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

Afghan Ziegler Chobi Carpets Explore Subtler Styles

HANOVER, April 3, 2009 -- Ever since Afghan refugees in Pakistan began having success in the late 1980s with their modified Ziegler designs (left), they've been mercilessly imitated by other producers.

Nowhere is that clearer than at trade fairs such as this year's Domotex in Hanover, Germany (January 17-20). The halls of the fairground were filled with Zieglers, familiarly called Chobis, but only a portion of them were made by Afghans.

Small wonder, then, that Afghan weavers -- whether they remain in Pakistan or have returned to Afghanistan -- keep searching for something new. And increasingly, where they are going is in the direction of subtler, small-scale floral designs that look very different from the Chobi's previous bold patterns.

Colors, too, are changing. After starting out with simple contrasts of burgundy and white, and then experimenting with darker shades including browns, blacks and gold, the Afghan designers now are exploring an ever broader spectrum of hues.

The only thing not changing is the Chobi's original and still greatest strength: soft vegetal dyes. Indeed, it is from the Turkmen word for wood -- one of the main dye sources -- that the name "Chobi" derives.

Here is one of the new Ziegler designs shown by Afghan weavers at the Domotex show. It made it to the semi-finals in the awards competition for Best Traditional or Nomadic Design under 150 euros/square meter.

The judge's positive appraisal augers well for the future success of the new Ziegler designs. At the same time, it shows how self-confidently Afghanistan's commercial carpet industry is returning to the world stage after decades of disruptions.

The carpet is made by Kabul-based Hali Weavers, which calls it 'Mahal," or Palace. It is 3.6 meters x 2.6 meters, with 300 knots per square inch, and was woven by Oraz Geldi, a master weaver in Aqcha, northern Afghanistan.

Aqcha, like the other carpet centers of Andkhoy and Shibergan, is in the heart of the Ersari Turkmen belt, a famous weaving area for generations. In recent years, thousands of Turkmen weavers who fled as refugees to Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war and the subsequent civil wars and Taliban era, have returned to the region.

As they come, they have brought back the Chobi techniques pioneered in the Pakistani refuge camps and turned the northern Afghanistan into a major center for Chobi production. (See: In Afghanistan's Turkmen Rug Belt, It's Tradition vs. Globalization).

All this has helped make Afghanistan's carpet industry boom. By some estimates, carpets now account for a full 60 percent of the country's exports (not including illegal opium poppies). They are followed by dried fruit, fresh fruits, leather, marble and other stones.

But carpet producers say the industry still is far from being as big a revenue earner for Afghanistan as it could be. The vast majority of carpets still go to market via Pakistan, where they are marked 'Made in Pakistan' and where a large portion of the profits are siphoned off by brokers and shippers.

Raaz Hassan, an owner of Hali Weavers, is one of some 40 Afghanistan-based producers who came to the Domotex show. The delegation was sponsored by USAID, which is investing in helping the domestic industry make market contacts abroad.

What is needed to make Afghanistan a carpet powerhouse in its own right again? Hassan has two recommendations.

First, he says, the Afghan government needs to negotiate with more international air freight carriers to fly directly to Kabul. Currently, the state airline Ariana carries carpets at 60 cents per kilogram -- half the usual private cargo rate -- to Dubai. But its capacity is limited.

Second, he says, the government should introduce a rebate system like that used in Pakistan to financially reward producers for each carpet they export. He notes that in 1990 the Pakistani rebate was 18 percent and that helped boost export production so much that the government has been able to draw the rebate down to almost zero today.

"Pakistan grew its carpet industry into a major hard currency maker for the country," Hassan says. "But our government does not understand that logic."

He says Kabul almost ignores its export sector as officials concentrate on taxing imports at a rate of 5 to 20 percent instead. "They are content to collect the low-hanging fruit," he observes.

Meanwhile, Hassan estimates that 95 percent of Afghan weaving goes out to the world through Karachi or, more recently, Iran's port of Bandar Abbas. Not a happy situation but also, perhaps, not a permanent one.

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An Analysis of Business Opportunities in Afghanistan's Carpet Sector, 2007

Afghan Mark: Carpets Made By Afghan Women's Consortia

Hali Weavers

Books: Three Novels About The Oriental Carpet World (Fun, Epic, Poignant)

PRAGUE, March 20, 2009 -- It's strange so few novels are set in the world of oriental rugs.

After all, it is a place where so many opposites meet.

Things made by the world's poorest people become objects of desire for the richest ...

Sophisticated urbanites are awed by nomadic tribes people ...

Tradition fights for a place in modern life ...

And honest carpet dealers contend with highly unscrupulous rivals.

So, what a pleasure to discover a new novel set entirely in the carpet world that is now appearing -- in chapter-by-chapter installments and free-of-charge -- on the Internet.

The novel, "When A Dragon Winks" is by San Francisco carpet dealer and writer Emmett Eiland and has a lot of attractions. It is funny, rich with insights into the rug business, filled with eccentric characters, and -- perhaps best of all -- has a page-clicking plot.

Here is the link: When A Dragon Winks

New chapters appear every Monday.

Just briefly -- so as not to spoil the fun -- here are some of the main characters.

There is a young carpet store owner trying to get his start in San Francisco.

There is a con man who appears like a good genie in the young man's store and suddenly makes his business take off -- but seems to have ulterior business motives of his own.

And there is a socialite who has climbed as high as she can in the museum world but wants to go much higher.

Plus there is one more highly volatile ingredient: an ancient Chinese dragon rug rumored to exist but never seen -- a rug so valuable that, if it were to appear -- it could make or break anyone's fortune.

What are some of the behind-the-curtain peaks into the rug business this book offers? Here is one description of the young carpet dealer, Holden Carter, as he sits musing in his store:

"He had heard of an African tribe that was said to urinate in rituals on objects to make them powerful. In the West, rather than urine, it was age that imbued objects with power and value.

"Nothing made a piece of furniture more desirable than to uncover it in an attic where it had been stashed away for 200 years. Oriental rugs, he believed, owned their mystique — their fabled reputations as magic carpets and flying carpets — to the fact that often they survived long enough to become quite old. The older a rug, the more valued it was.

"Nevertheless, as Holden’s antique rugs grew six months older and then a year and finally two years older while going unsold in his store, rather than gaining in power and value, they began to lose their magic for him. It was hard to stay in love with rugs that had been passed over by so many shoppers."

It would be unfair to talk of rug novels and speak of only one.

There are least two other novels that are partly set in the rug world which have appeared in recent years and deserve mention.

One is The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins.

Publisher's Weekly says:

"New York City teems with quiet desperation in this lucidly written but languid debut novel. The titular carpet salesman, Ushman Khan, has left his mother and his wife, Farak, in Iran in order to make a new start in America.

"Told from Khan's perspective, the narrative traces his subtle acculturation into Western life while he sets up shop and develops loyal customers like the wealthy socialite Mrs. Roberts. He plans for his wife to join him, but learns that she has divorced him for a Turkish salesman.

"Crushed, Ushman buys plane tickets to Paris he will never use and finds temporary, self-loathing comfort in a prostitute. Only when he meets Stella, a Barnard freshman, does he begin to see a way out of his isolation.

"Like him, Stella is an outsider struggling with loss and looking for connection, but Ushman must first resolve his conflicted feelings about women and sex and American culture.

"Originally developed as a short story that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2002, this melancholy novel droops under the weight of a sympathetic but tentative, passive protagonist who can find no real solution to his profound alienation."

Another book is The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani.

A review by Publisher's Weekly describes it this way:

"In Iranian-American Amirrezvani's lushly orchestrated debut, a comet signals misfortune to the remote 17th-century Persian village where the nameless narrator lives modestly but happily with her parents, both of whom expect to see the 14-year-old married within the year.

"Her fascination with rug making is a pastime they indulge only for the interim, but her father's untimely death prompts the girl to travel with her mother to the city of Isfahan, where the two live as servants in the opulent home of an uncle — a wealthy rug maker to the Shah. The only marriage proposal now in the offing is a three-month renewable contract with the son of a horse trader.

"Teetering on poverty and shame, the girl weaves fantasies for her temporary husband's pleasure and exchanges tales with her beleaguered mother until, having mastered the art of making and selling carpets under her uncle's tutelage, she undertakes to free her mother and herself.

"With journalistic clarity, Amirrezvani describes how to make a carpet knot by knot, and then sell it negotiation by negotiation, guiding readers through workshops and bazaars."

Altogether, these three novels offer a wonderful library for people who like reading about carpets. And just like carpets themselves, no two of them are the same.

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Related Links:

When A Dragon Winks: official website

The Blood of Flowers: official website

The Rug Merchant: Synopses and Reviews

Great Gatsby! What Are Oriental Carpet Patterns Doing On Jazz Age Beaded Purses?

INDIANAPOLIS, USA; March 6, 2009 -- The "It" girls of the 1920s -- the Flappers -- did a lot to usher in the modern age.

They were the first to stop wearing the waist-constricting corsets that gave so many women before them the look of walking -- and fainting -- hourglasses.

They danced wild dances -- the Charleston and the Bunny Hug -- to ragtime and jazz taken from the previously ignored culture of Black America.

And they cut their hair short and smoked and drank like men, presaging the days when women would join the workforce and become financially as well as socially independent.

All this revolutionary behavior might seem whimsical until you think of what directly preceded it: World War I. The previous world order had ended in what -- politics aside -- was collective suicide. Many people believed it was absolutely necessary to try something new.

But what does this have to do with carpets?

One of the less well-known ways the Flappers anticipated modern times was also by being interested in "ethno" styles.

Their early ethno-look did not just include feathered headbands to liven up a party outfit -- already a step too far for many people today. It also featured beaded purses in a variety of designs inspired by oriental carpets and textiles.

The beaded carpet purses came in a huge variety of patterns. They ranged from Turkish prayer carpets, to Caucasian rugs, to Persian medallion carpets, to Turkmen tribal designs, to Indian textile motifs. But unlike most ethno products today, they were not made in the East as one might expect, but in the United States and Europe, particularly in France.

The story of these beaded oriental carpets was told recently by an exhibit of 70 such purses at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in Indiana. The exhibit, entitled Shared Beauty: Eastern Rugs & Western Beaded Purses began May 31, 2008 and ends April 5 this year.

Niloo Paydar, curator of textiles and fashion arts at the IMA, says oriental carpet designs were not something originally associated with beaded purses, which have a long history of their own from the late 19th century through the early 20th.

Much more typical designs for beaded purses were chinoiserie, landscapes, flowers and occasionally people, and mostly these designs were taken from paintings and other arts of the period. Here is one such landscape purse (right).

In the 1920s, the demand for beaded purses reached its height. One reason may be that they were a perfect accessory for beaded evening dresses, which were an integral part of flapper-era costumes. This apparently created a desire for still more designs, and oriental carpet patterns suddenly joined the menu.

Paydar says the use of carpet designs was surprising because their patterns did not go particularly well with the patterns of the Jazz Age dresses, which were mainly art deco.

Still, their popularity may reflect the fact that during this same period Orientalism was still in vogue and eastern carpets were commonplace in western homes. The best-traveled could take package tours on the Nile or steamers to Istanbul or go on around the world from one European colonial possession to the next. Eastern motifs and the exotic associations that went with them were part of the times.

But precisely when the oriental beaded purses first appeared is hard to know.

Paydar says most beaded purses, which can be of glass or metal, offer very few clues to the date they were made. There are some trends, such as drawstrings being used earlier, and clasps later, for closing the purses, and some lining materials were used before others. But putting together a precise history of the purses is difficult indeed.

The 70 purses exhibited by the IMA come from a single private collection in California compiled by Stella and Frederick Krieger. The Museum juxtaposed the purses with rugs from its own holdings plus some more loaned by local rug collectors.

"I personally have an interest in exhibiting eastern and western designs alongside each other and talking about how they influence each other and how influence is not always west to east," Paydar says. "Who would have thought carpet patterns would have become a fashion accessory?"

She also says that the museum has found that exhibiting beaded purses, which are familiar to many Americans, is a good way to teach visitors about something that today is less familiar: oriental carpet designs.

That may seem ironic, given how popular both once were together. But over the decades things have changed. Oriental carpets are no longer a staple of American household furnishings but beaded purses -- in a whole variety of designs -- remain a very popular arts and craft item.

In the United States there is a huge community of bead purse collectors and almost every city has a bead society, Paydar says. Many enthusiasts make their own bead purses, so the tradition is very much alive today.

(Photos from top to bottom: Carpet Purse from Collection of Fred and Stella Krieger; actress Norma Talmadge; landscape purse courtesy Purse Treasures; carpet purse from Collection of Fred and Stella Krieger; Shared Beauty exhibit IMA.)

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Can Europe's Tapestries And Village Rugs Survive The Global Carpet Competition?

HANOVER, February 19, 2009 – No-one is surprised anymore at how many Western consumer items are produced in Asia.

But it can be a shock to see how many Western handcrafts are rapidly going the same way.

All over Europe, there are merchants selling crystal vases and glassware that once were locally made but now are just as likely to be made in China. The same is true for Baroque porcelain figurines, pewter candelabras, and handmade lace. If store owners remove the “made in” sticker, many buyers never notice the difference.

The East's workshops are excellent enough, and low cost enough, that they not only successfully compete with Europe’s traditional artisans, they also are putting many out of business. The news in December that cash-strapped Waterford Wedgwood is ready to sell off its once star acquisition Rosenthal – the famous German porcelain and china maker – is just one example.

A recent walk around Domotex, the carpet world’s largest annual trade show in Hanover, Germany, shows that Europe’s textile heritage is also no stranger to the trend.

The carpet show brings together producers from Turkey, Iran, India, China, Pakistan, and Nepal. For four days, they meet and trade with the wholesalers who supply Europe’s retail stores and boutiques with the whole spectrum of low-cost to luxury-grade oriental carpets. The styles on show range from classical to tribal to contemporary styles, so one expects to see a bit of everything.

But what one does not expect to see is something like a Moldovan village rug – the kind that is filled with memories of Old Europe. And yet here is one hanging on the wall of an Indian carpet-maker's booth with its characteristic design of roses -- the same roses that Moldovan peasant women traditionally weave into their ankle-length skirts and colorful headscarves.

Standing near the Moldovan rug is its producer, R. K. (Raju) Rawat of Manglam Arts, Jaipur. He is an affable man in a checkered sports jacket who looks pleased when a visitor recognizes how much his rug resembles the originals.

Rawat, who produces about 50 Moldovan rugs a month, says he got the idea some five years ago. That was when he saw some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale at an earlier Domotex show.

"I was attracted by Moldovan designs because of their feeling of freshness," he says. "They make you think about roses and gardens, and everyone loves roses."

But the dealer says getting Indian weavers to reproduce them was not easy. "I found one particular village that was interested, and the weavers were very flexible, but it still took a few years because they had just some photos to work from, they didn't have the original piece in their hands."

He pauses and then adds proudly, "but they did it!"

Have the Indian Moldovans been well received? Certainly.

"We brought them to Frankfurt's 'Heimtextil' show where designers and architects come and they really appreciated them. Even people from Moldova come and say this is fantastic!"

Mr. Rawat is a businessman and perfectly within his rights to reproduce any design he likes. But one has to wonder. If distant weavers take over this bit of Europe’s heritage, how long will it be before the rugs’ real origins become first, irrelevant and, then, forgotten?

It is not just a question that interests Europeans. Vast amounts of Persian carpets are hand-woven outside of Iran and almost all Caucasian carpets today are woven outside of the Caucasus.

The foreign producers reformat and simplify the original designs to fit their own concepts of what the global market wants.

In the case of the Caucasian carpets known as Kazaks that are woven in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the market has grown so used to their deliberately harmonized styles that those few weavers still working in the Caucasus get little competitive advantage by sticking to their traditional and much more spontaneous patterns.

Thinking about such things prompts one to walk around the rest of the fair in hopes of finding some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale as Rawat once did. It’s a daunting task. Domotex is a huge trade show, with several aircraft hangar-sized rooms filled with hand-woven carpets.

The carpets sprawl across the floor space in a vast array of knee-high and thigh-high piles, so the vast hangars resemble a giant bazaar. The richest carpet producers have glass enclosures. Others simply sit among their wares.

Everywhere, muscular porters are flipping back carpets as buyers look on with calculators in hand. As sales are made, in lots of dozens of carpets at a time, the porters stack them, bundle them in black plastic, and haul them away.

It is like looking for a needle in a haystack but, amazingly, almost invisible among the mountains of oriental rugs, there is a little stack of Moldovans. They are at the stand of a Turkish dealer, Ozmelek Hali.

How did they get here? One of the salesmen tells what he knows.

Before the trade show, the company went around the Istanbul bazaar collecting them from other dealers because it knows the carpets interest some European retailers. The rugs came to the Grand Bazaar in the suitcases of Moldovan travelers, who sell them cheaply for cash.

The Istanbul salesman, who has the air of a hard-working family man, observes a moment of silence after what he has just said. Moldova is Europe’s poorest nation, with 20 percent of its population working outside the country and sending back money to support the rest. The rugs are as likely to be personal heirlooms as workshop pieces. One of them has an inscription -- the name Iornuvera M. -- and a date, 1964.

It's striking how detailed the original Moldovans are compared to the copies. They are old, many are coarse and with dull colors, but they are definitely interesting.

And, it seems, appealing. Soon, three Norwegian retailers stop by. They circle the stack of old Moldovans with the keen eyes of people who have spotted what they are looking for.

The two women and a man are partners in a small home-furnishings catalog company called 'Home and Cottage' south of Oslo. It’s the kind of company that specializes in supplying rough, unvarnished chairs and dressers that look like they were stored for generations in the family attic.

Kaj Roger, the male partner, says the Moldovan carpets fit well with cottage decors. "We have a lot of cottages in Norway," he confides, "and at the cottage it should be Old Style. It's a place to relax."

Does he mean the Moldovan carpets somehow represent good old days, a grandmother's weavings, memories of lifetimes past?

The three Norwegians, who are entering middle age, do not object to any of these suggestions. One of the ladies pulls out the latest Home and Cottage catalog. She shows a picture of a Moldovan carpet in mellow golden and rust colors spread across a rough wood plank cabin floor. Then she shows another photo of a carpet draped across an ocean steamer trunk. The pictures are contrived but comforting. Old, bygone Europe.

Rawat's fresh and more brightly colored reproductions are not likely to appeal to the customers of Home and Cottage. But there is every reason to believe he will find a market. There are many successful precedents right here at Domotex, and they are not hard to spot.

In the middle of the sea of carpets, there is a small island that serves as a landmark for visitors. It is a restaurant with a terrace of tables ringed by houseplants which manages to look like an outdoor Biergarten. The restaurant competes bravely against the outside caterers who move around the trade show with freezer boxes full of curries and pilafs for the carpet producers.

To have a stand around the restaurant guarantees high visibility, so some of the biggest Persian producers are there. But so is one of the strangest sights of all: a large enclosure full of French Baroque carpets and tapestries.

It is the stand of Renaissance Carpets, a New York-based producer. Inside, one whole wall is covered with a 12 by 24 foot (3.6 x 7.3 meters) tapestry depicting scenes from a 17th century boar hunt. It is amazingly detailed, with all the characters in period costumes.

A young salesman in a department store suit is standing nearby. He has come over from New York because, he says, the company's tapestries and Aubusson and Savonnerie carpets sell equally well in Europe and the United States.

Who buys them?

"People who have houses in a similar style," he says nonchalantly, as if lots of people in the 21st century live in Baroque manor homes.

And where are they made?

"In China."

The boar hunt tapestry, he explains, took three weavers seven months to complete, with a resident French artist overseeing the work. The cost is modest compared to the same piece woven in Europe. Just $ 18,000.

One can't help but admire the quality. If this is a copy, where is the original? In a museum?

"We own the original," the salesman says. The company bought it at an auction for $ 15,000. And with the purchase, it acquired the copyright.

One could ask more questions but suddenly there don't seem to be any left. If a copy can be this good-looking and inexpensive, there is no reason to insist -- except out of vanity -- that your replica French hunting tapestry should be woven in France. Who but an expert can tell if it is woven in China under a French tutor instead?

Or is that really enough? France today still has a viable tapestry industry that continues a rich cultural heritage. But as the market gets used to outsourcing, there is no certainty that it will have one forever.

One leaves Domotex with one's head spinning. Can art, whether it's in Europe, Iran, India, or Africa, be separated from its place of origin and history without simply becoming a commodity? And if it becomes a commodity, what can stop it from inevitably being reworked and simplified to appeal to the widest market, until its meaning and history are all but forgotten?

And, finally, if this is exactly what is happening with globalization, who should come to the rescue? The natural saviors are those who love the original carpets the most -- collectors. But collectors tend to collect carpets from the past, not the present. And doing so, they fail to support today's traditional artisans or guarantee the future.

Perhaps it's time to re-think the business of collecting. If the intention is to preserve carpets as a meaningful cultural patrimony, the efforts being made today may seem a lot less successful tomorrow than they do now.

(The photo at the top of this article is a detail from The Lady And The Unicorn tapestry series in the Cluny Museum, Paris.)

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Market Trends Make Maintaining Traditional Designs A Struggle

In Afghanistan's Turkmen Rug Belt, It's Tradition vs. Globalization

What Do People Want From Oriental Carpets? It Depends On The Country

HANOVER, February 6, 2009 -- Many rug dealers say they can tell what kind of rug you will buy as soon as they meet you. If they know your nationality, they feel even more confident.

One such dealer is Khairi Ezzabi, a Libyan who travels the world looking for luxury goods to import back home to Tripoli. He buys and sells in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Along the way, he has learned a great deal about all three markets.

We recently met Mr. Ezzabi in a zimmer frei in Hanover, Germany. The occasion was Domotex, the carpet world's biggest trade show that takes place every January. The show attracts thousands of people, more even than the huge number of hotels in this trade-fair city can accommodate. So, many visitors find themselves taking rooms in private homes, something that leads to impromptu acquaintances.

As the guests come down for breakfast, the lady of the house introduces them to one another. The table is set with all the riches of German hospitality and instantly puts everyone in a good mood. There is bread, rolls, butter, jam, and honey, plates of ham, salami, and different cheeses, soft-boiled eggs, oranges, apples, and slices of kiwi, and then, as if waiting for dessert, an assortment of sweet buns and pound cake.

The conversation flows easily.

"Please tell our guest that the salami is made of lamb, and the ham is made of chicken," Frau Ripphoff says in German. But before anyone can play the part of translator, the well-traveled Mr. Ezzabi waves away the need for words with his hand.

"I was here before, two years ago," he replies in English. "I remember her kindness from before."

Everyone is pleased. The small breakfast corner suddenly doubles in size with the expansive good manners of the East. As the windows slowly turn from night-black to grey with the late winter sunrise, Mr. Ezzabi fills a plate with pieces of bread, abstains from everything else, and takes time to talk.

He is a wonderful talker, punctuating with delighted giggles what he knows will be outrageous observations. But he also knows much of what he says will be true. After all, hasn't he seen it with his own eyes?

"What do people want from oriental rugs?" he asks, repeating a visitor's question. "They want different things."

The French, Italian, and Spanish want imperfection, he says. They want to be able to see where the weaver ran out of a particular color here or made a wrong knot there.

"The Parisians pride themselves on being able to recite the whole personal story of the carpets in their home." He giggles.

Visions of tiny, high-priced boutiques that offer just a few nomadic and tribal pieces float before the eyes. The Paris dealers are not selling rugs, they are selling flights of fancy -- like travel agents. Or it that too much of an exaggeration?

But Mr. Ezzabi is too charming to quibble with.

"The Germans," he continues, eyeing the perfect breakfast table before him but taking only some more bread, "want technical perfection."

In Berlin they like a proper relationship between price and workmanship. And they don't like stories that sometimes sound like excuses for a weaver's mistakes.

The Libyan dealer has been all around the world and clearly knows something of human nature. He lovingly pours a cup of strong black tea. He does not want to offend, he likes everywhere he visits. Should he continue?

Arab, Russian, and Bulgarian buyers share a third taste in carpets, he says. They will spend far more for a single carpet than anyone else. And it will be for a big carpet, to fill a big room.

"Prestige," he says. "They like black and gold colors."

It is impossible to know if Mr. Ezzabi has become rich with these formulas. He is dressed in a simple gray suit of light material that looks Italian but has an accent of hand-tailoring in a distant land. He is trim, with impeccably courteous manners, and middle-aged in way that is impossible to pin down.

What are things like in Libya, one asks. After all, one doesn't meet a Libyan businessman every day.

"I only know Tripoli and the capitals of the world," he replies. I am always traveling."

And the desert, with its starry night sky that shines so bright above the vast dark sands?

"The oil men say it is beautiful."

One can only wonder what kind of carpets he has come to Hanover to find. At the fair, there are carpets from everywhere: Iran, Turkey, China, India, Pakistan. What will he choose?

"I don't know yet," he says. "The last time I came I bought just one carpet."

The carpet was from Mirzazadeh, one of the most famous Persian producers from Tabriz. But it was not a classical carpet, it was a pictorial carpet with a scene from Omar Khayyam.

The cost was over 100,000 euros and the workmanship extraordinary, with some 2,000 knots per square inch (31,000 knots per square decimeter). He took it to Tripoli and put it in the window of his shop in the heart of downtown. Cars crashed into each other on the road when they passed by.

"People suddenly stopped their cars to stare at the carpet," he says. "They admired it because it is as perfect as a picture, as perfect as a color photograph. No one could believe it is just a carpet."

And did he sell it?

"No," he says. "It is excellent advertising for my shop. So, I keep it in the window. And I like it too much myself to sell."

(The photo at the top of this article is of a Mirzazadeh pictorial carpet.)

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