Underside Couching from the Byzantine World: New Evidence from the Chungul Kurgan Burial

Underside couching is the technique by which gold embroidery threads are sewn to the underlying textile by pulling a loop of the gold thread completely through to the back of the material. Its advantages over the more common surface couching include greater durability and flexibility, and it has long been considered characteristic of the famous opus Anglicanum, embroidery from medieval England. It is an exceedingly rare technique among embroideries of Byzantine style: it appears in the medallion images of Christ and the Virgin Mary on the Mantle of Philip of Swabia in the cathedral at Speyer as well as in sections of the Grandson Antependium in Berne. In both cases, the presence of the underside couching technique has been used by scholars to argue against a Byzantine attribution. This paper introduces into the discussion a set of embroideries from the early thirteenth century, found in the burial of a nomadic ruler of the Kipchak (Cuman / Polovtsian) Confederation at the Chungul Kurgan in southern Ukraine. This burial contained a number of silk textiles, many featuring gold embroidery. The most spectacular of these were a series of embroidered faces set into an elaborate framework of silver-gilt plaques, gilt metal-thread braids, and pearl stringing. These heads and their gold backgrounds were embroidered in counted underside couching onto the silk ground textile. This evidence should prompt a reevaluation of the other embroideries combining Byzantine figural style and this technique hitherto considered “un-Byzantine.”