Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Rosamond E. Mack

Western fascination with oriental carpets dates from the fifteenth century, when European painters began to celebrate the artistry of pile carpets imported from the Islamic world. The Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1441) was the first to emphasize the beauty of exotic carpets, but his descriptions of them are unreliable. (1) Beginning in the 1450s, numerous Italian artists depicted Turkish and other identifiable eastern Mediterranean carpets with painstaking accuracy, and this practice spread to other European painters during the sixteenth century. When late nineteenth-century German art historians noticed the remarkable correspondence between the few antique carpets then known and representations in old master paintings, they began to name carpet patterns after the artists, beginning with Hans Holbein the Younger (see Pls. V, IX). Over time, the names of Hans Memling, Domenico Ghirlandaio (see Pl. X), Gentile Bellini (see Pl. VIII), Lorenzo Lotto and, as recently as 1979, Carlo Crivelli (see Pls. XIV, XV) were added. (2) Italian Renaissance paintings in particular provide important information on the history of carpet-making, illustrating the range of early carpet patterns and variations, and helping to date them. The paintings also show that during the second half of the fifteenth century there was a striking change in the kinds of carpets available and how Italians used them. This article will examine the rising status of the oriental carpet in Italian material culture and characteristics of the Italian depictions of them.

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Italian merchants and shippers, who dominated long-distance Mediterranean trade from the twelfth through the sixteenth century, must have been importing carpets from central Anatolia before Marco Polo (1254-1324) purportedly saw the best in the world being made in Konya, Sivas, and Kayseri in 1271 and 1272. (3) Venice established commercial relations with the Seljuk sultanate of Konya in 1220, and by 1250 Venetian and Genoese merchants controlled the alum trade in the area of Konya. Alum, a plant ash high in soda, was an essential ingredient in glass, soap, and high-quality textile dyes, so the Italian buyers of alum also must have been interested in the carpets produced in the region. Italian trade and travel in central and eastern Anatolia soared after the Muslim reconquest of crusader-occupied ports of Syria and Palestine in 1291. Trade shifted to the Christian-ruled port of Lajazzo in Cilician Armenia (now Yumurtalik, Turkey), which became a major entrepot and a gateway for overland travel to the Mongol empire until the 1360s. (4) Nevertheless, the carpets represented in fourteenth-century Italian paintings do not resemble surviving examples of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolian carpets.

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There is a noticeable consistency in Italian representations of carpets before the 1450s. As in the earliest dateable example, in Simone Martini's Saint Louis of Toulouse Crowning Robert of Anjou as King of Naples of about 1316-1319 (see Pl. II), almost all of the carpets appear as floor coverings, with little of the design visible beneath figures and furniture. (5) Simone provided only glimpses of a large carpet in the narrow spaces in front of and beside the dais of Saint Louis. Also, as in Plate II, many depictions show a series of dark parallel lines running horizontally across the carpet, which represent thick or multiple wefts and very coarse pile of three or four rows per inch.

As in Simone's painting, all the carpets depicted consist of rows of octagonal or quadrilateral compartments. In all but a few representations, the compartments contain stylized animals: the majority show paired birds flanking a tree and the rest have various animals alone or in pairs. Both the compartmentalized layout and the repertory of animal motifs are closely related to traditional Byzantine and Islamic textiles no longer fashionable in fourteenth-century Italy. At that time, the preferred luxury silks were imports from Mongol Asia or Italian versions of them. For example, in Plate II. Saint Louis wears a cope made from a Persian velvet with disks of gold brocade in offset rows, and a Central Asian silk with rhythmic patterns of tiny plants and animals drapes his chair. (6) There are no surviving examples of the animal carpets, and it is not known where they were made. A few of the depicted carpets have geometric motifs within the compartments. Those with cross motifs terminating in hooks resemble the simple guls (small geometric medallions) in later Turkish carpets named after Memling, but the designs are more primitive. (7)

Altogether, the paintings suggest that these carpets were utilitarian objects of little intrinsic artistic interest. They denote an honored or luxurious space, and some artists used the compartmentalized layout to convey a sense of three-dimensional or receding space. Their frequency in Tuscan Annunciations, several with very similar and uncommonly visible animal designs, suggests a common iconographical source. (8)