Depiction of the enthroned Madonna with a ‘Ghirlandaio carpet’ beneath her feet, Domenico Ghirlandaio, mid 15th century, Uffizi Gallery, Florence (from V. Gantzhorn, Oriental Carpets, ill. 482).
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Although examples of knotted carpets were known and produced in the
classical world by late Roman times in Egypt, they do not seem to have been
part of the larger Roman heritage that passed down to Medieval Europe. Once the
emerging Islamic Empire conquered Egypt in 642, thereby cutting it off from
the late Roman or early Byzantine Empire, rugs disappeared from European
material culture, with the exception of Spain, which was conquered by the
Muslims in 711. We have no direct evidence for rug production in Early
Islamic Spain, but it seems certain that its rulers would have had access to
the same sorts of carpet current in the rest of the Islamic world at this
time. Fragments found in the rubbish dump at Fostat in Cairo have in fact
been identified as early Spanish Islamic carpets of the eleventh to
fourteenth centuries. Spanish production is attested much more clearly from
the fourteenth century on, in the period of the Reconquista when Christian
Spaniards recovered control of the Iberian peninsula. Surprisingly though,
these late Medieval Spanish carpets still followed the design of Oriental
models, especially the Holbein and Crivelli Star patterns of Ottoman Turkey,
or the small-scale allover designs of Islamic silk textiles. After the final
expulsion of the Muslims from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492,
Spanish carpets evolved in more purely European or western styles.
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Spanish Carpet, possibly Alcaraz, 15th century, Metropolitan Museum, New York, (from V. Gantzhorn, Oriental Carpets, ill. 336).
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Depiction of a ‘Memling Gul’ rug in a still-life with a flower vase by Hans Memling, before 1494 (from V. Gantzhorn, Oriental Carpets, ill. 448).
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Although they did not produce their own knotted pile carpets, Medieval
Europeans were nonetheless attracted to the ones made by their Muslim
competitors to the East. The admiring observations of the Venetian merchant
Marco Polo on Anatolian carpet production in the thirteenth century were a
harbinger of things to come. As commerce between Europe and the Orient
accelerated in the wake of the Crusades, Oriental carpets began to become
less remarkable in the West. But what probably did the most to accelerate
the European familiarity with Oriental carpets was the emergence of the
Ottoman Dynasty, which initially established itself in the Balkan Peninsula
and southeastern Europe before taking control of Anatolia and Western Asia.
Since carpets were an important aspect of Turkish material culture, the
development of the Ottoman power in the Balkans and the regions to the
north must have brought large numbers of carpets to the very doorstep of
Central and Western Europe. When we add to this the role of Venice as a
major conduit between Europe and the East and the increase of intra-
European commerce generally toward the end of the Middle Ages, it is hardly
surprising that Europeans became avid collectors of Oriental carpets over
the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the two
centuries that followed as well.
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The European appetite for carpets is attested not only by extant pieces
whose early arrival in Europe is historically documented, but also by
European painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and later as
well. In truth, the depiction of early Turkish carpets in European master
paintings, which can be closely dated, is the basis for Oriental carpet
chronology, as well as for the descriptive terminology and classification in
carpet scholarship. Many of the terms or types mentioned above - Holbein,
Memling, Crivelli, Lotto, Ghirlandaio, and others as well, are named for the
European painters who depicted the carpets. In recent scholarship, John
Mills has taken the study of early carpets from the perspective of European
painting to new standards of critical analysis. Work of this kind has made
it possible to form a much more thorough picture of early carpet production
than would be possible purely on the basis of the actual pieces that
survive,
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Depiction of a “Small Pattern Holbein” rug in a portrait of Georg Gisze by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532 Gallery of Paintings, Berlin (from V. Gantzhorn, Oriental Carpets, ill. 14).
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whose dating would largely be a matter of conjecture. After the
sixteenth century, commerce with the Orient began to introduce affluent
Europeans to the carpets of Safavid Persia as well as those of Ottoman
Turkey. Persian rugs appear commonly in the works of the great Dutch masters
like Jan Vermeer.
European paintings also document the preciousness of imported Oriental carpets
in these early times, not only because they have been selected as marks of
affluence or luxury, but also because they are seldom shown as floor
covering. Pile carpets occur in the paintings primarily as tablecloths and
blankets or throws. They rarely appear on the floor, except under the feet
of royalty or the Virgin and saints. This sort of care helps to explain how
early Oriental carpets in Europe survived centuries of use. Nevertheless,
the European interest in Oriental carpets began to wane in the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was due to several factors. The
defeat of the Ottoman Turkish armies at Vienna in 1683 by a united European
force signaled the end of Muslim military and technological ascendancy,
which in turn weakened Muslim economy and its capacity to patronize the
arts. Islamic carpet production and art more generally went into decline
after 1700. The drop in quality and accessibility of Turkish and Persian
rugs, coupled with a new feeling of European cultural superiority toward the
Orient, stimulated the development of local European carpet production. Earlier, Western Europeans had at various times engaged in the imitation of Oriental carpets in needlework or even in pile technique. But in
the decades before and after 1700, the new factories of Savonnerie and
Aubusson established in France, related manufacturies in England, and the
workshops still active in Spain, all moved in to establish a new production of carpets now made in a Western or European style, as the taste for Oriental carpets
became a thing of the past. Oriental rugs once utilized only as precious tablecloths
were now put on the floor to be worn out by users no longer impressed by
their exotic beauty and rarity.
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