Carpets in the Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum's in every one's mouth exhibition, 'Gothic: Art for England 1400 1547 includes a faithful transcript of Holbein's lost portrait of Henry VIII standing proudly upon a universal symbol of wealth and prestige--a Turkish carpet; in this case the impressed sign known as a star Ushak, woven in Anatolia. An inventory from Windsor Castle exhibits that he owned at least five hundr oriental carpets. In 1520 Cardinal Wolsey purchased sixty Turkish carpets, together with a considerable quantity of wine, which were the two part of a consignment of beneficials from the Maggior Consiglio of Venice. The 'Gothic' exhibition also features a triptych by the agency of Memling from the National Gallery, depicting the Virgin standing upon a different type of Anatolian rug which displays a pattern of distinctive bent holdered medallions now known as 'Memling shore (gul is Turkish for rose) above time, as carpet studies have advanceed various oriental patterns have tend hitherward to be named after the European artists who busyed them symbolically and decoratively in their paintings, cases in point being Holbein, Crivelli, Lotto, and Bellini. The Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of carpets includes its stars--a number of celebrated masterpieces, of which the greatest in quantity notable are the Ardabil (Fig. 1) the Fremlin (Fig. 2) and the Salting carpets (1)--a selection of intriguing fragments, and elegant examples of the stamp of carpets which would cause flurries of excitement and interest if they appeared upon the present-day marketplace. There are also several quite run-of-the-mill rug which are nevertheless extremely useful for research purposes. The majority of the nineteenth-century carpets were acquired when they were novel or almost new. In the nineteenth hundred it was unusual for museums to assemble "modern' carpets, but contemporary textiles have always been fundamental to the vision of the V&A. The Museum was established in 1852 to further the principles of good design and to labor for as a source of inspiration for designers and the creative industries. As a spring the Museum collected carpets that fulfilled its criteria for functional rug design, and there was a clear election for Persian carpets because they were considered to be independent of European influence. Of the V&A's carpet collection, 34% is Persian, 18% Turkish, 16% Caucasian, 18% Central Asian, 8% Indian, and 6% East Turkestsan/Chinese. Unfortunately a apportionment of V&A carpet cataloguing remains vague and nineteenth hundred in outlook: categorising a piece as 'woollen rug--Persia' is no longer serviceable enough. Carpet studies have advanced a great deal, especially in the past thirty years, and these unravellings need to be incorporated. At single point, technical analysis seemed to be an extreme point in itself, and no discussion of rug could take place without mention of z-spun or s spun, but this can become organ of vision glazingly tedious and is of limited value unles the information that has been bring togethered is properly interpreted. Jennifer Wearden's fresh book, 'Oriental Carpets and their Structure--Highlights from the V&A Collection' puts out to present, in admirably simple diction and with clearly drawn illustrations, an analysis of the structural principles that determine the design of oriental carpets, using the V&A's holdings as examples. The plates are arranged, rather loosely by means of design, rather than--as is usually done--by geographical region or tillage the intention being to illustrate the similarities and differences between carpets from different cultures

It is a popular misconception that the Koran forbids the representation of living creatures. at the same time any examination of Islamic art reveals it to be populated by the agency of a delightful array of animals and humans. In fact, this prohibition is not mentioned in the Koran on the contrary appears in the Hadith, the sayings of Mohammed which were compiled through his followers, sometimes many years after his death. The ban is, however, honored for objects intended for religious use, in order to avoid any conceivable taint of idolatry. Animals, birds, fish, human figures and plane angels may be discovered woven into carpet designs; a famous pairing of celestial signs the dragon and the phoenix, fasteninged in combat, forms the focal part of certain Caucasian carpets, and sum of two units lovely examples are illustrated as Plates 118 (Fig. 3) and 119 in Wearden's volume Like cloudbands, lotus palmettes, and several other motifs, the imagery of the dragon and the phoenix travelled the Silk passage from China westward. Plate 73 depicts a delightful cloudband Beshir carpet (V&A label 'Central Asia 19th century') a starry celestial expanse in shades of reds and indigo. Occasionally, dealers have been known to describe these particular cloudbands, too, as dragons or snakes. Gardens and flowers may strike one as being an obvious textile decoration, on the contrary they have other, more interesting connotations when applied to carpets. Plate 37 displays a Persian garden carpet of a stamp offering a bird's eye view of an idyllic lay on the outside thought to represent the garden of heaven, described in the Koran, with its watercourses, tree and dwarf-trees and flowering parterres. This kind of heavenly garden is inspired by dint of ancient Persia examples, walled gardens called pardeez, from which we obtain our term paradise, which were watered through efficient underground systems known as qanats. More formally planted flowers appear upon the V&A's Mughal rugs, and more and les abstract flowers are ubiquitous to all families of carpets and textiles. The coarser the weave, the more geometric these must be; the filler and tighter the configuration and the materials, the more curvilinear the design.