Peacock & Vine
A.S. BYATT

“Hymn” is a quiet and sober word, a comforting, bread-&-butter, not-very-riotous word ... so I can’t say that A.S. Byatt’s new book is a hymn to its subjects. It is much wilder, richer and more evocative – a paean of praise to the imagination of the inventor, to Venetian water and English woods, and to the beauty of meticulous and absorbing work.

It’s a book about the Victorian designer and writer, William Morris, and the turn-of-the twentieth-century artist and designer, Mariano Fortuny. Morris you probably know already, through the reissuing of his fabric and wallpaper patterns - you might even, like Byatt, have “a faded Morris cushion … heavy Morris curtains ... tea towels ... a tea tray ... they were just the most exciting things we found. Both the colours and the geometry and ... the reality of real flowers and leaves.” Fortuny is the man who invented a method of pleating silk so finely and permanently that, sewn into simple tubes, it melded itself around the body like a mermaid’s skin; the initial idea based on the ankle-length tunic worn by the bronze Charioteer of Delphi. He also dyed his fabrics with subtle, shifting colours, printing them with archaic designs found in church vestments and carvings, Minoan paintings and Persian textiles.