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

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Rosamond E. Mack

Some animal carpets in fifteenth-century Italian paintings are related to surviving Anatolian examples. All feature fantastic beasts so highly stylized that Italians must have found them difficult to understand visually. (9) For example, the large carpet in Domenico di Bartolo's fresco of 1440 representing a wedding (see Pl. IV) closely resembles a fragment of a contemporary or slightly later carpet (Pl. III), with octagons containing a confrontation between a long-tailed phoenix and a coiled dragon. This theme was common in the textiles and other arts of Mongolruled Asia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in which the animals are normally quite legible. The geometric versions in Plates III and IV are consistent with the Turkoman carpetmaking tradition, which tribesmen migrating from Central Asia probably introduced to Anatolia. (10) In fourteenth-century Italian silks influenced by imports from the Mongol empire, such Asian beasts were rendered in a naturalistic style, making the totally fantastic confrontations very vivid. (11) Due to Italian artistic taste, therefore, these carpets were probably of limited interest, despite their high technical quality.

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During the 1450s, two talented young Italian painters gave new attention to the beauty of Anatolian carpets: Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492), in Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta [1417-1468] Kneeling before Saint Sigismund, dated 1451, which is in poor condition, (12) and Andrea Mantegna, in the detail of the altarpiece of 1456 to 1459 in Plate V. Each provided an unobstructed frontal view of the end of a carpet in the foreground plane (Piero's is draped over the saint's dais), and each described the brilliantly colored geometric pattern meticulously. Both also used the carpet artistically, Piero in a complex spatial and planar construction, and Mantegna to anchor the center of a pictorially rich composition embellished with various natural and man-made objects. Both artists represented what has come to be called the small-pattern Holbein type, which has a field of offset alternating rows of strapwork octagons and quatrefoils that vary in number in carpets of different sizes. The sophistication and flexibility of the pattern suggests that it was intended for commercial production. A late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century example (see Pl. VI) has a simpler, and presumably later, strapwork border than Mantegna's carpet; the "kufesque" motifs, descended from ornamental Arabic kufic script, are common on Anatolian carpets of this period. Representations in Persian miniatures indicate that the small-pattern Holbeins had come into production by 1410. (13) They probably reached Italy at a later date, and it seems likely that Piero and Mantegna chose these carpets because they expected their novel geometric patterns to please contemporary Italian spectators.

The number of meticulous carpet depictions soared during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Except when shown in traditional locations before the throne of sacred persons (Pls. X, XI, XIII) or the dais of a secular ruler, Italian artists now rarely represented carpets on the floor. Instead, they appear displayed as works of art: laid over tables, desks, and benches inside private houses (see Pl. VII) and government chambers; over altars in churches; or hanging from exterior windows, balustrades, and parapets on festive occasions or for informal ostentatious airing (see Pl. XV). The estate inventory of Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492) of 1492 confirms this picture. None of the thirty-two carpets listed in his palace on Via Larga in Florence seems to have been regularly used as a floor covering. The most valuable thirteen were all kept in a chest outside the room on the ground floor where he received important guests and were presumably reserved for special occasions. Some carpets of lesser value were shored elsewhere; others covered chests, writing desks, tables, and coffers. (14) Though the practice of placing carpets on furniture was not new in Italy, it now became widespread. (15) Oriental carpets were increasingly prominent in Italian life and during the sixteenth century appeared as status symbols in numerous portraits (see Pls. VII, IX).