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

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

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