Flemish Tapestries: Art, power, and the weavers who made them

Discover the history, craft and cultural significance of Flemish tapestries, and where to see them at the House of Refuge of Tongerlo Abbey in Mechelen. UPDATED MAY 2026

Introducing Flemish tapestries

Walk into a great European palace and you will often find them. Enormous, luminous, floor-to-ceiling hangings, teeming with colour and incident. Horses rear. Armies clash. Saints ascend. Monsters are slain. And if you look closely at the lower right corner, you may find a small woven mark. A town seal, or a maker’s signature, that tells you, if you know where to look, that this thing was made in Flanders.

From the early 15th century onwards, Flemish tapestries were the most prestigious portable art objects in the world. They were woven from wool, silk, and thread wrapped in real gold and silver. They were commissioned by kings, coveted by emperors, and considered alongside jewellery as the most valuable things a nobleman could own. They were also, and this is easy to forget, deeply practical objects. They kept the cold out of stone rooms that no amount of firewood could warm.

Today, the beating heart of that tradition lives in Mechelen, inside a late-fifteenth-century building that most people walk past without a second glance. The House of Refuge of Tongerlo Abbey was once a town refuge for the monks of the great Norbertine abbey in Westerlo. It is now home to the Royal Manufacturers De Wit, the world leader in tapestry conservation. What goes on inside is extraordinary. This post tells the whole story.

What is a tapestry?

It seems obvious, but it is worth being precise. A tapestry is not a painting on fabric, and it is not embroidery. It is a woven textile in which the image is created entirely by the coloured weft threads. The warp threads (the structural skeleton of the piece, stretched vertically or horizontally on the loom) are hidden entirely by the weft, which the weaver passes back and forth in short, interlocking runs of colour to build up the design.

The key technical innovation that makes tapestry different from ordinary cloth weaving is the discontinuous weft. Rather than running the coloured thread all the way across the width of the piece, the weaver works one small block of colour at a time. This builds up each element of the image section by section, like filling in a mosaic. The warps disappear; only the image remains.

The result can look, from a distance, remarkably like a painting. This was precisely the ambition of the great Flemish workshops. From the 1400s they developed their technique to the point where they could reproduce the subtleties of shadow, flesh tone and drapery in thread.

The craft: How a Flemish tapestry was made

The process began not in the workshop but in the studio of an artist. Every large tapestry started with a full-scale coloured design on paper or cloth, known as the cartoon. This was the blueprint from which the weavers would work. Producing it was a major artistic commission in its own right. Painters such as Raphael, Rubens, Jordaens and Bernard van Orley all provided cartoons for Flemish tapestry workshops. The cartoon dictated everything: the composition, the colour palette, the narrative.

The cartoon then went to the loom. Two types of loom were in use, each with its own implications.

High-warp loom

The high-warp loom held the warp threads vertically, with the cartoon hung behind the weaver for reference. Work was slow. The drawstrings that separated alternate warp threads for the weft to pass through had to be pulled by hand. But the quality was considered the finest available. Brussels’ high-warp weavers formed jealously guarded guilds to protect their secrets.

Low-warp loom

The low-warp loom was faster. Here, the warp ran horizontally, the drawstrings were controlled by foot pedals (freeing both hands for the delicate work of laying weft), and the cartoon was placed directly beneath the warp threads where the weaver could consult it easily. The catch was that the design came out in mirror image on the front of the tapestry, which meant the cartoon itself had to be made in reverse. Two, three or sometimes four copies of the same composition were often woven from a single cartoon.

Hatchings

Between 1400 and 1530, Flemish weavers developed a technique that set them apart from every other workshop in Europe. This was the use of fine interlocking triangles of colour, known as hatchings, combined with the juxtaposition of different materials. For example: wool for the body of the image, silk for the highlights, gilded thread for the finest details. This gave their work an unmatched ability to render texture and surface: the sheen of armour, the softness of velvet, the depth of shadow.

A large tapestry was not a quick undertaking. A piece five metres high by eight metres wide, woven in wool alone, might occupy five weavers for eight months or more. The cost of the materials, especially the silk and the gold and silver thread, was enormous. This was luxury production at its most extreme.

More than decoration: The practical importance of Flemish tapestries

It is tempting to look at these magnificent objects and think purely of art. But the people who commissioned and owned them were not thinking primarily of aesthetics. They were thinking, first and foremost, of survival.

Medieval and Renaissance buildings, even royal ones, were made of stone. Stone is cold. It is damp. It creates draughts that no fire can entirely defeat. Tapestries, hung floor to ceiling across the walls, transformed these interiors. They trapped air, blocked draughts, insulated rooms, and made the difference between a tolerable winter and a miserable one. In this sense, the finest tapestry was both the most beautiful object in a room and the most useful.

Tapestries were also portable. Unlike frescoes, which belonged to the building, tapestries could be taken down, rolled up and transported. This made them invaluable to the itinerant courts of medieval rulers, who moved from palace to palace and needed their surroundings to be imposing wherever they went. Even generals carried tapestries on campaign. A luxuriously appointed tent communicated power and wealth to both allies and enemies.

When they depicted sacred scenes, tapestries were hung between the pillars of churches and monasteries during feast days and ceremonial occasions. They appeared in city streets during royal entries and civic celebrations, draped from windows and balconies, transforming ordinary urban thoroughfares into something approaching theatre.

And because they were woven from gold and silver thread, they also functioned as a form of investment. In times of crisis, a great tapestry could be melted down or pawned for hard cash. Fifteenth-century inventories consistently listed tapestries as the most valuable portable objects after jewellery. They were more expensive than paintings and sculptures, and far more practical than either.

Power, prestige, and the Burgundian dukes

No patrons did more to create the Flemish tapestry industry than the Dukes of Burgundy. From 1380, Philip the Bold commissioned no fewer than ten tapestry series, using them as state gifts to impress and influence the great powers of Europe. His successors, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, expanded the collections further. The tapestry became a diplomatic instrument: something that expressed cultural superiority as much as military might.

The Spanish and Habsburg kings were equally obsessed with Flemish tapestries. When Philip II of Spain died in 1598, his collection ran to 701 tapestries. Of these, 183 have been preserved in the Royal Palace of Madrid, which today holds some 3,100 tapestries. It’s the largest collection in the world, and the majority are Flemish in origin.

The great weaving centres such as Brussels, Oudenaarde, Mechelen, Bruges and Tournai, competed intensely for the most prestigious commissions. Brussels, with its high-warp tradition and its roster of famous designers, held the top of the market for most of the 16th century. But every major centre produced work of the highest quality, and the movement of weavers between cities meant that techniques spread and evolved.

The House of Refuge of Tongerlo Abbey

Tongerlo Abbey itself is in Westerlo, in the Antwerp Campine. It’s a magnificent Norbertine foundation with its own remarkable history and a celebrated copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. But abbeys needed a foothold in the cities, too: a town house where the abbot and his monks could stay during visits, seek shelter in troubled times, and conduct the business that required an urban presence.

The House of Refuge of Tongerlo Abbey in Mechelen was founded in 1484 for exactly this purpose. It’s enclosed by high brick walls, accessed through a massive wooden door, and centred on a courtyard garden.  It hides in plain sight on the Schoutetstraat; a protected monument that most passers-by do not even know is there. The garden has been planted with flowers and herbs depicted in historical tapestries.

Since 1889, this remarkable building has been the home of the Royal Manufacturers De Wit, now the world’s foremost authority on tapestry conservation and restoration. The collection the building houses spans from the early fifteenth century to the present day.

De Wit: A century and a half of expertise

Founded in 1889, De Wit began as a manufacturer and restorer of tapestries. Over the generations, and particularly since the 1980s when new production was largely set aside in favour of conservation, it has become the benchmark institution for the preservation of antique tapestries worldwide. The world’s greatest museums such as the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, send their most precious pieces to Mechelen.

The scale of what happens here is astonishing. De Wit cleans around 150 tapestries a year. Some restoration projects cost close to a million dollars. Work on a single large piece can take more than a year.

In 1999, De Wit patented an aerosol suction cleaning method that has since become the benchmark standard for museums worldwide. The system uses a large suction table (five by nine metres) equipped with 45 aerosol sprays in the ceiling above. During cleaning, the tapestry is held flat by continuous suction from below while the aerosol fills the enclosed chamber with near-weightless micro-bubbles of water vapour and conservation detergent. These are drawn evenly through the entire textile, removing centuries of soiling without putting the fibres under any strain. pH, temperature and water pressure are monitored continuously by computer throughout the process.

The result is a cleaning method that can remove even the most stubborn soiling without disturbing fugitive dyes or weakening aged threads. Among the tapestries recently treated by this method: the Lady and the Unicorn series from the Musée de Cluny in Paris; tapestries from the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, Malta; and hangings from English country houses including Doddington Hall and Hardwick Hall.

Conservation also involves painstaking structural work. This can include removing old linings, stabilising weakened areas, and re-weaving damaged sections using age-old low-warp techniques. The team of restorers works on up to ten tapestry frames simultaneously, each at a different stage of treatment. The goal is not to make a tapestry look new, but to preserve what it is, including its age.

Visiting: What to expect

The Royal Manufacturers De Wit is open for guided tours on Saturday mornings at 10:30, with the exception of July, the Christmas-New Year period, and public holidays. Groups are limited to a maximum of six people or one family per session. This makes it an intimate and genuinely special experience. It is advisable to contact De Wit in advance to check availability.

The 90-minute guided tour covers the building itself, the De Wit collection of Flemish tapestries from the early 15th century to the present day, a weaving demonstration on a horizontal low-warp loom, and the conservation and restoration workshop (when the team is not at work). The collection on the upper floor includes a display of modern tapestry samples alongside the historic pieces.

Visitors consistently describe the tour as one of the most unexpectedly engrossing experiences in Mechelen. The guide’s specialist knowledge turns what might seem a rarefied subject into something vivid and human: the centuries of skill that go into a single square metre of cloth, the detective work involved in identifying damage, the patience required to re-weave a section that no one will ever know was restored. Photography is not permitted inside. More information from their website.

An aside: Not Tongerlo Abbey, Westerlo

A small clarification worth making if you are planning a trip to discover more about Flemish tapestries. The House of Refuge in Mechelen belongs to Tongerlo Abbey, but it is not the abbey itself. The abbey, a vast and beautiful Norbertine complex, is in Westerlo, about 35 kilometres to the east. If you want to visit the abbey church (and its remarkable Leonardo copy), that requires a separate journey. Check out my post on Westerlo that includes a visit to Tongerlo Abbey. The two places are related by history and by name, but they are not the same place, and they are not close to each other. De Wit is in Mechelen. That is where the tapestries are. And Mechelen is, in any case, a city that richly rewards a day’s wandering. Here’s my post on how to spend a day in Mechelen.

Denzil Walton

I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.