One of the striking things about the culture of 15th-century Ireland is what is not there. There is not, to any great extent, evidence of that great flowering of European intellectual and artistic life that is summed up in the term Renaissance. The magnificent set of 15th-century Benediction copes and Mass vestments that survives from Christ Church in Waterford stands out as a rare example of Renaissance art in Ireland. But it could not be other than a European import.

The vestments are first mentioned in 1481 in the will of John Collyn, dean of the cathedral. Though later legends claimed that they had been a gift from Pope Innocent III in 1211, they are clearly of much later origin and are much more likely to have been commissioned by a wealthy local patron.

They must have cost a fortune: the fabric is Italian cloth of gold and the embroidery is Flemish, from the great workshops of Brussels, Bruges or Ghent.

When Oliver Cromwell’s troops took the city, in the 17th century, they found that priests had hidden “a great store of plate, chalices, rings, and rich copes, as rich as ever seen in Spain”. The vestments were so well hidden that they were not discovered again until 1774, when the old cathedral was demolished.

The most important part of the collection is the set of copes (liturgical mantles or cloaks): the red Creation Cope, which illustrates the mystery of the Incarnation; the green Passion or Crucifixion Cope (in the National Museum); and, featured here, the Magi Cope.

It is staggeringly opulent: one and a half metres high and (at its maximum) two metres wide, made of brocaded velvet on cloth of gold, with a pile of red silk fixed with tiny loops of gold. The velvet almost certainly came from the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The opulence is visual and metaphorical as well as physical. The hood of the Magi Cope alone depicts three parallel Biblical scenes: the homage of the Magi to the newborn Christ at the centre, the arrival of the Queen of Sheba at the court of King Solomon on the left and the visit of Abraham to Melchizedek on the right.

The Flemish artists who designed the Magi scene almost certainly drew on depictions in a book that typified the spread of learning in the Renaissance period that was made possible by printing: the Biblia Pauperum, the Bible of the Poor that was hugely popular in Germany and the Netherlands. Thus, the cope brings together some of the forces that were shaping western European culture: the burgeoning wealth of the Italian city states, the spread of books, the skills of a growing artisan class, new visual imagery that implies a new way of seeing the world.

But nothing like this could have been made in 15th-century Ireland. The Renaissance was above all an urban phenomenon, and in Ireland urban settlement was, if anything, being reversed. Ireland was never cut off from the great cultural awakening, but it experienced it largely as an import.

Thanks to Eamonn MacEneaney

Where to see itAt Chorister's Hall, part of Waterford Museum of Treasures, from the summer; 051-304500, waterfordtreasures.com. The Crucifixion cope is at the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, Kildare Street, D2, 01-6777444, museum.ie