Endrei Walter szerk.: Textilipari Múzeum Évkönyve 8. 1995 (Budapest, 1995)
dr. Márta Járó: Manufacturing technique of gold threads and their imitations on museum textiles - chronology of the preparation of metal threads. Results of the scientific investigations
According to the unanimous statement of goldsmiths, only a palm-sized gold foil can be hammered into thin leave uniformly. This is the reason why the gold leaves made by hand are of such small dimensions even nowadays. It is very likely that these palm-sized gold foils were cut up for the preparation of gold threads at the beginning. The wrapping (or spinning) required a very meticulous work and it made these threads even more expensive. On basis of the analyses made up to now, mostly flat gold strips were used for the tablet-wo ven braids decorating the garments in Europe in the 5-8th centuries [28]. In the meantime, the cylindrical gold thread (metal strip wound around a fibrous core) also appears on some archeological textile fragments dated to this period. However, these are considered generally as non-European products [29]. According to the evidence of the findings, the cylindrical metal thread has again outplaced the flat gold strip by the 9th-10th century [30]. Around the first millenium larger and larger surfaces were embroidered with metal threads. The gold embroidery of the Hungarian coronation mantle is for instance cca. 3 m 2 . The density of the threads on 1 cm is cca. 60, i.e. about 60 gold threads were laid close to each other and fixed by silk thread to the base fabric [31]. With the embroidering technique used in case of the mantle, a cca. 60 cm long metal thread was used for 1 cm gold embroidery, which corresponds to an about three times as long gold strip, since the metal thread used was a gold strip wound around a silk yarn. For the thread sufficient to embroider the surface of 3 m , more than 50 km long gold strip had to be wound around the core [32]. If the strip segments were cut from palm-size gold foils, more than half million short strips had to be joined for making the thread. It is very likely that there existed another, more simple method or methods for the preparation of longer strips. In contemporary sources and historical works, some indications can be found for this, however these are not quite unequivocal. Saint Jerome (4th century A.D.), for instance wrote in his sixteenth letter to Eustochim: "... vestibus attenuata in filum auri metalla texutur" [33], he speaks about a garment made with gold thread prepared of thinned or stretched metal. It can not be decided unambiguosly what the author meant by that. In one of the recipes of the Manuscript of Lucca, dated back to the 8th century A.D., there is an indication that longer strips were made for the preparation of metal thread: the hammered gold-foil (or the wider strip cut from this foil) was stretched and so fibres (strips) having the
