The Origin of the Sample Book

The medieval model book was one of the earliest examples of a portable instrument used for recording and disseminating samples of design ideas. Before the widespread use of paper and the introduction of the printing press in the West in the fifteenth century, artistic communication was achieved through drawings on vellum, an expensive material laboriously manufactured from fine animal skins. In the late medieval period, model books with vellum pages were used as portable portfolios by itinerant artists or in design workshops to preserve artists’ works. Designers’ model books showed the range and quality of their work to potential clients and served as a repository of stock motifs that could be utilized in a variety of decorative contexts, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, architectural ornament, and textile design.

Textile pattern books were a direct development from artists’ model books, whose use waned as printing and other reproduction methods emerged. The first pattern books containing textile design motifs were published in Germany in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and, by the end of the century, similar books were widely disseminated in Italy, England, and France. The books documented patterns used for weaving, embroidery, and lace, predominantly for the border ornamentation of table covers, towels, and clothing. In large part, pattern books were intended for the skilled amateur, to guide the “virtuous work” undertaken by a fashionable woman belonging to the nobility or the newly emerging merchant classes.