The Historisches Museum in Bern possesses one of the most famous tapestry collections in the world, in the form of its Burgundian tapestries from the period between 1440 and 1515. A large special exhibition is now showing these precious tapestries, woven from wool, gold and silk and uniquely well preserved, in a wholly new light. For the first time it will thus be possible to admire the pictorial tapestries in all their stunning brilliance of colour and wealth of detail. You will be able to experience masterpieces covering an area of some 1000 sq m such as the Trajan Tapestry from the Cathedral Treasury in Lausanne and the Millefleurs (thousand flowers) Tapestry from the Burgundian booty, the earliest and at the same time the most magnificent millefleurs tapestry in the world, in the midst of an audio-visual recreation of late-medieval festive culture. Discover more about the use of costly tapestries as the decoration of façades, banqueting halls and tribunes for court ceremonials, and about the patrons who commissioned them and the weavers who made them. New state-of-the-art computer animations answer your questions about the manufacture of hand-woven tapestries and convey in a vivid way the process and circumstances of their creation. All the captions in the exhibition will be in three languages (French, English and German).
