The Baroque Era: When Europe Fell Out Of Love With Oriental Carpets

PARIS, October 22, 2011 – It is a strange thing that during Europe's long love affair with oriental carpets, the love once cooled for almost a hundred years.

That period roughly corresponds to Europe's Baroque era when, instead of importing oriental carpets as they had for centuries, European nobility began buying European-made carpets instead.

Those carpets, like the Savonnerie carpet shown here, looked nothing like the Turkish and Persian styles depicted in the Renaissance paintings of earlier generations. Rather, they were specifically woven in Europe beginning around 1644 to compliment the new baroque architecture of European palaces and mansions.

In fact, the new European carpets did not just compliment baroque architecture, they often directly imitated baroque ceiling designs. That enabled Europe's designers to do what they had never done so lavishly before: swaddle the wealthy in a single style of interior decoration from head to foot.

The single style – Baroque and its spin-off Rococo - conveyed power and opulence and corresponded with Europe's own rising sense of economic wealth and importance.

Still, if the development of French-made Savonnerie and Aubusson carpets, or similar Axminster and Wilton carpets in Britain, suggests that Europeans somehow entirely lost interest in Eastern designs at this time, the impression would be wrong.

Ironically, the Baroque Era in which Europeans lost interest in Oriental rugs coincides with what was Europe's greatest ever period of fascination with all things Turkish. That fascination was so widespread that it had a name: Turquerie.

Here is a portrait of Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa at the height of the Turquerie fad which swept Europe in the 1600s and 1700s. She is dressed in a Turkish costume and is holding a mask. It was painted circa 1744 by Martin van Meytens.

How the Turquerie fad took shape and why it did not include rugs is one of the stranger stories in carpet history. After all, Turquerie – the French-coined word for Europe's taste for Turkish styles – could be found in many other arts: from dress, to fabrics, to interiors, to porcelain.

To understand Turquerie – which was a precursor of, but quite different from, Orientalism – one has to return to Europe of the 1600s. It was a time when Europe's relations with the Ottoman Empire changed dramatically.

Prior to the the mid-1600s, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe's most feared neighbor. The Empire had grown with astonishing speed from its start two centuries earlier and directly annexed much of Eastern Europe, including Greece.

But by the mid-1600s, the Ottoman's power to expand deeper into Europe was clearly spent. The Empire's second attempt to take Vienna with a 60 day siege in 1683 ended in a disastrous route and, though Eastern Europe would remain under the Ottomans almost another two centuries years, fear of the Empire in the rest of Europe subsided.

Instead, Western Europeans suddenly became very interested in the art and lifestyle of the foe they no longer feared. To dress up for palace balls "alla Turca" became the rage. And the practice of drinking coffee – something that had previously reached only Venice from Istanbul -- suddenly spread across Europe.

In Vienna, one of the first cafes was the House under The Blue Bottle, which opened in 1686. Its origins, just three years after the Ottoman siege of the city, perfectly illustrates the new fascination with the East.

The Blue Bottle's proprietor, Georg Franz Kolschitzky, had lived in Istanbul as a young man and learned Turkish. During the siege he used his language skills to spy on the Ottoman camp. Legend says that afterwards he claimed the coffee beans the Turks left behind as his share of the war booty and used them to start his business. For decades, he ran his café dressed as an Ottoman cafe owner, as this painting from the time shows.

Like any fad, Turquerie was a mix of reality and fantasy. It came when still very few Europeans traveled to the East and it was heavily influenced by Europeans' own imaginary visions of oriental luxury, Ottoman customs, and even harems.

But even if Turquerie was in large part make-believe, there is no doubt that genuine curiosity about -- and even admiration of the Ottoman Empire – was equally part of it.

When one of the most famous, and large-scale, weddings of the time took place in Dresden in 1719, the celebration included days of specially themed events.

On one of those days, the newlyweds (the Prince-elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Josepha) had a palace in ‘Turkish style’ erected complete with a corps of janissaries. The guests, who included an Ottoman ambassador, were requested to appear in Turkish costume.

Similarly, it became the rage for noble women to have their portraits painted wearing a Turkish costume and in an Oriental setting, sometimes even sitting on an oriental carpet.

Here is one portrait from the time, Mademoiselle de Clermont "en Sultane" painted in 1733 by Jean-Marc Nattier.

A much more famous sitter, the Marquise de Pompadour, commissioned three portraits of herself dressed as a Sultana in 1750. The portraits not only allowed the sitters to appear in exotic fashions but also to abandon their body-constricting corsets -- something that would not become possible again in Western fashion until the 1900s.

Men also took part. In the 1700s, it was in fashion for wealthy men to smoke Turkish tobacco in a Turkish pipe, sometimes wearing a Turkish robe. And when people went out to the opera, it was possible to find Turquerie there, too.

The most famous of the Turquerie operas – still played today – is Mozart's 'The Abduction from the Seraglio'. It was first presented in 1782, but 13 other similarly themed operas predate it. Often the productions clothed the singers in authentic Ottoman fashions, knowing that theater goers were curious about them.

Even in architecture Turquerie found a place, this time in the form of Ottoman-inspired pleasure domes.

Here is the central building of a "Türkischer Garten" built between the years of 1778-91 in southwestern Germany. It is part of the Schwetzingen Castle, the summer residence of the rulers of the then German state of Baden-Württemberg.

One could easily imagine that so much interest in the Ottoman Empire would have to increase interest in that most essential symbol of the orient of all – carpets. But the fact that Europe's taste in carpet patterns went in an entirely different direction may only prove that, ultimately, Turquerie was more a measure of Europe's growing sense of self assurance than of cosmopolitan tastes.

Throughout the 1600s, when Turquerie began, and through the 1700s as it continued, the "gout Turque" coincided with the greatest period of expansionism in European history. It was a fad in an epic period that included the transformation of the New World and the creation of sea trading networks and ultimately colonies across Asia.

That meant that the key status symbols European society would have to be European too. Whereas wealthy Europeans in the Renaissance showed off their Turkish carpets to underline their rich status, the people of the late 1600s and early 1700s centuries furnished their mansions with European-woven baroque carpets instead.

Here is an antique Axminster, woven in Britain, that reflects the English taste of the time. It is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Interestingly, Europe's overwhelming preference for baroque carpets over oriental ones would not last long. By the mid 1700s, the taste for oriental carpets would begin returning with redoubled strength as Europe's view of the East started to dramatically change again.

This new change, seen most visibly in Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt in 1798, would come as Europeans directly entered into the life of the Orient as never before. It, too, would be accompanied by a new fad: Orientalism. But that is the subject of another story (see: Orientalism and Oriental Carpets).

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From Hand-Knotted To Power-Loomed, Every Rug Has Its Appeal

LONDON, Oct. 1, 2011 – One of the many fascinating things about rugs is the many different ways they are made.

In some places they are hand-kotted with traditional designs that date back thousands of years. In others, they are partly or entirely woven by machines and there is constant innovation.

The result is a variety of rugs so great that it is easy to get lost in a sea of choices and terminology.

To make sense of this vast world of weaving, Tea & Carpets recently sought out an expert who deals with it daily.

We asked Tony Sidney of Rug Store North East, Britain's top rug online retailer, to describe the main ways rugs are produced today and why.

Sidney says the terms to know are hand-knotted, hand-loomed, hand-tufted, and power-loomed. Each kind of production offers qualities the others do not.

Hand-knotted offers the quality of the most human contact between the weaver, her or his creation, and the rug buyer. When the design is a traditional one, the rug is a message from one culture to another and across both space and time.

Here is an Afghan Kunduz rug, available from Rug Store NE. It is an example of the traditional "red rugs of Central Asia" that continue to be woven today.

But because hand-knotting is laborious and time-consuming, many rug producers have for centuries also sought ways to machine-assist weavers.

One way is to use a loom that is powered by the hands and feet of the operator. This method, particularly used in India and other parts of Asia, speeds the weaving of kilim-like rugs which don't require a knotted pile.

A more recent innovation, since the 1980s, is hand-tufting, which helps weavers quickly produce a piled rug that resembles a knotted one but without actually tying knots.

Here is an example of a hand-tufted rug in a classical oriental design, available from Rug Store NE.

In hand tufting, the weaver pushes wool or a man-made yarn through a matrix material using a hand-held pneumatic gun. Later the yarn is trimmed to create the pile and an adhesive backing is affixed to the rug to hold everything in place.

Sidney says that because hand-tufted rugs can be made faster than hand-knotted rugs, they are generally less expensive.

Yet the tufting method also creates a highly durable rug which, when produced by a skilled craftsmen, can accurately depict even intricate designs.

After hand tufting, the next step in mechanization is machine-looming. The photo below is of a machine-loomed Qashqai available from Rug Store NE.

The use of machines to make rugs has a rich history, beginning in 1800 century with the first mechanical loom invented by Joseph Jacquard of Lyons, France. But large-scale machine production of carpets did not begin until 1839, when Erastus Bigelow, an American, invented a steam-driven loom.

The steam-driven loom dramatically upped the productivity of weavers. A single weaver suddenly could produce 25 square yards of carpet in a workday of 10 to 12 hours, compared to 7 square yards of carpet before.

Ever since, the invention of new machines and synthetic fibers has greatly stimulated the manufacture of rugs and carpets. Today, the technique is used to make copies of all kinds of rugs in western and oriental as well as modern designs, with wool or synthetic fibers.

So which of the many different kinds of woven rugs sell best?

Sidney says the biggest market exists for machine-loomed rugs. At his store, he says, "the largest selling machine-woven rugs at the moment are probably shag pile rugs with the main production coming from Belgium and Turkey."

Turkey – and Bulgaria – are also rising producers of machine-loomed Oriental rugs. "Turkish and Bulgarian wiltons (named for the Wilton Loom they are woven on) are becoming more evident in the market as Belgian ranges in traditional Oriental designs seem to be slowing down," Sidney notes.

The next bestselling rugs, Sidney says, are hand-tufted rugs in both contemporary and traditional designs.

Rug Store NE, for example, stocks mainly Chinese production with a large variety of qualities available -- including high-end wool and silk ranges from Nourison, the world's leading producer of handmade area rugs. Here is an example in wool.

For both machine-loomed and hand-tufted rugs, it is price, availability of programmed sizes (especially larger sizes) and choice of colors that seem to be the main reasons for their popularity over traditional hand-knotted rugs. Rapid and large scale production means distributors and customers can count in advance on find the size and colors they want.

Does that mean that hand-knotted rugs -- the small fish in this sea of production – one day will be crowded out of the market?

Sidney sees no danger of that.

"There is still no substitute for a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug, woven by a experienced weaver using good quality wool and dyestuffs," he says.

He adds, "We will always have a select group of customers who know the difference and are happy to pay for a good quality hand-knotted piece that will far outlast any machine-made rug."

(The picture at the top of this page is a detail of a medallion in a hand-knotted rug from Pakistan reproducing a William Morris design.)

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Russia And The Red Rugs Of Central Asia

MOSCOW, Sept. 15, 2011 -- Central Asian carpets came to attention of Europeans in the mid-1800s largely as a result of the Russian Empire's expansion into the region.

The expansion took place in a dramatic reversal of the previous order.

For centuries, Russians had lived in the shadows of the Turkic and Mongol empires that dominated Eurasia. From 1223 to 1480, neighboring Tatars held such direct sway over Russia's principalities that Russians call it the time of the "Tatar yoke."

And for centuries more, nomads so regularly raided Russia and Eastern Europe for slaves that the word "slave" itself derives from "Slav" in many European languages.

But gunpowder gradually neutralized the advantages of the horse borne warriors.

As Robert B. Golden notes in his book Central Asia in World History (2011), nomads were no longer able to take cities fortified with canons by the late 1400s. By the mid-1600s, the infantryman's flintlock musket had become a match for the nomad cavalryman's composite bow.

Then it was Russia's turn to expand across the steppes, starting in the mid-1500s under Ivan IV the Terrible. By the time the Russian Empire reached the Silk Road cities of Central Asia in the late 1800s, it is was an unstoppable industrializing power that had helped defeat Napoleon and recently annexed the Caucasus.

Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand fell to the Russian Empire like dominos, captured in 1865, 1867, and 1868, respectively. Above is a picture of the battle for Samarkand.

The cities fell quickly because, by the 1800s Central Asia had declined into an impoverished region of settled and nomadic peoples steeped in tradition. The trans-continental Silk Road trading routes had been undercut by the sea trade and the wealth and vision they once generated were gone.

But some tribes put up a fierce resistance. At the battle of Geok Tepe ("Green Hill" in Turkmen) in 1882, some 25,000 Turkmen held out in a fortress for 23 days against a far better armed Russian force of 6,000. Finally, the walls were mined and the fortress was taken by storm.

Here is a photo of Turkmen soldiers in chain mail and armed with antiquated muskets.

In the wake of Moscow's conquests, the famous red carpets of Central Asia, known in the West but rarely seen in abundance, came flooding onto the Russian market.

One American observer, New York Herald correspondent Januarius MacGahan, witnessed the surrender of the city of Khiva to the Russian Army. He reported that families were forced to sell their carpets and other belongings to traders in order to pay tributes levied upon the defeated tribes:

"The Turcoman carpets, too, were very much in demand, and sold readily, in spite of the high prices demanded for them and of the fact that hundreds had been "looted" in the campaign against the Yomuds. A carpet, four yards long by two wide, brought 4 to 5 (pounds).

He added:

"A curious feature of the sale was, that although the Turcomans must have been hard pressed for money to pay the indemnity, they could not be induced to lower their prices a single kopek. They simply named their price, and you might take the article or leave it, as you pleased."

Here is a photo of a Turkmen woman standing on a carpet she has woven before her yurt. The photograph is by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who traveled throughout the Russian Empire in the early 1900s and was a pioneer of color photography.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia came at the height of the scramble by European powers for colonies worldwide and Moscow's occupation of the region followed the model of the times.

Despite the fact the territory was part of the Russian Empire, its peoples were designated "inorodtsy", or aliens. They were subjects but not citizens of Russia.

And unlike other ethnically non-Russian subjects, they could not be drafted into the Imperial Russian army, where they might acquire knowledge of modern warfare and weaponry. That was, perhaps, in memory of the past days of the Tatar yoke.

Of course, there was mass colonization, too, with ethnic Russians moving into the region, particularly to Kazakhstan, starting in the 1890s,.

Still, while Central Asia was treated very much as a colony, Moscow was interested in learning more about both its economic potential and its peoples. So, Russian academic teams fanned out along with colonial administrators.

The work of some of these teams helped lay the foundations of the West's enduring fascination with Central Asian rugs today – both as art and history.

In 1901 and 1902, Samuil Martynovich Dudin, already a well-known amateur specialist in Oriental Art, led two trips to collect materials and photographs for the first Central Asian collection of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. He brought back an enormous number of objects (2,526), including 350 rugs and carpets.

Here is one of Dudin's photographs, showing a bazaar in Central Asia.

Dudin's rug collection, which exists intact today, included Uzbek, Kirghiz, Baluch, and Afghan rugs. But most were Turkmen pieces because he considered the Turkmen to be the best carpet weavers in the world. He explained why in his travel notes:

"This quality of Turkmen rugs, in addition to other reasons, can be explained by the fact that all items are used, aside from their practical function, as decoration for the yurts. When put on camels during migrations and wedding ceremonies, they served as publicity for the family, visual evidence of the weavers' skill, the brides and wives.

He concluded:

"It was the competition of the inhabitants of various yurts that created the superb examples of carpet craftsmanship which one admires in one's travel on the Turkmen steppes and in local carpet shops.”

This picture of a Turkmen family seated in its yurt and surrounded by textile items was taken by Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s.

But if Russians appreciated Central Asian carpets and, helped funnel them to Western Europe, the increased interest had a devastating effect on traditional carpet weaving itself.

By 1898, the ancient Silk Road cities were linked by rail to Russia proper via a western line to the Caspian and, by 1906, via a northern line to Orenburg (on modern Russia's Kazakh border). Commercialization of the weaving craft accelerated with the pace of exports.

Rug researcher Richard Wright notes that "from about 1900, functionaries were worrying about weavers' movement away from traditional designs."

To support traditional handicrafts, administrators introduced the "kustar" (or "artisan") program in Central Asia just as elsewhere in the Empire. The program, which distributed traditional designs to weavers and organized promotional exhibitions, was intended to help peasants supplement their livelihood by producing and selling quality handicrafts. But often it had the effect of simply fanning commercialism further.

The decline in quality continued. By 1903, says Wright, official reports were complaining of the "recent use" of synthetic dyes instead of natural ones and of "hasty work." By the end of the first decade of 20th century there were complaints that it was difficult to see sharp outlines in “new” rugs.

Then, far greater threats to tradition arrived.

The Russian Revolution brought communism to Central Asia and the drive to industrialize. Thousands of weavers were "collectivized" into state-run manufactories where, aided by machines, they churned out endless meters of cheap carpeting for public halls across the Soviet Union.

Those weavers who still created carpets at home found their ability to maintain the quality of their work and sell it severely limited. The Soviets' initial maintenance of the kustar program gave way to state neglect, good materials were hard to get, and the free-market was banned.

Here is a rare example of museum-quality weaving in the Soviet era: a portrait carpet of Lenin. It may have been specially commissioned for a meeting hall, mausoleum, or the private villa of a powerful party boss.

Yet if overall the weaving of the once-famous red carpets of Central Asia sank abysmally, there was one saving grace in the story. Ironically, it was the ability of Turkmens who had fled Moscow's control to continue their tradition of fine weaving and even pioneer a return to natural dyes.

As Robert Pinner & Murray L. Eiland, Jr, note in their 1999 book Between the Black Desert and the Red – Turkmen Carpets from the Wiedersperg Collection, "many Turkmen groups migrated to northern Afghanistan for religious reasons" when the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia. And later, "around the time of the Russian revolution there were more tribal movements toward the south."

In northern Afghanistan, the new arrivals joined fellow Turkmen who had been living and weaving there for centuries. Their weavings found their way West via Kabul and, later -- when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and many weavers fled south to Pakistan -- via the rug bazaars of Peshawar.

Today, with the independence of the Central Asian states since 1991, there are hopes that fine carpet weaving will revive, particularly in Turkmenistan. But progress is slow, despite the Turkmen government's opening of a carpet museum in the capital in 1994 and injunctions to producers to return to natural dyes.

Still, there is no reason to doubt a renaissance will come, or to doubt Central Asia's ties to its carpet heritage. By no coincidence, the flag of independent Turkmenistan is also a showcase of the 'guls' most commonly used by the country's five major tribes in their carpet weaving. Those tribes are the Tekke, Yomut, Ersari, Chodor, and Saryk.

(Note: Dudin is quoted in 'Thirty Turkmen Rugs - Masterpieces from the Collection of S. M. Dudin, Part II (Saryk Weavings)' by Elena Tsareva, originally published in Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 11, #1)


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Time Off: A Rug Dealer Vacations In Turkey

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 15, 2011 – What does a rug dealer do when he goes on vacation in Turkey?

One thing is to reflexively cast an eye around the rug markets to see what's new.

So, when Tea and Carpets learned that San Francisco dealer Chris Wahlgren of Nomad Rugs had recently been to Istanbul and Konya, we asked him to share his impressions with us.

The biggest surprise?

After not visiting Turkey since 2004, he was amazed by how good things look. The European Union designated Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture in 2010 and the city spruced up its main historic districts for the occasion. They still shine.

As for Konya, that too has changed. Over the years it has turned from a sleepy town into a thriving city of over a million people.

Here is a picture of Konya with its famous Alâeddin Mosque, constructed in stages in the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries by the Seljuks.

All the changes are a measure of how much Turkey's economy keeps growing despite the big slump of recent years. And that, Wahlgren says, creates challenges for its rug sector.

As more manufacturing jobs open up, weavers are increasingly moving to factory jobs instead. They consider the factory jobs more prestigious and secure than handicrafts and the work often pays better.

To compete, rug producers have to increase salaries. But that drives their own production costs up, making it harder to compete with powerhouses like India and China where labor costs are low.

"I don't know how much longer we can count of Turkey to be a producer except on a small scale," Wahlgren observes. Already about half the stock in Istanbul's carpet shops is from Pakistan and Afghanistan because Turkish production is not large enough to meet demand.

Still, Turkey's carpet producers are famously resilient. And Wahlgren saw plenty of signs that they plan to stay in the game, particularly by innovating with new designs.

"Turkey has always been smart about re-imagining rugs," he says. That includes in recent decades pioneering the return of natural colors with the DOBAG project, introducing the world to patchwork kilims, and experimenting with patchwork rugs.

Here is a patchwork kilim available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco

Today, the newest innovation is "overdyed" rugs, also known as "retro" rugs. They were first shown in the United States at the Domotex show in Atlanta last year but Wahlgren found so many in Turkish shops that it is clear producers are banking on them to become a new trend.

How an "overdyed" rug (shown here) is made is interesting.

"They take old Turkish village rugs that are not saleable due to their color or condition, then they bleach and wash them, and then overdye them in very brilliant colors, like bright blues, mauve, or purple," he says. "They are heavily distressed, with remnants of the original design showing through in the background."

These are rugs that are meant to be highly visible and so they probably go best with minimalist furnishing styles. Individual rug lovers may, or may not, like them. But from the producers' point of view, one can't help but admire their genius. They are the perfect solution to rising weaver costs.

"They can get an old village rug for a couple of hundred bucks, bleach and overdye it, and then sell it for a couple of thousand bucks if it’s room-sized," our visitor notes.

If that isn't clever marketing, what is? Wahlgren himself hasn't decided if he likes the rugs enough to stock them but he's keeping the door open. Without a doubt the rugs are intriguing – combining a modern look with a traditional design – and they could well be a fad for the next five years or so.

So, did Wahlgren, who says he spent 90 percent of his vacation time in Turkey vacationing, bring anything home with him?

Like any visitor to Turkey -- on vacation or on business -- he did indeed.

For his shop, he ordered some mohair tulus with wool so fine it feels like silk, some natural dye kilims, some patchwork kilims, and some yastik-sized small rugs. About 30 to 40 pieces in all.

This picture is of a natural dye kilim from Konya, available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

And he brought something home for himself, too.

"I received a beautiful kilim from Mehmet Uçar," he says "natural dyed with a deep saffron color." He doesn't need to add that a gift like that is something to treasure.

Mehmet Uçar, who works in the Konya region, has been called the "master of the natural-dyed Konya kelim" by Hali magazine and for years has been one of Wahlgren's close associates and suppliers.

That may seem like a lot of rugs to bring home from vacation. But being able to bring so many is precisely the fun of being in the rug business.

(The picture at the top of the page is of a weaver in Konya.)

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Rugs And The Art Of Looking Beyond What You Can See

PRAGUE, July 15, 2011 -- Can viewing a rug be a metaphysical experience?

It can be if you see rugs as many are meant to be seen.

That is, as a patch of infinity.

The idea might not make much sense until you consider how many rugs have field patterns which do not seem to stop at the rug's border.

Instead, they have an endlessly repeating pattern which appears to spill under and past the rug's own borders.

And because the pattern seems to extend ever outward, it is easy to imagine the rug itself is just a small sample of an infinitely larger universe, like a patch of stars in the sky.

Just how this works can be seen in rugs from almost any era and from across the rug-producing East.

Here is an Ottoman court Usak Medallion carpet from around the 16th century.

The focal point of the rug is the central medallion but other, partial, medallions float above and below it, giving the impression that the patterns go on forever.

But if Ottoman court weavers seemed to enjoy creating such illusions of infinity, they were far from the only ones.

So did court weavers in Mamluk Egypt, Safavid Persia and Mughal India.

And so did -- and continue to do – many city and tribal weavers.

Below is a 19th century Turkmen tribal carpet – a Yomud – from Central Asia.

It, too, has a field made up of ever repeating elements that have no beginning and no end.

At the top of the carpet, the final row of field motifs is only half complete, as if they literally have been interrupted by the border only to continue again on the other side.

This Yomud rug is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Interestingly, the appearance of the borders themselves often only helps heighten the sense of infinity.

Particularly on village rugs, weavers are likely to simply stop working on a rug when it reaches the desired length. The result is "unreconciled borders," where the repeat of the border motifs stops but does not clearly end, much like the field design itself.

The readiness of a weaver to stop "just-like-that" as she weaves suggests an artistic tradition very different from that of the West, where symmetry and a sense of completion are usually the rule in art.

So perhaps it is no surprise that some scholars have tried to explain where the tradition comes from and what it means.

Schuyler V.R. Cammann, a professor of East Asian studies who has written about rugs, puts it this way:

“We are accustomed to seeing patterns that fit neatly within trim borders or assigned frames, completely compact entities. To comprehend these infinite patterns, expressing a very different way of thinking, we must put asides our customary points of view and take a new look at some of the rugs we have come to take for granted.”

His remarks appear in the Textile Museum Journal, December 1972, in an article entitled "Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rugs."

Cammann believes the answer lies in the way weavers in Muslim lands view the world and are inspired by the spiritual ideas and beliefs of their common faith.

As he notes, "we meet the concept of endlessness very frequently in Islamic thought. God – under the name of Allah – is described as having limitless transcendence, boundless power, infinite mercy and compassion."

But if the concept of infinity is central to Islam, he believes that Eastern artists' comfort with depicting the world in infinite terms can be traced to long before Islam itself.

Cammann notes that in the Louvre Museum there is a 7th century BC Assyrian carved stone slab which represents a carpet set before the throne in the king's court at Ninevah. Its central field, enclosed by a continuous floral border, also has a repeating pattern.

"These continuous patterns – so characteristic of Middle Eastern design and by no means confined to rugs – did not originate in the Islamic tradition, he concludes. "Muslim weavers took over this already ancient device to express some of their most fundamental beliefs."

If the artists who weave oriental carpets were content to express infinity in their work and stop there, it would already by interesting enough.

But some rug designs appear to go yet a step further and that is to try to suggest the "indefinability" of the world around us, as well.

That concept may seem more familiar when we realize that it already is a large part of what makes Islamic architecture so distinctive and instantly recognizable, such as this dome interior of the Sheikh Lotfollah in Isfahan.

On mosques, the walls and domes are often covered with arabesques and tile which break up the surface into myriad smaller patterns which make the solid structure of the building itself appear to be what it is not: airy and weightless.

In effect, matter is "dissolved," and that contradiction between appearance and reality powerfully evokes the indefinability of the divine, of the spiritual, and ultimately, of all creation.

Often the breaking up of a surface into smaller elements is done using a pattern which itself seems to endlessly repeat beyond the confines of the surface itself, further reinforcing the idea of the infinite, indefinable nature of the universe.

And it is this combination of techniques that can be seen at work in many of carpets which most famously have captured the imagination of Western rug collectors and painters.

Here is a photo of a Lotto carpet woven in a court workshop of the Ottoman Empire.

The Lotto design so captivated European Renaissance painters that it is the most frequently depicted classical Anatolian carpet of all, appearing this way or with variations in some 500 paintings.

But Lotto carpets are just one example. Cammann says the same principles can be seen in the earliest known rugs from Seljuk period and in the Mamluk carpets of pre-Ottoman Egypt.

And, again, they seem to be at work in many village and tribal rugs throughout history.

According to Cammann, the repeated stars and octagons and extra fillers in other shapes that break up the background of Caucasian rugs are not so much the result of a horror vacui, or fear of empty space, as many Westerners imagine, but an example of the dissolution of matter.

Here is a Shirvan carpet from the Caucasus, showing the use of such filler. It is available from Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Many Central Asian rugs, including Yomud and Tekke, also combine the principles of infinity and dissolution of matter in their patterns.

It would be fascinating to know more about how and when weavers across the Muslim world began to introduce such intriguing ambiguity into their works.

But finding out is complicated by the fact that Muslim historians never paid much attention to chronicling changes in the arts.

The reasons for the absence of art history, interestingly, are much the same as those which made the artists allude to the indefinability of divine creation rather than depict subjects realistically.

If something is indefinable, it is not man's work to define it. The historians passed on to more worldly concerns, like politics, and left the artists' secrets to the artists themselves.

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The Antique Carpet Trade: "It's More About What People Feel Than What They Need."

NEW YORK, June 15, 2011 -- If there is a pinnacle to the rug business, it is the antique carpet trade.

It is not only where people are willing to spend the most on a carpet they admire but also where dealers take the greatest risks.

Why risks?

Because to be successful, a dealer not only has to invest huge amounts of money in inventory. He or she also has to hope the global economy stays strong enough to create enough buyers to keep turning the inventory over and make the business prosper.

That's why Tea & Carpets welcomed the opportunity recently to interview one of the most successful people in the antique carpet trade, Jason Nazmiyal.

His New-York based company Nazmiyal Collection has been a leading name in the antique carpet world for decades. If anyone can describe the ins-and-outs of the business he can.

We started with this question: How much has the economic downturn affected the antique carpet market?

The answer is: a lot. Since 2001, he says, the antique market has been under heavy pressure. That's because the purchase of antiques is related to the performance of the stock market. When people's investments do well, they spend their extra earnings on luxury items, when not, not.

The goods Nazmiyal specializes in – room-sized decorative antique rugs – are luxury items running from $ 20,000 to $ 200,000. So, he has felt the pressure firsthand.

Shown here is an antique Agra currently available from the Nazmiyal Collection.

Buying antique rugs, Nazmiyal explains "is more about what people feel than what they need." And over the past years, when even CEOs have worried about losing their jobs, what many people have felt is the urge to be cautious.

But how that caution gets expressed in the rug market can be surprising.

What many interior decorators advised their clients to do during the worst of the downturn was to buy new rugs instead of antique ones, because they are less expensive.

And, as that caused antique rug inventories to pile up, many antique rug dealers followed suite. Rather than invest their capital in more inventory, they invested in producing new rugs themselves, instead.

Nazmiyal did not follow that strategy, but he says for many dealers it made economic sense.

Here's why: To sell a $ 25,000 antique rug, you have to have half a dozen similarly expensive pieces for the client to choose from. But to sell a room-sized new carpet you need only show a $ 200 weaving sample.

If the sample satisfies the client, weaving can go ahead with just a fifty percent deposit, with the rest to be paid when the rug is delivered.

Here is another antique Agra carpet, with a flower design, available from Nazmiyal Collection.

The Nazmiyal Collection weathered the storm without switching to new rugs because its inventory is large and it has an extensive website with global clients. But, perhaps most valuably, the company's long-standing reputation for quality assures designers and others seek it out.

Today, with the economy showing signs of recovery, the antique carpet market is slowly stabilizing again.

Over the past six months, Nazmiyal says, the drift to new rugs has reversed and buyers are returning to vintage pieces.

The reasons they are returning are all the classic ones for which people value antiques. Compared to new rugs, antique rugs have greater interest of history and provenance, they have a patina that will take new carpets decades to acquire, and you don't have to wait six months for them to be woven.

There is another question that always fascinates people about the antique carpet business and that is the way it is influenced by changes of taste and style.

So, we asked how much tastes in antique rugs have changed over recent years and what is in demand now.

The answer, again, was surprising. Over the last 10 years in the United States , Nazmiyal says, decorators grew tired of busy Persian designs. They moved to East Turkestan rugs, for example, instead. Such rugs offered simpler designs and more monochromatic, muted colors.

Here is an antique Khotan available from Nazmiyal Collection.

But over the past six months, things have shifted once again. Now high-end decorators are looking for traditional designs and bolder colors.

What drives the taste changes is a mystery. But the way it works is through the power of a handful of famous tastemakers.

Nazmiyal estimates that in New York City, there are about five "phenomenal designers" who are the trendsetters of our time and whom all the other designers watch. When their taste in fabrics, wallpapers, and other furnishings changes, so do the kinds of carpets the decorating world wants.

Interestingly, the designers themselves may or may not know much about the history of oriental carpets. "Some of the New York designers are so well trained to see beautiful things," he says, "that they don't need to know rug history and styles. They can just be confident of their own taste."

Does this mean that everywhere fashions change as if on cue? Not at all. There is still plenty of room for regional differences and there are variations in what kinds of antique rugs people want even from city to city.

Nazmiyal says that in Atlanta, for example, there is equal demand for beautiful carpets with medallion or all-over designs. But in New York, decorators only want all-over designs because they feel medallion designs fit less flexibly with current styles.

Similarly, there are trans-Atlantic differences.

In Europe, where houses and apartments tend to be smaller than in the United States, a 9 x 12 foot carpet is about the maximum any room can absorb. That makes a big rug, like a Sultanabad or Hajji Jalili, less desirable. And it gives people reasons to prefer smaller yet still highly visible rugs, like Caucasians, instead.

Here is an antique Sultanabad available from Nazmiyal Collection.

One could pose questions about the antique rug trade all day and still never finish. So, we ask a final question about something most people only dream of. That is: what rug do you select for your own house when you have virtually every possibility available in your inventory?

Nazmiyal says he has a mix. He keeps a silk and wool Tehrani woven in 1920-21 with blues and whites in his library. And an early Agra in his living room.

Then he has to laugh. Like many carpet enthusiasts, he has a small obstacle to bringing home ever more antique pieces, as much as he might want to.

"My wife likes new things, not old ones," he says. "So when I bring an antique rug home, it has to be clean and with a full pile and look like a new rug."

How familiar does that sound? Sometimes the husband is the collector, sometimes the wife, and always compromises have to be found.

"But over time," he adds, "she's come to like antique rugs much more. It only took 15 years."

May all families enjoy such peace. And thanks again to Jason Nazmiyal for sharing his experiences with us.

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Mughal Carpets And The Natural Beauty Of Flowers

NEW DELHI, May 15, 2011 – When Europeans discovered a direct sea route to India in 1497-8, they arrived just in time to witness the birth of one of the East's great empires.

It was the Mughal Empire and it was the last of the waves of epic conquests by Turkic-Mongol warriors which for centuries shaped the history of so much of Eurasia.

The empire the Mughals (or Moguls) created, beginning in 1526, so impressed Europeans with its wealth and power that the word 'mogul' has become a synonym in English for "tycoon," as in a Media Mogul or Banking Mogul.

But the Mughal Empire also gave India one of its most enduring and internationally recognized artistic styles. That style is the decorating of objects of all kinds with patterns of naturally depicted flowers.

This carpet, and the detail of it shown at the top of the page, show just how beautifully Mughal weavers portrayed flowers. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Where did this style originate and how did it become the epitome of Mughal art?

The origins can be traced to those of the Mughal Dynasty itself, which began with Babur, a blood descendant of both Timur and Chengis Khan.

Born in 1483 in the Fergana Valley of present day Uzbekistan, he grew up in the fusion of Turkic-Mongol and Persian culture which then characterized court life across a vast band of Eurasia -- from Anatolia to Persia to Central Asia.

This shared court culture put a premium on luxurious gardens and Babur personally built some of the most famous gardens of his time. The garden, which he built in Kabul, his first major conquest, still stands as one of the city's landmark parks and is the site of his tomb.

But it was Babur's subsequent conquests of the Muslim sultanates of northern India that brought still more elements into the mix and created a uniquely Mughal artistic style.

India's Muslim sultanates dated back to Islamic conquests centuries earlier. But their populations remained largely Hindu, and it was the fusion of Turkic-Mongol and Persian culture with Hindu aesthetics that would distinguish the Mughal style – and Mughal carpets – from the art of the other great eastern empires.

Here is a map showing the greatest extent of the Mughal Empire, which lasted from 1526 to 1858.

The distinctly Mughal style did not emerge immediately. For decades, Mughal carpets were essentially "Persian style" carpets which took their design inspiration from Persian floral carpets while adding some Indian motifs, such as segmented blossoms, wisteria, or grape clusters.

This Persian Style echoed the initially large presence of Safavid artists at the Mughal court.

The Safavid artists' presence was due to a quirk of history. Babur's son, Humayun, lost his father's empire to usurpers and was sheltered for years by the Safavid Shah Tahmasp, who was a huge patron of the arts. After Humayun regained his throne and Shah Tahmasp turned austere in middle age, many of the Shah's finest artists moved to Humayun's court instead and became its leading lights.

Nevertheless, a distinctly Mughal "Flower Style" of naturally depicted plants and flowers gradually gained ground.

During the reign of the next Mughal emperor, Akbar, blossoms and vines, even whole plants, became commonly represented in Indian art. And Akbar's successor, Jahangir, made a special trip to Kashmir in Spring just to admire the valleys in bloom.

After returning from his trip, Jahangir famously recited an ode celebrating the natural beauty he had seen and ordered one of his most accomplished miniaturists, Mansur, to paint more than a hundred portraits of flowers.

One of Mansur's paintings is shown here.

By the time of the following emperor, Shah Jahan (1628-1658), who is most famous for the Taj Mahal, the rapidly developing Flower Style was already spreading across Mughal art.

Patterns of naturally depicted flowers could be found on objects ranging from inlaid stonework, to the borders of miniature paintings, to ceramics and carpets.

Daniel Walker describes how the Flower Style came to dominate Mughal carpet design in his book "Flowers Underfoot, Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era."

In the book, published in conjunction with an exhibit of Mughal Carpets at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1997, he writes:

"It is true that in the earlier years of court carpet production, from about 1580 to 1630 or so, the patterns of Indian carpets were heavily dependent upon Persian models (nevertheless displaying an unmistakably Indian aesthetic).

"But then a particular fashion for formally but naturalistically depicted flowers came into vogue. This truly indigenous style came to dominate Indian ornamentation in all media and even influence foreign artistic production, particularly in Iran, perhaps as a result of carpet or textile imports."

But developing a unique Flower Style was not the Mughals' only contribution to carpets.

The Mughal weavers also made extraordinary use of color to achieve naturalistic effects, including "mixing" of two colors to achieve a third one. They did so by juxtaposing knots of different colors, usually in checkerboard fashion, to trick the eye.

At the same time, the weavers used color shading to highlight the edges of plants and other objects and give them a three-dimensional appearance.

Both these techniques, Walker notes, were rarely found in carpets outside of India.

The weavers did not always strive for realism in their portraits of flowers. They also sometimes combined the blossoms of different plants on a single stem to create imaginary plants of great beauty, too.

Here is a Mughal carpet with a motif of just one flower set in an apparent niche.

Such Mughal niche rugs are frequently called prayer rugs but many art experts believe they were more likely used as qanats, or screens, to surround the tents of an emperor's encampment when he was traveling.

One more unique characteristic of Mughal carpets was that weavers did not use silk for the high-knot count they needed to draw their flowers.

Most often, they used pashmina, the extremely fine wool undercoat of the Himalayan mountain goat. As Walker notes, that made India "the only carpet weaving society where silk was not the luxury material of preference."

The source of the pashmina was western Tibet but, because it was imported through Kashmir, Europeans long referred to it as "cashmere," mistakenly assuming Kashmir was its source.

Europeans began to become familiar with Mughal carpets by the early 1600s, very shortly after English and Dutch ships followed the Portuguese trail to India in the last decade of the sixteenth century.

Records show that Britain's East India Company sent a first shipment of carpets back to England in 1615. The Dutch started to ship carpets from India in about 1625.

But the Mughal carpets which first appeared in Europe were not the Flower Style carpets so sought-after today. They were the Persian Style ones which at that time still dominated Mughal weaving.

Ironically, the European taste for Mughal Persian Style carpets continued long after the Flower Style became dominant in the empire itself. That was because the European market for centuries had thought of 'oriental carpets' only in terms of what was most familiar to it -- Anatolian and Persian styles -- and imported accordingly.

European paintings of the time – particularly Dutch and British paintings – continued to frequently portray wealthy families with a prized oriental carpet displayed on a table near them.

But precisely because Europeans tended to import Mughal carpets that were Persian Style, it is often hard for art experts today to know if the carpets depicted were made in Safavid Iran or in Mughal India.

Had the families acquired a Flower Style carpet, instead, knowing its provenance would be easy.

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