Fleet K. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 1, Byzantium to Turkey, 1071-1453

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Figure 8.21 Konya carpet (t

ıem 688) with motif from Y

uan period Chinese

silk damask, c.1300 (Photo Walter B. Denny)

have been produced well into the fourteenth century seems conﬁrmed by

ıem 688 (Fig. 8.21), the pattern of which has been shown to derive from a

type of Y

uan silk damask found in Egyptian tombs dating to c.1300, while one

of the Beys¸ehir fragments with a design of pendant palmettes in staggered

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Art and architecture, 1300–1453

rows turned alternately left and right may even date to the early ﬁfteenth

century.

It is likely that production of Konya-type carpets overlapped chronologically

that of a second type of Turkish carpet, designated by Erdmann the Anatolian

animal carpet. These latter were apparently much admired in the west, to

which they seem to have been exported in large quantities, for representations

of animal carpets had already begun to turn up in the work of Sienese and

Florentine painters in the ﬁrst half of the fourteenth century, where they

appear as coverings on ﬂoors, on the steps of thrones of the Madonna, on

altars and tables, and hanging from balconies and windows. Since one must

assume that the animal carpets would have been in production in Anatolia

for some time before they found their way to Italy, it is probable that carpets

of this sort had their origin no later than the last decades of the thirteenth

century.

The rugs represented in fourteenth- and ﬁfteenth-century Italian, Span-

ish and Netherlandish painting were carefully studied years ago by Wilhelm

von Bode, Ernst K

uhnel and Kurt Erdmann,

and are characterised by ﬁelds

divided into rows of rectangles or squares with bevelled corners, in each of

which is represented abstract and angular animal forms. The rectangles them-

selves are separated from one another by broad borders, the ornamental treat-

ment of which in most paintings is either unrepresented or unintelligible.

Typical fourteenth-century motifs include single birds or quadrupeds such as

lions standing in the ﬁeld rectangles. An example of the former can be seen in

Niccolo di Buonacorso’s Marriage of the Virgin (c.1370) in the National Gallery

in London (Fig. 8.22), while stylised lions are depicted in the ﬁeld squares

of a fourteenth-century Sienese painting of the Annunciation formerly in the

Schlossmuseum in Berlin, as well as in a contemporary painting of the Mar-

riage of the Virgin by Giovanni di Paolo in the Galleria Doria in Rome. Later

fourteenth- and early ﬁfteenth-century paintings depict carpets with ﬁeld pan-

els ﬁlled with pairs of angular birds ﬂanking severely stylised trees as in a

Marriage of the Virgin by Sano di Pietro in the Pinacoteca Vaticana in Rome and

53 For a discussion of the connection between t

ıem 688 and the Y

uan silk damasks from

Egypt, as well as of the Beys¸ehir carpet with pendant palmettes today divided between

the KeirCollection andthe private German collection, see Agnes Geijer,‘Some Thoughts

on the Problems of Early Oriental Carpets’, Ars Orientalis 5 (1963), 82–3.

54 See Kurt Erdmann, ‘Orientalische Tierteppiche auf Bildern des XIV. und XV. Jahrhun-

derts’, Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 50 (1929), 261–98; Erdmann, ‘Neue ori-

entalische Tierteppiche auf abendl

andischen Bildern des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts’,

Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 63 (1941), 121–6; John Mills, Carpets in Pictures

(London, 1975); Mills, ‘Early Animal Carpets in Western Paintings’, Halı 1 (1978), 234–42.

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Figure 8.22 Niccolo di Buonacorso, Marriage of the Virgin (c.1370), National Gallery,

London, with Anatolian animal carpet (Copyright The National Gallery, London)

in a Madonna and Child by Giovanni di Paolo in the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York (41.190.16). In addition, from the early ﬁfteenth century weﬁnd

painted representations of carpets in which pairs of animals are presented side

by side in a single rectangle as in a painting by Fra Angelico entitled Enthroned

Madonna with Saints in the Museo di San Marco in Florence, or alternatively,

in which two animals are shown in combat. The most famous depiction of

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Art and architecture, 1300–1453

this latter theme is to be found in Domenico di Bartolo’s The Wedding of the

Foundlings, a fresco in the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, dating

to between 1440 and 1444. Signiﬁcantly, in some of these depictions of later

carpets the animals represented alternate from panel to panel.

A number of painted representations of Anatolian animal carpets, docu-

ments which are of particular value because many of the paintings can be

dated with some precision, have been catalogued and the authenticity of these

representations has been veriﬁed by reference to fragments of fourteenth-

and ﬁfteenth-century Anatolian animal carpets found at Fustat and today

in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Statens Historiska

Museum in Stockholm and elsewhere. Nonetheless, surviving carpets and

carpet fragments of this type are exceedingly rare. Three animal carpets or

carpet fragments in Turkish museums

with zoomorphic motifs recalling

those of the carpet depicted in a painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints

by the ﬁfteenth-century Catalonian artist Jaume Huguet (Museo de Arte de

Cataluna, Barcelona) are said to belong to this group and have been assigned

a ﬁfteenth-century date, although that attribution has not met with univer-

sal acceptance.

In addition, a recently acquired carpet in the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York (1990.61), with animal motifs similar to those

depicted in a late fourteenth-century Sienese School painting of the Marriage

of the Virgin in the National Gallery in London, has been dated to the fourteenth

century.

However, the two most famous carpets of this type, one from an Ital-

ian, the other from a Swedish church, are to be found in European museums.

The ﬁrst (Fig. 8.23), a fragment purchased for the Berlin Museum by Wilhelm

von Bode in 1890 from a Rome antique dealer and said to come from a church

in central Italy, is surely one of the most widely discussed carpets in the whole

of rug literature. Its ﬁeld is divided into two large rectangles, each contain-

ing an octagon on which a stylised blue dragon and phoenix outlined in red

55 For detail showing the animal carpet of the Berlin Schlossmuseum Annunciation, see

Erdmann, ‘Orientalische Tierteppiche’, Abb. 20; for Giovanni di Paolo’s Marriage of the

Virgin, see ibid., Abb. 23; for Sano di Pietro’s Marriage of the Virgin, see ibid., Abb. 14;

and for Giovanni di Paolo’s Madonna and Child, see M. S. Dimand, Oriental Rugs in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1973), p. 175,ﬁg.143. A detail of the Fra Angelico

Enthroned Madonna with Saints is found in Erdmann, ‘Orientalische Tierteppiche’, Abb.

26; of the Domenico di Bartolo, Wedding of the Foundlings, ibid., Abb. 33.

56 t

ıem 566, Istanbul Vakıﬂar Halı M

uzesi, no. 1036, Konya Mevlana M

uzesi, no. 841.

57 Erdmann, Seven Hundred Years,p.49, agrees; Dimand, Oriental Rugs,p.176, does not;

Richard Ettinghausen, ‘New Light on Early Animal Carpets’, in Aus der Welt der Islami-

schen Kunst. Festschrift f

ur Ernst K

uhnel (Berlin, 1959), p. 112, says middle or late ﬁfteenth

century.

58 See Mackie, ‘An Early Animal Rug’, pp. 154–5; also Erdmann, ‘Orientalische Tiertep-

piche’, Abb. 22.

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Figure 8.23 Animal carpet with struggling dragon and phoenix, c.1400,

Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Photo Walter B. Denny)

struggleagainst a yellowground.Themotif has origins in Chinese art and bears

a striking resemblance to that on the carpet depicted by Domenico di Bartolo

in Siena (referred to above), suggesting an early ﬁfteenth-century date. The

second carpet, known as the Marby Rug (Statens Historiska Museum 17786),

was discovered by C. J. Lamm in a church in Marby in J

amtland, western

Sweden, and is characterised by an overall ﬁeld composition similar to that of

334

Art and architecture, 1300–1453

the Berlin carpet but with confronting cocks placed symmetrically on either

side of a stylised tree, again against a yellow ground.

Woven in symmetrical ‘Turkish’ knots, Erdmann saw the Anatolian animal

carpets as being related in terms of structure, colour range and wool qual-

ity to later Bergama carpets and hence localised their production to western

Anatolia in the period between the end of the thirteenth and the middle of the

ﬁfteenth century. This was a region which until only recently had been under

Byzantine rule, and it is possible therefore that some of the zoomorphic motifs

found on the carpets were inﬂuenced by Byzantine textile design, although

it is well established that silks with animal patterns had long been produced

in the Islamic Near East where they were held in high regard for several cen-

turies. From western Anatolia, with close commercial links to Genoa and

Venice, animal carpets could have found their way to Italy without difﬁculty.

Curiously, no examples of animal carpets with ﬁeld compositions of the sort

encountered in the Berlin and Stockholm rugs or depicted in the majority of

Italian painted representations – that is, one or more stylised animals in square

or rectangular ﬁeld compartments – has been preserved in Anatolia itself, sug-

gesting that these carpets may have been more popular in the west than in

the land of their origin, where geometric and foliate forms may have been

favoured. Indeed, it has even been suggested that Anatolian animal carpets

were made up primarily for export and hence reﬂect a western rather than a

Turkish taste. It should be noted, however, that depictions of animal carpets

with stylised beasts in octagonal frames not unlike the Berlin and Marby rugs

also appear in fourteenth-century Ilkhanid book illustration, as for instance in

the painting of Zahhak Enthroned, today in the Freer Gallery of Art in Wash-

ington, DC, from the mid-fourteenth-century Great Mongol Shahname, and

that a well-known fragment of a ﬁeld octagon containing a stylised bird found

today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (27.170.89) came from

Fustat.

Finally, there is evidence that already in the fourteenth century two other

types of rug were being woven in Anatolia alongside the Konya carpets and

animal carpets. The ﬁrst of these is known today from a surviving piece from

Beys¸ehir (Riefstahl’s Beys¸ehir XII, today in the Mevlana M

uzesi, Konya), dated

to the early ﬁfteenth century, as well as from fragments of similar carpets

recovered from Fustat, while the second is documented by a handful of repre-

sentations in Italian painting of the second half of the fourteenth century. These

latter, including a pair of frescos of the School of Giotto, one at Assisi and the

other in Santo Spirito in Prato, dating to the ﬁrst half of the fourteenth century

and a third fresco of the Annunciation of the Virgin in the church of Santa Maria

335

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Nouvella in Florence from the end of the fourteenth century, depict carpets

characterised by a division of the ﬁeld into rectangles in a manner similar to the

animal carpets, but different from the latter in that the rectangles are ﬁlled with

geometric patterns rather than with zoomorphic motifs.

The Beys¸ehir carpet

and Fustat fragments, on the other hand, have ﬁelds patterned with staggered

rows of geometric and geometricised ﬂoriate motifs on a blue ground (Fig.

8.24). As such they should be seen as precursors of the later so-called Holbein

carpets of Bergama and Us¸ak of the mid-ﬁfteenth to late sixteenth century.

That such carpets are unrecorded in European painting and, in so far as is

known, are not preserved in any European collection suggests that, just as the

zoomorphic carpets may well have been made for export, the geometric rugs

were possibly manufactured for a domestic market. Perversely, if such is the

case, the nature of the evidence has ensured that the carpets made for a foreign

taste are today better known than those fashioned for local consumption.

Ceramics

The common ware glazed pottery types associated with the Seljuk period

in Anatolia continued to be produced into the fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth

centuries.

Finds at

Iznik, for example, including sgrafﬁto wares, slip painted

earthenwares covered with clear as well as turquoise or brown glaze, and black

underglaze painted wares under a turquoise glaze, all types known from Kale-

hisar, Beys¸ehir and elsewhere in Anatolia, suggest that the techniques for their

production had been introduced into Bithynia by the Ottomans in the early

fourteenth century. In addition to these, a new, distinctively Turkish glazed

common pottery makes its appearance in the fourteenth century. Known as

‘Miletus ware’, it is characterised by a red or buff earthenware body covered by

a white slip painted in cobalt blue, turquoise, green, purple and black usually

under a clear lead glaze. Motifs range from simple stem, leaf and ﬂower motifs

to geometric patterns and naturalistic bird forms set in leafy ﬁelds. Because

59 For the Assisi and Prato frescos, see Kurt Erdmann, Oriental Carpets: an Account of their

History, tr. Charles Grant Ellis (Fishguard, 1976), ﬁgs. 17, 18; for the fresco in Santa Maria

Nouvella, Florence, see Erdmann, History,ﬁg.25.

60 For early Ottoman ceramics see John Carswell, ‘Six Tiles’, in Islamic Artin the Metropolitan

Museumof Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (New York, 1972), pp. 99–124 (on Master of Tabriz

tiles of Muradiye and the tomb of Sultan Cem plus Syrian analogies); Carswell and

Dowsett, ‘Ceramics’, in Tulips, Arabesques and Turbans: Decorative Arts from the Ottoman

Empire, ed. Yanni Petsopoulos (New York, 1982), pp. 73–114; Arthur Lane, ‘The Ottoman

Pottery of Iznik’, Ars Orientalis 2 (1957), 247–81; Rudolf M. Riefstahl, ‘Early Turkish Tile

Revetments in Edirne’, Ars Islamica 4 (1937), 249–81; Tahsin

Oz, Turkish Ceramics (Ankara,

n.d.); Meinecke, Fayencedekorationen; Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby,

Iznik: the Pottery

of Ottoman Turkey (London and New York, 1989), pp. 82–9.

336

Art and architecture, 1300–1453

Figure 8.24 Proto-Holbein carpet from Beys¸ehir (Mevlana

uzesi, Konya, no. 841) (Photo Walter B. Denny)

337

howard crane

fragments of this pottery were ﬁrst found on the islands of the Aegean, the

earliest published accounts referred to it as ‘Island Ware’. Quantities of it

were also found by Th. Weigand in the course of his excavations at Miletus

(Balat) and, given that area’s long history as a centre for the production of

pottery, it was assumed to be a local product despite the fact that no kilns were

found with which its manufacture could be associated. In fact, ‘Miletus wares’

have subsequently turned up at many sites, not only in Anatolia but also in

the southern Balkans, including Afyon, Amasya, Antalya, Athens, Bergama,

Bursa, Edirne, Istanbul, Karac¸ahisar, Konya, Malatya, Sardis, Selc¸uk, Seyitgazi,

Silifke and Yalova, and more signiﬁcantly, kilns and wasters have been found

at K

utahya, at Akcaalan near Ezine in the Troad, and at

Iznik. The

Iznik kilns,

excavated by Oktay Aslanapa in the 1960s, make clear the fact that the latter

town, in particular, was an important centre for the production of ‘Miletus

ware’. It must be assumed, nonetheless, that common wares of this sort were

produced over a wide area in western and central Anatolia and perhaps the

south-eastern Balkans as well.

Although the various sub-groupings of ‘Miletus wares’ await systematic

classiﬁcation, it is nonetheless clear that the term covers a range of stylistic and

technical types and undoubtedly refers to a lengthy production. Its appearance

in post-conquest contexts in Istanbul establishes the fact that it continued in

use into the early decades of the sixteenth century, but the date of its initial

production remains ill deﬁned. In terms of decoration, the geometric and

radial designs of the ‘Miletus wares’ suggest possible links with fourteenth-

and ﬁfteenth-century Syrian pottery, while some of the plant motifs seem

to have links to fourteenth-century Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. It is

signiﬁcant that Byzantine inﬂuence seems to be entirelyabsent from its painted

decoration. ‘Miletus ware’ would thus appear to be an unsophisticated and

mass-produced pottery of a local west Anatolian ceramic industry ranging in

date from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. It is important

to note, however, that neither in technique nor in style does this pottery have

anything in common with the luxury frit wares, which begin to be produced

Iznik under court patronage from the latter half of the ﬁfteenth century.

61 For sgrafﬁto, slip painted earthenwares and black underglaze painted wares from

Iznik,

see OktayAslanapa, ‘

Iznik Kazılarda Ele Gec¸en Keramikler veC¸ ini Fırınları’, T

urk San’atı

Tarihi Aras¸tırma ve

Incelemeleri, vol. II, ed. Behc¸et

Unsal and Nejat Diyarbekirli (Istanbul,

1969), Lev. i/, 1, 2; Aslanapa, Anadolu’da T

urk C¸ini ve Keramik Sanatı (Istanbul, 1965), Lev.

18, 19. For ‘Miletus ware’ see ibid., Lev. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 23–31.

62 For ‘Miletus wares’, F. Sarre, ‘Die Keramik der islamischen Zeit von Milet’, in Das Islami-

sche Milet, ed. Wulzinger et al.,pp.109–88; Oktay Aslanapa, T

urkische Fliesen und Keramik

in Anatolien (Istanbul, 1965); Aslanapa, ‘Pottery and Kilns from the Iznik Excavations’,

338

Art and architecture, 1300–1453

Figure 8.25 Mihrab, Ulu Cami of Birgi, 712/1312–13 (Bo

gazic¸i University,

Aptullah Kuran Archive)

The use of faience as architectural decoration in the Anatolian emirates,

while continuing a Seljuk tradition, is with the exception of a handful of

monuments far less ambitious than in the preceding century. As can be seen

from the mihrab of the Ulu Cami of Birgi (712/1312–13) (Fig. 8.25), in terms

in Forschungen zur Kunst Asiens: In Memoriam Kurt Erdmann (Istanbul, 1969), pp. 140–6;

Aslanapa, T

urk Sanatı, 2 vols. (1969), ii,pp.62–73; M. Paker, ‘Anadolu Beylikler Devri

Keramik Sanatı’, STY 1 (1964–5), 155–66.

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