At first glance, the painting appears almost ordinary. A male subject, his identity lost to the centuries, gazes solemnly out to the viewer from his oval frame, housed in a slightly yellowed paper card holder 5 inches in length and 6.25 inches in height. The details of lavish garments rendered in precise strokes from a woodcock feather brush are still clear, but the edges of the picture appear frayed—with good reason. This particular work was painted not on canvas, but on the ethereal strands of a spider web.
Although much remains unknown about the painting, there are a few clues to its origins. The words Gemälde auf Spinnengewebe, German for “Paintings on Cobweb,” are written next to it, along with the signature Fr. Unterberger in Innsbruck (Tirol).
Carol Mobley, the current owner of the work, is offering it for sale at the Ephemera Fair in Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 14 and 15. Mobley came by this particular oddity almost by chance. “The guy I got it from was in his 90s and had it for maybe 40 years,” she says. “He said that a relative gave it to him. He’d always meant to do more research into its origins, but never got around to it.”
Almost certainly, the painting made a transatlantic voyage from Tyrol, Austria, and passed through Ellis Island. “It’s just a shame that some of the cobweb has deteriorated away, I’m sure that’s from being jostled around over the years,” Mobley says. Given how far it journeyed, though, it’s a wonder it’s still intact at all.
In the 19th century, Spinnwebenbilder, also known as cobweb painting or gossamer painting, was a somewhat popular form of folk art in the Tyrolian Alps. Due to the fragile nature of these gossamer works, fewer than 100 such paintings have survived the ravages of time. Almost all are in private family collections, sequestered away into drawers or passed down as heirlooms.
No one knows exactly who first thought the dewy strands of spiderwebs and silk caterpillars would make for a suitable artistic medium. Most likely they were a member of a monastic order near the Puster Valley, an alpine vale stretching through Italy and Austria.
By the 16th century, these monks had developed a mastery of the laborious process of collecting cobwebs, washing them, then layering them on top of one another. Once the webs formed a milky, opaque surface, they would stretch them over mats to form their miniscule canvases, then grab their brushes. The resulting renditions of Catholic saints would have appeared to float like specters in cloister windows. The Chester Cathedral in England is home to one of the last such pieces of iconography: an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child, painted by the Tyrolean artist Johann Burgman.
As the centuries crept by, secular subjects entered these ghostly frames. Mobley speculates that the figure in her painting was an Austrian military man from his uniform. Dukes, duchesses, and other members of society who were wealthy enough to afford a portrait are common subjects, along with landscapes and pastoral scenes.
Franz Unterberger, the artist who signed this particular work, played an outsized role in popularizing these curiosities. Although an accomplished oil painter, Unterberger most likely did not wield the brush here. Rather, he worked as an art dealer out of a shop in Tyrol, where he commissioned cobweb paintings from anonymous artists and sold them. His business continued into the 1930s, by which time the last artist with the knowledge of this enigmatic craft had passed away.
While a few 20th-century artists have taken a stab at the finicky medium, the art has largely died out. All that remain are a few rare fragments of a lost art.
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