The XXXIVth Biennale Internazionale dell’Antiquariato di Firenze, 2026

Furthermore, from my experience of how the rug trade has operated over many centuries, I believe that most rugs reaching the Constantinople market between the 15th and 20th centuries were old. In Anatolia rugs were made predominantly for home use; when parents died, their rugs – perhaps 30 to 50 years old and often in perfect condition – were gifted to mosques or sold to merchants. For five hundred years there has been a virtually endless supply of old rugs. Neither by Halil Inalcik nor Ionescu has yet presented conclusive evidence of when carpets were actually made: their extensive evidence concerns when rugs were sold, on the assumption that they were new.

The earliest depiction of a so-called ‘bird’ rug is in a painting by Hans Mielich of c.1557 (Footnote 4). We know of more than 120 ‘bird’ carpets from Ushak or Selendi, and our lists are surely incomplete, yet this is the only instance that establishes when a western artist saw this field pattern. The so-called cloudband border may be considerably older in Anatolian rugs. It first appears on a small medallion Uşak in Girolamo da Santacroce’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1519, in the Museo Civico, Bassano, and that rug may itself have been made 30 or 40 years earlier (Footnote 5).

The Cattai rug has a most interesting provenance. It was sold anonymously (from various private collections) at Paul Graupe, Berlin, on 12 October 1935, lot 241, illustrated pl. 37 (‘124 × 188 cm’, image reversed). The Erdmann Archive in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, holds two images: a black-and-white one from the 1935 catalogue (ref. Am V/003a) and a later colour photograph inscribed on the reverse with the name W. Geske and a reference to Werner Grote-Hasenbalg (ref. VT.1-c.41.ve). Grote-Hasenbalg published the rug in 1957–58 (p. 34, fig. 27), writing:

‘It is certain, however, that at the time of Mannerism, customers in Europe were still seeking something other than the brightly coloured patterns found on Ushaks, which emphasised the centre. As Persian carpets were still scarcely reaching Europe in the 16th century, the repeat pattern of the so-called “bird carpets” provided the desired neutral pastel effect. It remained a purely Ottoman innovation, as did the even more beautiful pattern in the central field, featuring three spheres above two wavy lines; the author [Kurt Erdmann] presents the finest example of this, from the Bardini Museum in Florence. This pattern derives from Turkish textiles and tiles of the period. The light, mostly white ground of these carpets – rarely tinged with a pale-yellow hue from dyeing with walnut shells – which extended right through to the border ground, already provided the necessary foundation for this… Here, the bird-like figures are still grouped in fours around a rosette and only later, in the form reproduced in our Fig. 27, around a rectangle divided into several half-squares. The suggestion that these figures constitute an arbitrary filling of the space between two shrunken arabesques – as, according to the author, R. M. Riefstahl explains in the Art Bulletin VII/1925 on Turkish bird carpets – is unlikely to be the case… Yet one does not have this impression when the design is interpreted as a stylised bird figure oriented in two directions. Rather, it seems likely that a figurative representation was concealed beneath the plant decoration.’

The idea that ‘bird’ rugs were made for Europe continues to be repeated throughout the carpet literature with little or no evidence to support it.

The rug then disappeared from view until it was sold at Hargesheimer Kunstauktionen Düsseldorf on 7 September 2023 (p. 120, lot 2133) to Gallery Aydin, Istanbul. In my opinion, authors have wrongly assumed that carpets were new when they appear in trade records. With a seemingly unlimited supply of old carpets, there was no reason to make rugs for export other than special orders. Who is to say, then, that Cattai’s ‘bird’ rug could not date from the 1530s (the rug Mielich painted is unlikely to have been new in 1557), or as late as 1650? The tradition of weaving these design types continued over so long a period that the evidence is presently insufficient.

Equally fascinating, and also shown by Cattai, were two Tang-dynasty (618–907 CE) terracotta figures of horses with female riders (3 , 4), whose authenticity was established this year by thermoluminescence testing of samples in Turin. Both sold on the second day. The riders’ painted faces are distinctly Han Chinese, and the under-saddle rugs are remarkably similar to Chinese or Central Asian felts of the same period, such as those in Nara, Japan (HALI 196, pp. 48–59), and those depicted in many of the wall paintings at Dunhuang in Gansu Province, western China.

Among the most interesting textiles at the fair was a 1919 silk embroidery on linen, 144 × 144 cm, by Vittorio Zecchin (Murano 1878–1947) (fig. 5), shown by ED Gallery of Piacenza. A graduate of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, Zecchin worked in paint, gesso, tapestry, embroidery and glass – although in textiles he may simply have supplied designs to hired weavers; I have yet to establish which. Several of his tapestries and paintings recall Gustav Klimt (Vienna 1862–1918 Vienna), particularly in the decoration of costumes. Zecchin also studied in Vienna. Coming from Murano, it is hardly surprising that most of his work is in glass; according to MutualArt, his auction record stands at USD 800,000.

Of greater interest to carpet connoisseurs was a pair of mosaics by Zecchin (figs. 6 and 7) shown by Galleria Gomiero of Montegrotto Terme (PD). As the gallery’s caption explains, 1919 marked a turning point, when Zecchin became increasingly engaged with the applied arts; between 1919 and 1923 his work was characterised by recurring zoomorphic imagery – deer, hares, fawns and birds – in stylised, highly synthesised forms. His mosaics began earlier: in 1913–14, with the Barovier glassworks, he produced Viennese Secession-style glass mosaics that were shown to great success at the 1914 Venice Biennale, and in 1920 he exhibited two mosaics executed by the Società Italiana Arte Musiva of Murano at the Exhibition of Dissident Artists of Ca’ Pesaro, held at the private Galleria Geri Boralevi in Piazza San Marco.

The hares recall those on the red-ground Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in the Musée de Cluny (HALI 227, p. 160), or perhaps on the Hakky Bey–Peytel small silk Kashan rug in the Louvre (inv. no. OA 6741; HALI 48, p. 39), while the spotted deer evoke the creatures on a group of silk-foundation carpets from central Persia, possibly Qazvin or Isfahan, c.1540–1560 (HALI 170, p. 79, fig. 2). In notes from the 1920s, Kurt Erdmann, former director of the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, wrote that much could be learned from mosaics, which may have influenced the patterns of lost ancient Greek, Hellenistic and Roman carpets. Not until the 1990s were carpets from the Hellenistic world – once part of the kingdom of Alexander the Great – discovered, proving Erdmann’s observation correct.

Galleria Gomiero also exhibited a spectacular Nazca textile from the south coast of Peru, c.400 CE, 140 × 200 cm (fig. 8). Its very fine weave, wonderful colours and abstract composition simply took one’s breath away.

It is a great pity that Milanese galleries such as Tabibnia, Alberto Levi and Sorgato, or indeed Gallery Aydin in Istanbul, did not bring some of their magnificent carpets, helping to restore the Florence Biennale to what it was many years ago.

Footnotes

1 Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, 1999, vol. 1, p. 39; vol. 2, p. 94, pl. 54 (with structural analysis).

2 Ionescu cites the register as published by Mübahat Kütükoglu (‘Osmanlilarda narh müessesesi ve 1640 tarihli narh defteri’, Istanbul 1967) and compiled by Halil Inalcik (‘The Yürüks: Their Origin, Expansion and Economic Role’, Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies II, Carpets in the Mediterranean Countries 1400–1600, London 1986, pp. 39–65, table 4, pp. 56–57).

3 Alexandr Osipian, ‘Uses of Oriental Rugs in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Social Practices and Public Discourses’, in Arkadiusz Christoph Blaszczyk, Robert Born and Florian Riedler (eds.), Transottoman Matters: Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning, Göttingen 2022, pp. 173–217. Osipian’s source is Korneli J. Heck (ed.), Tomae Pirawski, Relatio status almae archidiocesis Leopoliensis, Lviv 1893, p. 49.

4 Stefano Ionescu, The Transylvanian Heritage: Ottoman Carpets 1450 to 1750 – A New Perspective, Rome 2024, p. 100; the image, from the Beattie Archive, is perhaps the only colour reproduction of this painting. The design appears in eight later paintings. ‘Bird’ carpets were made in the Uşak region, with some coarser examples attributed to Selendi. The Mielich painting indicates that they were made from the first half of the 16th century, continuing to the mid-17th century or slightly later. Of the 107 examples recorded by Ionescu (2024, p. 318), 84 have the cloudband border.

5 Girolamo da Santacroce (Santa Croce, Bergamo c.1485–c.1556 Venice), The Calling of St Matthew, 1519, oil on canvas, 242 × 165 cm, Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa; commissioned by the Beccai (Butchers’) Guild of Venice for the church of San Matteo.