken of, and their fortune would unfold along two channels: collecting, which would also entail the market, and musealization.
The valorization of the tovaglie perugine is interwoven with the cultural operation whose aim is to provide models for the modern ‘artistic industries’. It arises, in fact, at the moment when in industry the concept of ‘applied art’ begins to take its first steps, that is, artistic research applied to the object of use produced mechanically and in series. I study the form of a leaf, I find its outline, its color, and so on, and the result I apply, as decoration, to a curtain or a glass.
This form of art finds its origins in northern Europe, and in Italy, theorized by Alfredo Melani, it finds its first school in the Istituto d’Arte Applicata that would be opened inside the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Melani himself, moved by the spirit of industrial art, would form with the then emerging Ulrico Hoepli (1889-1909) an association that would lead him to publish several texts on applied art.
The Tovaglie Perugine did not escape Melani, and in an issue of ‘Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale’, a journal of 1903, he analyzed them and gave tracings of the decorative motifs.
Still in order to understand the importance of applied art, we must recall that this is the moment in which the great museum of South Kensington in London was born, which would become the famous Victoria and Albert Museum. This collection preserves objects of craftsmanship with the intent of making them models of applied art; we will find here many finds that come from the prolific Italian production.
It may seem that we have gone off track with this discussion, but if the cultural climate had not been this one, our tovaglie too would have been one of the many beautiful objects of the past, without a real place in the present; instead, seen through this lens, their value can be understood. Their importance was not only that of an important find of antiquity, but also that of art forms rich in economic potential that could be transferred to the industrial product. This formula, tradition and modern production, could be transferred to today.
It is onto this panorama that collecting grafts itself: another decisive factor for the knowledge and conservation of this textile product.

Collecting
Let us cite, as representative of all, the example of a Perugian collector, Mariano Rocchi (1855-1943). Rocchi is sensitive to the modern discourse on the applied arts and, on the wave of this fashion, gathers many craft finds, as the fine catalogue of his collection shows; among the objects present in his collection, a great deal of space is held by the tovaglie perugine.
His collection is so famous that at the beginning of the twentieth century he would lend examples to three national exhibitions (Turin, Perugia and Rome), and foreign visitors and buyers would frequent his collection, which from Perugia would be moved (1907) to Rome, to a building on via Nazionale which, as the illustrative booklet advertises, is also equipped with a modern elevator.
Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the nascent taste for popular production, collecting and the consequent market would bring the indigo weavings out of the shadows; from this moment all the connoisseurs of art, scholars in general, art historians (let Walter Bombe be named for all) go in search of them; they would be noted and pointed out every time they appear in paintings; the repeated studies would make them a banner of the Italian Renaissance.
A number of modern firms, too, which produce artisanal weavings, begin to reproduce them; more than copying them, they interpret them, creating imaginative fabrics that continue their tradition in an autonomous way.
New colors are introduced: rust, yellow, red; the decorative patterns are simplified; from objects of use they become decorative accessories, witnesses of the taste of the past.

One cannot close this reasoning without recalling that an embroidery stitch (and those who are knowledgeable know that it was part of the education of young Umbrian women a few generations ago) such as the Punto Assisi, invented in the early years of the twentieth century, derives from the tovaglie perugine.

Silvana Toppetti taught History of Art and of the Applied Arts; more specifically, she devoted herself to the study of ancient and modern Textiles. She has written several articles on the subject and collaborated on various publications, in particular: Alida Becchetti and Sivana Toppetti, Punto Assisi, Edizioni Minerva, Assisi (PG) 1991.