On Thursday, 18 May, an exhibition of the most precious liturgical vestments of the Diocese of Brno began simultaneously at the Mendel Museum of Masaryk University and the Diocesan Museum at Petrov. It will last until 2 June, and from July to September it will be part of the exhibition in the Želiv monastery. 

A large number of historically valuable pieces of liturgical vestments have been preserved in the collections of the parishes of the Diocese of Brno. A project of Masaryk University in cooperation with the Diocesan Museum, supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under the ÉTA programme, has carried out field research on these fabrics and selected the rarest exhibits for the forthcoming exhibition. The surviving liturgical garments are a testament to the enormous inventiveness and creative freedom of 17th and 18th century textile designers, whose free handling of the rules of perspective or disregard for the laws of nature anticipated similar developments in painting by centuries. According to František Svoboda from the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, who is one of the authors of the exhibition, the realm of historical fabric patterns will introduce a hitherto little-known area of artistic creation to the wider public. The Patterns of Beauty exhibition is one way of marvelling at how beautiful, but also laborious and unfathomable, is the world we live in and that our ancestors bequeathed to us." 

Visitors to the exhibition will see rare textiles from Indian, Persian, French and Italian weaving workshops, as well as textile designs from Southeast Asia. The exhibition will also present the development and changes in the styles of textile patterns in their chronology, which was quite different from the development of works of art in sculpture, painting and architecture, and is not well known to the general public. Individual weaving techniques and the different visual impact of different types of fabrics will also be presented. 

One of the aims of the project was to recall the beauty and richness of historical patterns and at the same time to develop their application potential today. Historic fabric patterns are one form of cultural capital that can be reused. That is why the Kolovrat, ČM s.r.o. company, which created replicas of selected historical fabrics, and students of Fashion and Textile Design at the Higher Vocational School in Brno, who used the replicas of historical fabrics to design garments in a contemporary style, collaborated on the project. Visitors will be able to see how this meeting of 18th and 21st century creativity turned out in the last section of the exhibition.  

The exhibition installation and graphic design were created by students and teachers of the Faculty of Architecture at Brno University of Technology.  The project also includes the website www.beauty-patterns.org/, where all the surviving designs can be viewed in reconstructed form. 

František Svoboda and Jiří Vácha /Faculty of Philosophy, Masaryk University/ Architectural and artistic design.