Los amores de Mercurio y Herse. Una tapicería rica de Willem de Pannemaker

In the book Los amores de Mercurio y Herse, published as a catalog of the exhibition held by the Museo Nacional del Prado in the summer of 2010, a creation of great beauty is collected: the series of eight tapestries woven in gold thread that tells the story of the love between the god Mercury and the Attic princess Herse with the final metamorphosis of her envious sister, Aglauro, in stone. It is about the representation of one of the fables collected in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The tapestries form a set of extraordinary beauty, even for the high level of the great Willem upholsterer of Pannemaker.

The tapestries have been photographed expressly for this publication, after their restoration and cleaning. Next, the images have been carefully contrasted with the cloths to guarantee maximum fidelity to the original piece. The texts of the specialists Concha Herrero Carretero and Nello Forti Grazzini, document rigorously the state of historical knowledge about these works.

The transcendence of the sample is not small, since, after a century of separation, the eight panels meet. Because of this, this brief monograph carefully edited and illustrated has been published: a necessary instrument to place in its rightful place the extraordinary value of the pieces that form such an exquisite sample.