Towel

This complete towel entered the collection in 1899. The design is formed of addorsed and confronted animals specifically to be identified as wyverns. According to The Oxford English Dictionary a wyvern is a "chimerla animal imagined as a winged dragon with two feet like those an an eagle, and a serpent-like barbed tail". It is the same animal which one also finds, however, with its wings spread, in the lower part of the Borghese coat-of-arms. Towels of this kind can be found in Early Renaissance paintings and manuscript pages where they were used either as table covers or as overtowels.