Technique
High-warp technique
Each Scassa tapestry is worked in high-warp, the traditional technique used for the great tapestries of the past, by the nuns in the Romanesque era and by the 18th-century lissiers.
High-warp weaving is the first and most noble form of tapestry production. It is also takes the most time and is the most laborious – indeed, to weave a square metre of tapestry takes an average of 500 hours of work. The final result comes from a craftsmanship able to successfully interpret and blend a thousand-year-old technique with the most unscrupulous stylistic innovations in modern figurative art, in a unified poetic expression.
As early as the Romanesque era, this traditional technique was already being employed by the nuns of the Saxon convents, in 14th-century Paris and by chief manufactures in Arras, Tournai and Brussels. The same technique was used by the maestros of the 16th-century Italian manufactures and by the lissiers of the Gobelins between the 17th and 18th centuries. This method of weaving tapestries has been intentionally unchanged for centuries, without altering any aspect of its instrumentality that is invigorated upon encountering the new stylistic inventions, testifying to a new and more current aesthetic sensitivity.
Carpet technique
Amongst the oldest carpets preserved today is a fabric dated to the 5th century BC, originally from the Eurasian Steppe and discovered in 1949 in a tomb in Eastern Siberia, near the border with Mongolia. Adorned with images of deer and knights, it consists of 360,000 knots per square metre. Today, it is preserved at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Much later on, at the beginning of the 17th century in Paris, the first carpets made at the famous Savonnerie Manufactory were created. Under the guidance of Henry IV and Louis XIV, national production was further encouraged and – thanks to the Aubusson and Beauvais manufactures – carpets became an integral and essential part of the great palaces and the splendid homes of the bourgeoisie.
The base or warp consists of a single continuous thread, often made of cotton or silk and which, once woven on the loom, can be used in pairs. On each pair of warps, with one thread of wool or multi-strands of silk, comes the creation of a knot (being ghordies for Turkish-made carpets) or a weave (as in the case of carpets with a Persian knot). These knots are positioned one-by-one and can be of different colours in order to create precise patterns based on a drawing prepared in advance, determining the colour and location of each knot.
Academic Specialisation Courses
Arazzeria Scassa is in constant communication with the most important and prestigious Italian Academies of Art, being united in their commitment to cultivating the best artistic talents, organising lectures accompanied by a good number of workshops that are periodically held within the ancient walls of the Certosa di Asti, in the laboratory in which Sassa tapestries have come to life since the company’s beginning.
In the same way, art scholars are welcomed in order to facilitate further insights related not only to the study of the technique but also to the historical-artistic definition of the work carried out by the tapestry atelier, in a dialogue directed with an atelier company that aligns closely with many Renaissance art workshops.
