Quilting the Threshold

This creative scholarship project translates the material language of Baroque marble flooring into textile form through quilt-making, interpreting thresholds within the Chigi Palace at Ariccia. The quilt centers on a specific passageway connecting family rooms, where three distinct flooring patterns converge. Formed by the thickness of the palace’s medieval walls, this architectural seam functions as a site of both separation and connection: between spaces, functions, and occupants of differing rank within the domestic hierarchy. By translating these marble patterns into fabric, the quilt renders the threshold as an intimate, tactile artifact, inviting reflection on how patterned stonework reflected the Baroque experience.

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Quilt-making extends this metaphor. Just as marble floors were produced through commesso, the inlaying of contrasting stones into unified designs, quilts are composed by piecing together diverse fabrics into coherent surfaces. The quilt top reproduces the marble patterns through this process of textile inlay, while the quilting stitches that bind the layers draw motifs from the wallpaper of adjacent rooms. These stitches echo Bernini’s bel composto, uniting disparate materials into a seamless whole. In this way, marble flooring and quilt-making emerge as parallel practices of composition, where difference is held together through craft.