Saint-Etienne earned the name city of the ribbon, and the print takes that literally: Rubelli's studio built the original by weaving diagonal silk ribbons of different colours, then printed what it had made.
What survives the translation is the depth. The ribbons cross and pass beneath one another, and because the source was a real woven object rather than a drawing, the shadows fall where they ought to. On 155 cm cotton with a 37 cm repeat in both directions, the figure is small enough to read as texture across a chair and large enough to be legible at arm's length. 20,000 Martindale, made in Italy.
