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| Constellations in the Heavenly Firmament
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| Vase carpet fragment, Kerman, south Persia, late 17th-early 18th century. 3.33 x 3.75m (10'11" x 12'4"). See below for full caption
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10 January 2005
'Le Ciel dans un Tapis' at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris is one of the most important public exhibitions of oriental carpets staged anywhere during the past two decades. Indeed, apart from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Mughal exhibition 'Flowers Underfoot' in New York in 1997, one must look back to London in 1983 and 'The Eastern Carpet in the Western World' for an exhibition of comparable stature. Here, the idea behind the show is set out by its co-curator, Roland Gilles, with additional introductory comments and extended captions by HALI's consultant editor Michael Franses.
Michael Franses writes: Roland Gilles and Jöelle Lemaistre of the IMA have assembled a historic exhibition of fifty-seven extraordinarily beautiful carpets, mostly from the 15th to 17th centuries. The list of lenders is remarkable, including the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Musée Historique des Tissus, Lyons, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Keir Collection, Ham, and the Chapitre de la Cathédral, Sion.
Such rare exhibitions are almost impossible to organise for both financial and logistical reasons. The powers-that-be at the IMA are to be applauded for giving Gilles and Lemaistre the scope to create such an outstanding show. Serendipitously, the Islamic galleries at both the V&A and the Met are closed for major redevelopment, simplifying the loan of major carpets from both collections. The overall selection – many of the rugs are well known, others less so – is superb and Mr Gilles tells a special story through the juxtaposition of specific pieces, as he has explained below.
Too many authors believe that oriental carpets can be appreciated and written about from illustrations or memory alone, but a real understanding can only be achieved by actually seeing them and comparing similar examples side by side. 'Le Ciel' is a rare chance to view some great masterpieces, an opportunity that may not be repeated for another twenty years and that should not be missed by HALI readers.
Carpets were made for the floor, but the origins of their designs may be shown to represent a reflection of the heavens. In lands where the night sky can be seen as a wondrous, ever-changing picture, where the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon and the seasonal positions of the constellations point towards some all-prevailing grand scheme, people tried to show in their carpet designs a sense of heavenly beauty within a well-ordered composition. The size, colour, placement and juxtaposition of ornaments were part of a language that we can observe and appreciate today, but never really understand.
Roland Gilles writes: By bringing together a group of outstanding classical period carpets and showing them in a solemn, religiously charged atmosphere, our hope at the IMA was to open people's eyes to the art of the carpet in a new way. The rugs, all chosen for the vitality of their decorative language, are displayed against a deep blue background so that they stand out like constellations in the night sky.
Joelle Lemaistre and I chose to limit the scope of the exhibition primarily to rugs of the 15th and 16th centuries, since this made it possible to highlight the series of styles (geometric, central medallion, floral) that emerged and succeeded each other in almost organic progression: in less than a hundred years we pass from the world of the intellect to the world of the senses. There is a certain mysterious blossoming, comparable perhaps to that of the final flamboyant apogee of Gothic art, which we wanted to make accessible to the public.
To signal the emergence of each of these styles we chose examples that are generally considered among the oldest of their type. The Keir Collection fragments were an obvious choice for the Holbein design, as was the V&A fragment, still so close to the Anatolian decorative repertoire, for the Mamluk geometric style (7). The V&A's quadrilobe fragment seemed to us one of the very earliest manifestations of the Ushak style, so this speaks for the star Ushak design, while the medallion Ushak is represented by the wonderful and little published carpet in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a rug that looks proto-Safavid in its insistent reference to Ilkhanid and Timurid decorative schemes.
We were also able to illustrate some of the earliest ways in which the Ushak design was handled thanks to the Gulbenkian Museum's willingness to lend us their famous medallion carpet (2) – a piece which bears the Turkmen imprint on its heart in the form of a tiny star. At this time the medallion Ushak seems more closely inspired by the interior canopies of princely tents than by the ornamentation of tooled leather book-bindings.
For the Ottoman floral carpets we show a small fragment of a table carpet from the Berlin Museum which still bears traces of the Mamluk style. It thus serves to establish a link between the two types of decoration and confirms the role of the Cairene workshops.
On the Persian side, a fragment from the Musée Historique des Tissus in Lyons, once analysed by May Beattie, heralds the floral style which will take shape in the workshops of Kerman. Here visitors will be able to see the Gulbenkian's wonderful sickle-leaf carpet, a masterpiece of Persian weaving that embodies precisely the same qualities the Ottomans were striving for in their workshops in Cairo.
Our focus on the classical period may seem rather conventional to tribal rug enthusiasts, so it is worth recalling that in the East most rugs made in non-urban settings are nevertheless inspired by the great decorative schemes that emerged from the Islamic courts between the 15th and 17th centuries. So we have also included some later examples that show the creative afterlife of some of the designs, as well as the tenacious conservatism of tradition.
It was in the light of such ideas that we included in the opening display not only carpets of the 'Holbein' type, whose age is not in dispute, but also three 'Ghirlandaio' rugs of 2-1-2 composition, of which the oldest seems not to predate the 17th century. This allows us to highlight at the outset the lasting contribution of the symbolic approach favoured by Turko-Mongol artists, as well as the powerful hold of their central plan-based design system.
These classical carpets bring us face to face with the refined world of painters and illuminators, an ambience permeated by the ideas and philosophies current in court circles. It is intriguing to consider how these thought systems are expressed in the carpets, and we have therefore attempted to interpret some of the designs, looking first at the imagery.
In many cases the treatment of the motifs in terms of colour and drawing makes them appear to occupy different planes, like the elements of a theatrical stage set. More than this, there are carpets in which certain compositional elements very clearly work in both plan and in elevation (or section). In other words the procedure is the same as in oriental miniature painting. The Turkish 'keyhole' or 'Bellini' prayer rugs, with a strange octagonal 're-entrant' at the base of the field are probably funerary rugs representing a qubba (mausoleum) shown simultaneously in plan and in section, the small niche marking the placing of the tomb (5, 6).
Most of the decorative constructs used in carpets of this period can be placed within the traditions of Islamic art and expressly convey its aims and ideas. In keeping with medieval tradition, the decoration of the carpet is shown as a continuous or exponential construction of pure forms, arbitrarily interrupted by the framing border as would be the heaven of fixed stars seen through a window, or the landscape of the night sky mirrored in a pool of water.
Thus the field of the carpet seems to hold or reflect an infinitely tiny part of the bright heavens that enclose the earth in their subtle tracery and have brought about, by a series of emanations or outpourings, the formation of the concrete world. This thought, taken from the philosophy of al 'Farabi (d.950 ad) and above all of Avicenna (d.1037 ad) and his disciples, guided us in our interpretation not only of the luminous medallion carpets, which clearly lend themselves to such an approach, but also of the great Kerman floral vase carpets with their complex lattices (1).
Finally, we could not have brought this project to completion without the support of IMA exhibitions director Brahim Alaoui, or the gracious co-operation of the Gulbenkian Foundation. From the very outset we received the warmest welcome from the Gulbenkian Museum's Director Joåo Castel-Branco Pereira and from Fernanda Passos Leite, their chief conservator, who willingly contributed to the preparation of the catalogue. We would like to acknowledge all our lenders, and especially the curators of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin who lent us 17 wonderfully conserved carpets.
Le Ciel dans un Tapis
Institut du Monde Arabe, 1 rue des Fosses St Bernard, Paris, France
6 December 2004 – 27 March 2005
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Avenue de Berna 45a, Lisbon, Portugal
28 April – 31 July 2005 |
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| | IMAGE DETAILS |
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| | 1. | Vase carpet fragment, Kerman, south Persia, late 17th-early 18th century. 3.33 x 3.75m (10'11" x 12'4"). Bought by Calouste Gulbenkian in June 1937 at the Burat Collection sale in Paris, this carpet is cut horizontally, but looks complete by virtue of being centred around the extremely colourful vase. It offers an interesting insight into the different interpretations that occur within the three-plane lattice type of 'Vase' carpets when compared to the dramatic example from the Musée Historique des Tissus, Lyons (HALI 33, cover), which was hung almost beside it in Paris. The Lisbon fragment has many of the same motifs and floral designs, but it does not follow the same disciplined expression, instead demonstrating the colour and exuberance of its floral decoration via a rather freer interpretation. This is seen in the way in which the infill of small blossoms in the first complete row of palmettes in the field abruptly stops. In terms of date this carpet, with its profusion of small flowerheads throughout the field and less 'organised' three-plane lattice, comes towards the end of the Vase carpet production period. However it has such a pleasing painterly feel that understanding the carpet merely through comparison would risk not seeing its obvious beauty. Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, T.102 |
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| | 2. | Northwest Persian medallion carpet, Tabriz (?), first half 16th century. 2.22 x 5.30m (7'3" x 17'5"). Gulbenkian curator Maria Fernanda Passos Leite tells us that this carpet, "perhaps the oldest in the collection compiled by Calouste Gulbenkian, belonged to the Austrian imperial collection – and some people associate it with Charles V... Gulbenkian acquired it in The Hague in 1935. The decorative design of this wool carpet, probably made in Tabriz, in a royal workshop of the first Safavid capital, is very close to those seen in arts of the book. This type of motif appears, for example, on book bindings long before it is found in carpets… According to Donald King, carpets of this type made in northwestern Persia would have influenced Anatolian artisans, as is demonstrated by the presence of sixteen-branch stars, which appear in their production as well as in Ushak medallion rugs." The art critic David Sylvester once remarked that the Tabriz carpets were the greatest of all classical carpets. Apart from stylistic comparisons with other works of art, the best evidence of dating for these carpets is the Hunting Carpet of Pope Pius IX in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, Milan, whose inwoven date can be read as either 1527 or 1542-1543. Charles Grant Ellis found close similarities between a faience panel on a 15th century mosque in Tabriz and a saf of this group, the major part of which is in the Türk ve Islam Eserleri Museum in Istanbul. Walter Denny considers the Boston Museum of Fine Arts northwest Persian medallion carpet to be the oldest of its type and dates to the 15th century. If Donald King's comments were to stand good today, the Tabriz carpets would have needed to predate the classical Ushaks. However, Julian Raby has placed the earliest Ushaks into the mid-15th century. The Gulbenkian carpet is one of the great examples of the type and is the most 'classical' of the some fifty surviving examples, many of which are fragmented, having, as it does, many of the features typical of the group: both lac and madder reds; small 'Talish-like' rosettes also seen in Anatolian carpets; an inner minor border of dashes and dots; a Holbeinesque central star; geometric palmettes and the typical strapwork border. There are a number of finer and grander examples, such as the Musée des Gobelins fragment in Paris or the V&A 's piece, but confronted by the Gulbenkian medallion carpet one is in awe of its beauty and magnificence. Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, T.97 |
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| | 3. | Northwest Persian carpet fragment, Tabriz (?) early 16th century, 1.01 x 1.80m (3'4" x 5'11"). Julius Lessing purchased this fragment for the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum in 1887, the same year that his book on carpets in 15th and 16th century European paintings was published, five years before Alois Riegl's great Vienna exhibition. It is very unusual, and a testament to its quality, that Lessing acquired a small 16th century Tabriz fragment when complete examples were still available. No photograph can do justice to its beauty, which can only be understood first hand. It is the finest of its type, its colours are unsurpassed and the grandeur of the design puts one in awe of the master craftsman who created the design. The quartered medallion in the field must have been repeated in the four corners of the field. It may have had a central medallion, although Roland Gilles believes that it had a plain field. The in-and-out palmettes on a red ground seen in the border are also used on other groups associated with central Persia, as is the curvilinear drawing of the inner border, but the colour and drawing of the outer border are more typical of northwest Persian carpets. Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, 89,4 |
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| | 4. | Medallion carpet, northwest Persia or east Anatolia, 17th century. 2.16 x 3.70m (7'1" x 12'2"). The product of an urban rather than rural loom, this carpet shares a common design heritage with the so-called Tabriz medallion carpets of the late 15th and 16th centuries. In his caption for this carpet in the IMA catalogue, Richard de Unger writes that it "… appears to be a descendant of large Safavid carpets with medallion of the 16th century. The magnificent example in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon provides a perfect model for the medallion, border and compositional scheme." The results of carbon-14 testing of a number of Turkmen carpets show that certain oriental carpet design traditions continued unaltered from the 16th to the 19th centuries, with only very slight changes in technique. This is an understandable phenomenon in a reasonably isolated rural environment but, if both the Gulbenkian (2) and Keir Collection carpets were made in an urban setting, their weavers would have been susceptible to outside design influences and the evolution of ornaments. De Unger goes on to tell us that "the vibrant palette of the Keir Collection's carpet seems to be related to the colours of carpets from northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia." There are a number of pieces that share several of the same features such as red wool wefts, the particular colours and wool, and ornaments more often associated with Anatolian carpets. These are not yet published as a group. It is possible that this particular medallion design and border pattern were used right through the 16th century; some fifty related northwest Persian medallion carpets are known from this period. Some of these may be from the 17th century, but surprisingly few later examples seem to have survived. Perhaps most 16th century Tabriz carpets survived because they were taken by the Ottomans during incursions into Persia and then given to Anatolian mosques. In order to understand the origin of the Keir carpet, we need to look at two 16th century fragments from a Tabriz carpet with cartouche border, both also in the Keir Collection (Friedrich Spuhler, Islamic Carpets and Textiles in the Keir Collection, no.42), and compare them to a carpet in the Berlin Islamic Art Museum (I 6934, published by Kurt Erdmann in 1943), sections from the pair to which are in a private collection. The Keir fragments represent the fine workshop version while the Berlin carpet possibly represents a provincial urban rendering. In his catalogue to the 1926 Art Club of Chicago exhibition, Arthur Upham Pope attributed the De Young Museum of San Francisco's pair to this carpet to 16th century Kurdistan. Spuhler agreed with Kurdistan but dates the Berlin carpet to about 1700. In truth, the dating probably lies somewhere between, but De Unger's reference to Anatolia is probably far nearer the mark with regard to place of manufacture. While other examples exist that can be related to the Keir carpet, the Berlin piece also has similar colour, wool and technique to a small prayer rug in the Wher Collection, Lugano. Interestingly the pair to the latter carpet, formerly in Vienna, has an Armenian inscription, which may indicate a contemporaneous urban workshop in eastern Anatolia. The Keir Collection, Ham, Surrey. no.45 |
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| | 5. | 'Bellini', Keyhole' or Re-entrant' prayer rug, west or central Anatolia, 16th or 17th century. 1.19 x 1.52m (3'11" x 5'0"). The re-entrant device is one of the longest lived and most interesting designs on Anatolian rugs. It is formed by a continuous narrow band placed just inside the field. At the lower end, this band runs parallel to the main border until it re-enters the central part of the field in an inverted 'U' shape resembling a keyhole. These rugs are also known as 'Bellini' rugs because of their depiction in two paintings, one by Gentile Bellini, painted after 1469, and the other by Giovanni Bellini in 1507. In his caption for this example, Metropolitan Museum curator Daniel Walker writes that most of the elements seen here are also found in the composition of the Met's other 'Bellini' rug (6, right). However, here the central medallion is not a radiant motif but a diamond shape with a multi-lobed outline, like those found in a similar form in Ushak carpets. The 'lamp' is repeated five times, above and below the top of the niche. The weakening of the design together with the size and closeness of the ornaments probably indicate a later date of execution than that of the other 'Bellini'. The differences in overall design, drawing of the motifs, colours and technical characteristics also suggest a different place of production. It is interesting that the weaver chose to use only half of the 'ragged leaf' border. It is unlikely that this was done in order to give the impression of an endless design continuing beyond the outer guard stripe, and more probable that the model used simply did not fit the format. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, James F. Ballard Collection, no.22.100.114 |
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| | 6. | 'Bellini', Keyhole' or Re-entrant' prayer rug, west or central Anatolia, first half 16th century. 1.06 x 1.75m (3'6" x 5'9"). Some 33 re-entrant rugs have been recorded in European paintings from the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 17th centuries, suggesting that they were imported to western Europe in quite substantial numbers and were greatly admired. Johanna Zick wrote on them in 1961 and in 1991 Dr John Mills (HALI 56) listed 23 examples in 18 Italian paintings. There are probably over seventy related rugs extant. Of the 18 single-niche 'Bellini' rugs, five were probably made in or around the Ushak region and two could be considered provincial Ushaks. Seven examples, the most 'classical' of their type, of which the present rug is possibly the most beautiful, have a purity of style that suggests that they may be the earliest surviving manifestation of the design. They share many features with traditional Ushak carpets and were probably made not too far away. Three, including this rug, have a ragged leaf border; all have an eight-pointed star medallion in the centre of the niche, from the points of which extend stylised zoomorphs; at the top of the niche they have one, three or five so-called hanging-lamps, although in many instances, these motifs resemble stylised animals more than lamps. Richard Ettinghausen, in his introduction to the catalogue for the 1974 Washington DC 'Prayer Rugs' exhibition, wrote about the early history, use and iconography of the prayer rug. Today it is generally believed that certain designs, including directional niches, stem from far more ancient cultures and traditions than Islam, but were adopted and adapted by Islam. Re-entrant rugs might well have served several functions; as prayer rugs, as door rugs or as burial rugs. Roland Gilles believes that they were made to cover coffins and writes convincingly about the multi-plane concept of the design. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, James F. Ballard Collection, no.22.100.109 |
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| | 7. | Mamluk carpet fragment, Cairo, Egypt, 15th century, 1.53 x 2.18m (5'0" x 7'2"). Undoubtedly one of the great masterpieces of the art of the carpet, according to Roland Gilles, "this fragment constitutes the lower right-hand corner of a carpet three times as large, probably measuring some 6m long by 3m wide, the design of which must have included three large principal compartments. It is considered the earliest fragment of Mamluk carpet known so far and must date from the second half of the fifteenth century. Plenty of features indicate its great age and, curiously, link it to Anatolian court carpets designed at the same period. Note the plain zone around the central orb, the 'Holbein'-type interlacings, the border in pseudo-Kufic script, the floral band parallel to the border and the absence of outlined papyrus. This is a composition that pre-dates classic Mamluk designs and has not yet attained its full flowering." Mamluk carpets can be placed into distinct groups: the earliest have red wefts and seven or more colours; later carpets tend to have green wefts, simple cartouche borders, three to five colours and simplified designs. Rugs with Ottoman designs made in the same workshops in the second half of the 16th century share the some of the same characteristics. This fragment has a number of fascinating details: the outer Kufic border is unique in known Mamluk carpets; the circular motif in the corner of the outer border may possibly be part of a blazon; the interlaced medallions in the corner, like those seen in Anatolian Holbein carpets, are part of an international style in vogue in several Mediterranean centres. At the top of the fragment is a section of what was probably the central compartment. It was bought by the V&A in 1908 from Giuseppe Salvadori, a Florentine dealer. "Asia Minor", "Moorish" and "Hispano-Moresque" are among early attributions recorded in the museum register. Wilhelm Valentiner appears to have been the first to suggest Egypt for such carpets, whereas Wilhelm von Bode thought that the "Mamluk carpets of Cairo" were the "Damascene" carpets mentioned in Venetian inventories. Friedrich Sarre made it clear that Cairo was a strong candidate and this soon found universal acceptance. Kurt Erdmann went on to confirm this attribution in two ground-breaking articles. The features of this group, confirmed by Siegfried Troll, Louisa Bellinger and Ernst Kühnel, are the use of red wool dyed with lac, S-spun wool and asymmetric knotting. Alberto Boralevi discovered two carpets with the same technical features in the Pitti Palace in Florence, both of which were recorded in the Medici inventories as being from Cairo. Charles Grant Ellis, Jenny Housego and Carlo Suriano have also presented less than convincing alternative opinions as to the possible origin of these carpets. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 150-1908 |
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