Were Animal Design Carpets Renaissance Europe’s First Favorite Oriental Rugs?

VENICE, May 8, 2009 – It is impossible to visit Venice and not wonder what the first carpets that came to Europe through this great trading port looked like.

After all, Venice is home to Marco Polo, who very early on registered his appreciation of oriental rugs when he visited Konya in the Seljuk-controlled Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia.

The quintessential Venetian traveler of the 13th century mentioned the fineness of the carpets he saw and it is clear they were part of an already thriving commercial industry.

Another famous traveler of the time, Ibn Battuta, noted that Konya carpets were being exported to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, India, and China.

Here is a Seljuk rug of that era which was discovered in 1905 buried under the layers of prayer carpets that accumulated over the centuries like geological strata on the floor of the great mosque of Alaeddin in Konya.

But one cannot be sure of what kinds of carpets reached Europe until much later, the early Renaissance period of the 1400s. That is when Europeans fell so in love with rugs that they began to regularly include glimpses of them in paintings.

The paintings are not of rugs per se. The rugs only appear as trappings, sometimes with just a corner or edge showing, like stage props. And the only reason to include them in the pictures seems to have been to enhance the beauty of religious scenes or prove the wealth of the nobles and merchants sitting for their portraits.

But because the paintings can be dated, the paintings offer both a wide sample of rugs on the European market and even give some idea of the market trends over time.

Are there some surprises?

One is that the first carpets to show up in the paintings are not the kinds of sumptuous and complicated court workshop carpets one generally associates with days gone by.

Instead, almost all the carpets to appear in pictures before 1450 are of rather simple pieces with highly exotic animal motifs. They are rugs that – astonishingly – can remind a modern viewer of our own enthusiasm for ethno and tribal works today.

One of the animal carpet designs is shown in this detail from a fresco painted in 1440. The fresco is one of three large mural paintings by Domenico di Bartolo to decorate the wall of a hospital (the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala) in Siena and celebrate the main activities of the facility. Those activities were to care for the sick, distribute alms to the poor, and to raise and marry off orphan girls.

Under the feet of the girl in the fresco (‘The Rearing and Marriage of Female Foundlings’) is a carpet with a curiously Far Eastern looking dragon-and-phoenix motif.

There are no known surviving rugs of this type, so scholars have had to look for something resembling it from the same period. The closest parallel seems to be this carpet from Anatolia, woven in the early to mid 1400s.

It is unclear when the dragon-and-phoenix motif carpets first came to Europe. But the motif itself appears to have a history that much pre-dates the carpets themselves.

Rosamond Mack, in an article entitled ‘Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols’ (Magazine Antiques, Dec. 2004), says confrontations between fantastic animals such as a dragon and phoenix were common in the textiles and other arts of Mongol-ruled Asia in the 1200s and 1300s.

During that time – the Pax Mongolica – art motifs were easily shared across Eurasia as trade along the Silk Roads flourished. The Silk Roads ran from China across Central Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Many scholars believe that, along the way, motifs like Chinese animal patterns were stylized and simplified into more geometric forms as they were adopted by Islamic weavers. Mack observes that Turkoman tribesmen migrating from Central Asia, in turn, may have brought the stylized motifs to Anatolia.

Rug scholar Nalan Turkmen dates the motifs’ appearance in Anatolia to the early 14th century, after the fall of the Seljuks. He writes that the carpets “represent a new stage in Turkish carpet weaving which coves two hundred years from the early 14th century to the late 15th centuries” (‘Tracing Central Asian Turkmen Carpet Designs Through Parallels With Anatolian Carpets,’ Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies, Volume V Part 1, 1999).

The vast majority of the carpets in early Renaissance Europe are believed to have come from Anatolia and phoenix-and-dragon motifs are just one of a variety of different compartmentalized animal designs that appear in the paintings of that time. Mack notes “the majority (of the animal design carpets) show pairs of birds flanking a tree, and the rest have various animals alone or in pairs.”

These animal carpets are from the 1400s during the Ottoman period.

As to why the designs were popular with Europeans of the early Renaissance, one can only guess. But European art of the just-ended Medieval period made wide use of fantastic creatures, including unicorns, so the stylized animal design carpets would have seemed exotic, but not strange, to European eyes.

Animal carpets were far from the only carpets reaching Europe at the time. There were also Anatolian carpets with geometric designs, as well as carpets woven in Cairo and Damascus. But the animal carpets stand out for their popularity and, also, for one more great surprise. And that is the fact that, after 1450, they completely disappear from the European market.

The trend is recorded in the paintings. Suddenly, almost all the carpets pictured are geometric designs and only the faintest echoes of the once so dominant animal carpets remain.

The faint echoes take the form shown in this detail from a painting by Carlo Crivelli in 1486. The animals are reduced to a mere cameo appearance within the compartments of the rug’s complicated 16-point star pattern.

A surviving example of the same kind of carpet is shown below. The carpet is believed to have come from Anatolia, but there is no known record of where the style was woven. The best rug scholars have been able to do is name the style after the Renaissance painter who depicts it: Crivelli himself.

If animal carpets suddenly vanished from the European market after 1450, what could be the reason?

There are two possible explanations.

One possibility is on the producers’ side. Some rug experts believe that by this time the Ottoman authorities who ruled Anatolia were becoming stricter about depicting life forms in works of art. That is in line with Muslim prohibitions against making something to look like God’s creation, because it includes an implicit claim of an ability similar to that of God.

Nalan Turkmen observes that “when animal figures disappeared from Turkish carpets in the 16th century their place was taken by geometric motifs such as octagons or diamonds set in the compartments of a squared ground.” He adds that animal figures do not reappear again in Turkish carpets until the late 16th century and then only as a filler, not as a main motif.

The other possibility to explain the disappearance of animal motifs carpets in Europe is on the consumers’ side. By the mid-1450s the Renaissance had come to fully dominate Europe’s cultural life. And with its emphasis on humanism, logic, and science, it may have left no room in the market for artwork that appealed to a Medieval fascination with mysticism and symbols.

Whatever the reason, it seems things in the early carpet market never stayed the same for long -- just as in the carpet market today.

Here is the kind of geometric carpet that took the place of the animal carpets in Renaissance paintings after 1450. It is a Memling pattern, named after the artist Hans Memling, who depicted it often in the late 1400s.

It is interesting to note that Renaissance collectors – or at least the people who valued carpets enough to make them available to artists to copy – were not collecting either antiques or even the most extraordinary carpets of their time.

Throughout the 200 years or so of the Renaissance, the most complex Mamluk and Ottoman court carpets almost never appear in paintings and no-one knows whether this is because they were rare or because they were simply extremely difficult to paint. Persian carpets do not appear until end of the 16th century. Then, too, the finely-knotted silk carpets woven at Kashan and Isfahan are rarely represented.

Instead it seems the Europe’s carpet owners, especially as carpets became commonplace in the homes of the well-to-do by the mid 1600s, mostly bought and valued carpets that reflected the commercial trends of their day – again, much the way most people do now.

The fact that these carpets are extraordinarily beautiful is perhaps the biggest surprise for a modern viewer of all. It seems to be due as much to the high-level of the carpet industry at the time as to the discerning eye of the early collectors. And that is a situation contemporary carpet lovers can only envy.

(The picture at the top of this article is Marco Polo’s family home in Venice.)

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Related Links

Oriental Carpets in Italian Renaissance Paintings: art objects and status symbols, by Rosamond Mack, Magazine Antiques

Wikipedia: On Oriental Carpets in Renaissance Painting

The Carpet Index: The Oriental Carpet in Early Renaissance Paintings

Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture: a gallery of Renaissance paintings

Seljuk Textiles and Carpets

Seljuk Rugs

Old Turkish Carpets

Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts: Ottoman Court Carpets

Ottoman Carpets

Ottoman Dynasty Carpets and Rugs

Venice: Discovering Europe’s Silk Road City And The Early Carpet Trade

VENICE, April 24, 2009 – No-one knows exactly how oriental carpets first reached Medieval Europe.

But the first ones are believed to have arrived around 1200, the time of the fourth crusade, or earlier. And that makes it likely they came through Venice, the port which provided the ships to ferry the crusaders east.

Is it still possible to visit Venice today and find signs of the early rug trade?

The answer is yes – and right in St. Mark’s square. But you have to close your eyes to the throngs of tourists around you. Then, when you open them again, you have to imagine you are standing at the heart of a Silk Road City.

The signs that Venice was Europe’s terminus for the Silk Road are everywhere. And, fortunately, in recent years they have become the subject of scholarly study, so that now spotting and understanding them is becoming easy.

One such study is 'Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art 1300 – 1600' by Rosamond Mack (2001). It is an art history book which documents Venice’s trade links with the Eastern Mediterranean and Asian trade centers that made up the Silk Road.

Mack finds echoes of Silk Road cities as distant as Bukhara in the appearance of the Doge’s Palace which dominates St. Mark’s square.

Looking at the diamond patterns on the palace’s marble façade, she observes a startling similarity between them and the brickwork pattern at the base of the minaret of Bukhara’s famous Kalyan mosque, built around 1170.

Is the similarity coincidence? Venetian travelers such as Marco Polo regularly followed the Silk Roads eastward and it is likely they brought back not just precious stones and silks but also detailed impressions of what they had seen.

And, as Mack suggests, adding a Central Asian motif on the Doge’s palace -- whose decoration was completed in an era when Venetian traders could safely travel as far as China and India thanks to the Pax Mongolica (1240-1360)-- would be a way to publicly underline the reach and power of Venice itself.

Similarly, there may be echoes of Venice’s trade with Alexandria and Cairo in the stone pinnacles (three-tiered merlons) that stand like a fence along the roof of the Doge’s palace. They recall the crenellation atop Cairo’s Ibn Tulun mosque, completed in 879.

And there may be an echo of Damascus in the stone-lattice windows that decorate part of the façade of St. Mark’s cathedral. Mack notes their similarity to the window grills of the Great Mosque in Damascus, which was completed by 715.

Damascus, Byzantium, Alexandria and Cairo – as well as ports like Tana and Trabzond in the Black Sea -– were all the western end points of trade routes across Eurasia. Down these roads traveled camel caravans so big that they could carry the equivalent of a cargo ship of their time.

By sending private galleys, as well as regularly scheduled state convoys, to many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, Venice extended that trade across the sea to Europe. The ships carried back silk, ceramics, glass, metalwork, sugar, and spices at a time when Europe was beginning to prosper again after the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Western Roman empire.

To pay for the luxury goods produced in Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, the Venetian galleys brought wood, iron, woolen textiles, and silver from the West. Much of this trade in kind came from Central Europe, to which Venice – the middleman -- had the best access via the Brenner Pass.

What kinds of carpets moved down the Silk Roads to be sold in the great souks of the eastern Mediterranean and ultimately in Europe’s own greatest port, Venice?

The earliest depictions of oriental carpets in European paintings appear in the early 1300s and, as Mack notes, they include both geometric and animal-motif (phoenix-and-dragon) carpets that appear to be from Anatolia.

By the mid-1400s, carpets had become a commonplace enough status symbol that many wealthy Italian noblemen and merchants had their portraits painted with a prize carpet spread across a table beside them. These, too, are Anatolian but now almost exclusively geometric in design.

By the 1500s, according to inventories kept by some collectors in Venice and Florence, a huge range of carpets was available. The inventories list Mamluks from Cairo, Paramamluks presumably from Damascus, and North African, Ottoman, and Caucasian carpets.

And by the mid-1500s Persian carpets also begin appearing in European paintings.

How popular some carpet designs became is exemplified by the Lotto pattern – a yellow arabesque trellis on a red background. Lotto carpets are shown in more than 80 old master paintings and some 500 of the carpets – which were produced between the 15th and 18th centuries in Anatolia – still remain today.

It is interesting to note that the early carpet trade did not only make money for Venice. Carpets themselves became very much part of the city’s public image.

A visit to the museum of St. Mark’s cathedral – upstairs in the cupola -- helps tell the story. The collection includes an array of carpets from Safavid-ruled Persia in the 1500s. During religious festivals they were draped in front of the high altar of the church as symbols of the city’s wealth and power.

Similarly, for state processions in St. Mark’s Square, residents hung carpets from the windows and balconies to mark the occasion. And when Venice celebrated its sea victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571, merchants covered the Rialto bridge with carpets for the three-day celebration.

This painting shows the Doge Andrea Gritti with his throne placed upon a Western Anatolian Star Oushak carpet. Painted in 1534 by Paris Bordone, it commemorates one of Venice's most important annual public rituals: the throwing of the Doge’s ring and its retrieval by a fisherman. The ritual symbolized Venice’s marriage to the sea.

Venice’s trade with the East spanned centuries and during this time the city changed its principal trading partners many times according to conditions of war and peace.

The Pax Mongolica that gave easy access to Central Asia collapsed with the Mongol empire and Venice shifted focus to Mamluk-ruled Syria and Egypt. The rise of the Ottomans shifted the focus yet again, to their new empire.

But throughout all the flux, there was one constant. The continuous trading – as well as the Greek-Roman-Byzantine artistic traditions common to both Italian and Near-eastern Islamic art -- created a shared taste in decorative, non-figurative art that spanned the Mediterranean world.

Mack describes how the luxury goods trade not only brought eastern textiles, carpets, glassware, and porcelain into Europe but also hugely influenced Europe’s own decorative arts industry.

So many textiles from China and the Muslim world came into Italy that Medieval and Renaissance artisans freely adopted those motifs into their own production. The fabrics that revolutionized Italian textile design beginning in about the 1330s, she says, were Tatar cloths arriving from central Asia, Persia, and Syria during the Pax Mongolica.

Over time, Italy’s workshops so successfully copied eastern designs, or Europeanized them in cosmopolitan ways that also pleased Eastern customers, that by 1400 Italian producers dominated the luxury textile trade in the Mediterranean.

Oriental carpets – which Italian artisans did not try to compete with – were the exception to the rule.

The shared tastes that characterized the Mediterranean world of the Renaissance can still be found in chance encounters in Venice today.

A short walk from St. Mark’s square, through the labyrinth of narrow streets, narrow bridges, and narrow canals, one finds a shop that suddenly seems to make time stand still.

There, for sale at the back of the small boutique, is a recently produced velvet ‘door curtain’ large enough for the salon of your Venetian palazzo. The fabric is emblazoned with richly embroidered cartouches that could give your palazzo the feel of a Renaissance court. But, amazingly, up close, the embroidery turns out to be highly stylized Arabic calligraphy.

Is the door curtain European or Islamic? The attendant of the shop, which is called Venetia Studium seems to find the question misplaced. “The pattern is Byzantine-Turkish,” she answers.

Venetia Studium is a design house with workshops in Venice that is trying to revive some of the styles that characterized the city’s booming Rensaissance-era textile industry.

The door curtain is not the only fabric with stylized Arabic lettering. There are many table coverings typical of Renaissance Europe and here, too, there are some with borders of graceful calligraphy.

Mack provides an explanation in her book of how Arabic script became – for a time -- an integral if unexpected part of Italian art.

She notes that Italian traders and ambassadors to the East developed a high regard for the ceremonial robes of Muslim courts. The distinctive ornamentation on these robes of honor were bands of Arabic inscription which expressed titles and phrases such as ‘the sultan,’ ‘the sultan the wise,’ or ‘blessing.’

As early as 1285, Italian painters adopted the same style to decorate the borders of fabrics appearing in Christian religious art. Most commonly, they painted the decorative borders – complete with a simulated Arabic calligraphy -- on the garments worn by the Holy Family or other sacred figures. At times, they also used Arabic lettering to decorate gilded halos.

An example is this detail from the Madonna and Child painted by Gentile de Fabriano in 1422.

Mack says it was possible for Arabic script to become part of Italian religious painting because the painters “correctly associated Arabic with the Holy Land but evidently did not know it arrived there in the 7th century as the language of Islam.”

That may make Arabic calligraphy the example par excellence of the Mediterranean world’s community of taste. The inscribed borders did not disappear from Italian paintings until the mid 1500s, when High Renaissance painters turned to images of classical Rome for their depictions of early Christianity.

By time time the calligraphy borders disappeared, Europe was already beginning a shift away from the Mediterranean as the focus of its trade to a new future of ocean routes to the Far East and the Americas.

The new ocean routes and the rise of the Atlantic powers would eventually put Venice and the other Silk Road cities out of business. But the influence the Silk Road had in sharing techniques, styles, and tastes across Eurasia has never disappeared and may help explain why Eastern carpets remain so fascinating for Westerners today.

As a visit to Venice makes clear, much of Eastern and Western art is a shared heritage.

(The picture at the top of this article is a detail from a painting by Vittore Carpaccio in the late 1400s.)

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Related Links:
Book review of “Bazaar to Piazza: Italian Trade and Islamic Art 1300-1600”


“Venice and the Islamic World 828-1797,” edited by Stefano Carboni

”East Meets West in Venice,” Saudi Aramco World magazine (March/April 2008)

Wikipedia: Pseudo-Kufic

Venetia Studium