The golden cap -preparing the fabric

 So the major challenge in my quest to recreate the specific look of Kristina Gyllenstierna from the 1516 altarpiece in Västerås is to figure out her headpiece.

I have crawled the the web and literature to find anything similar. The only other examples are two tomb monuments, made from the same unknown master as this sculpture. As mentioned in my earlier post I have decided to go for a standard wulsthaube to get the shape of the headwear, even if it's going to be a bit smaller than this really big headpiece. One day I would like to work with worbla or foam to make an exact replica, but that wouldn't exactly be even close to historically accurate.

Then I found this altarpiece from 1506 by Lucas Cranach

Altarpiece with the Martyrdom of St Catharine: St Dorothea, St Agnes, St Kunigunde [left wing, recto]

1506, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

The woman to the left has a headpiece that from a distance gives off a very simlar appearance to the headpiece of Kristina Gyllenstierna. This is also the time when I want to scream at my 12-year old self to take note of all the details when you see a painting. I'm pretty sure that I must have seen the original when the family passed Dresden and spent several ours at the art museum. Thankfully though the wonderful Digital Cranach archive  has scans in HD, which lets you really zoom in on the paintings.

It's obvious that the decorations come from gold embroidery, and that is the reason why I have spent quite some time this year practising gold embroidery, and now I'm waiting for my material to arrive. Under all the embroidery there are the diamonds made up from dots though. They continue under the embroidery so they must on the fabric itself. I couldn't find any fabric with that pattern, so I would have to do it myself. After having totally overthought it, I had plans to basically build a full printing set up, I realised that the easiest way of doing a fairly similar pattern would be with a marker pen.

I started out with testing a few pens on a piece of linen. After having bought and tried several pens that were marked as metallic gold I was really disappointed. They looked like rusted brass, and the dots were just black and dirty. So I decided to go wtih a regular marker pen in gold colour instead of metallic gold. This is of course not an historically accurate way of making the dots, but here I think the end result is more important thant the technique. For a more accurate way I could probably have found some kind of gold paint and used a stencil or something.

I continued to test the pen on the fabric to figure out a good size for the diamonds. In the end I thought that diamonds that were 4 cm wide and 5 cm high looked the best.

I then marked the whole fabric with lines and dots 4 and 5 cm apart, so that I got a grid. I used a frixion pen so that I could easily erase the lines and dots, but had painted the shape of the hood pattern with a non-frixion pen so that wouldn't be disappear.

For each diamond I marked out the top, bottom and side centers.

I started with marking out the dots on the side center, and then I simply freehanded the other dots. This makes each diamond a bit unique, and I don't mind that. They are not totally similar in the painting either.

It was a matter of marking and painting, marking and painting. In all it took med around 1,5 hours to finish it all.

And here is the final result - linen fabric with diamonds built up from gold dots.