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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 9
Lesson 1: West Asia- Petra: The rose red city of the Nabataeans
- Petra: Rock-cut façades
- Petra: urban metropolis
- Petra: UNESCO Siq Project
- The Kaaba
- The Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra)
- The Great Mosque (or Masjid-e Jameh) of Isfahan
- Folio from a Qur'an
- Basin (Baptistère de Saint Louis)
- Bahram Gur Fights the Karg (Horned Wolf)
- Introduction to the court carpets of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires
- The Court of Gayumars
- Paradise in miniature, The Court of Kayumars — part 1
- Paradise in miniature, The Court of Kayumars — part 2
- The Ardabil Carpet
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The Ardabil Carpet
By Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Old, beautiful and important
The Ardabil Carpet is exceptional; it is one of the world's oldest Islamic carpets, as well as one of the largest, most beautiful and historically important. It is not only stunning in its own right, but it is bound up with the history of one of the great political dynasties of Iran.
About carpets
Carpets are among the most fundamental of Islamic arts. Portable, typically made of silk and wools, carpets were traded and sold across the Islamic lands and beyond its boundaries to Europe and China. Those from Iran were highly prized. Carpets decorated the floors of mosques, shrines and homes, but they could also be hung on walls of houses to preserve warmth in the winter.
Ardabil and a 14th century Saint
The carpet takes its name from the town of Ardabil in north-west Iran. Ardabil was the home to the shrine of the Sufi saint, Safi al-Din Ardabili, who died in 1334 (Sufism is Islamic mysticism). He was a Sufi leader who trained his followers in Islamic mystic practices. After his death, his following grew and his descendents became increasingly powerful. In 1501 one of his descendents, Shah Isma’il, seized power, united Iran, and established Shi’a Islam as the official religion. The dynasty he founded is known as the Safavids. Their rule, which lasted until 1722, was one of the most important periods for Islamic art, especially for textiles and for manuscripts.
Made for a shrine
This carpet was one of a matching pair that was made for the shrine of Safi al-Din Ardabili when it was enlarged in the late 1530s. Today the Ardabil carpet dominates the main Islamic Art Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, while its twin is in the LA County Museum of Art. The carpets were located side by side in the shrine.
The pile of the carpet is made from wool, rather than silk because it holds dye better. The knot-count of a carpet still directly impacts the value of carpets today; the more knots per square centimeter, the more detailed and elaborate the patterns can be. The dyes used to color the carpet are natural and include pomegranate rind and indigo. Up to ten weavers could have worked on the carpet at any given time. The Ardabil carpet has 340 knots per square inch (5300 knots per ten centimeters square). Today, a commercial rug averages 80-160 knots per square inch, meaning that the Ardabil carpet was highly detailed. Its high knot count allowed for the inclusion of an intricate design and pattern. It is not known whether the carpet was produced in a royal workshop, but there is evidence for court workshop in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Design and Pattern
The rich geometric patterns, vegetative scrolls, floral flourishes, so typical of Islamic art, reach a fever pitch in this remarkable carpet, encouraging the viewer to walk around and around, trying to absorb every detail of design.
That the design of the carpet was not arbitrary or piecemeal, but was well-organized and thoughtful can be seen throughout. Considering the immense size of the carpet—10.51m x 5.34m (34' 6" x 17' 6")—this is impressive. A central golden medallion dominates the carpet; it is surrounded by a ring of multi-colored, detailed ovals. Lamps appear to hang at either end.
The carpet’s border is made up of a frame with a series of cartouches (rectangular-shaped spaces for calligraphy), filled with decoration. The central medallion design is also echoed by the four corner-pieces.
Art historians have debated the meaning of the two lamps that appear to hang from the medallion. They are of different sizes and some scholars have proposed that this was done to create a perspective effect, meaning that both lamps appear to be the same size when one sat next to the smaller lamp. Yet, there is no evidence for the use of this type of perspective in Iran in the 1530s, nor does this explain why the lamps were included. Perhaps they were included to mimic lamps found in mosques and shrines, helping the viewer to look deeply into the carpet below them and then above them, to the ceiling where similar lamps would have hung, creating visual unity within the shrine.
An inscription
The Ardabil Carpet includes a four-line inscription placed at one end. This short poem is vital for understanding who commissioned the carpet and the date of the carpet.
The first three lines of poetry reads:
Except for thy threshold, there is no refuge for me in all the world.
Except for this door there is no resting-place for my head.
The work of the slave of the portal, Maqsud Kashani.
Maqsud was probably the court official charged with producing the carpets. By referring to himself as a slave, he may be presenting himself as a humble servant. The Persian word for a door can be used to denote a shrine or royal court, so this inscription may imply that the royal court patronized the shrine. The carpets would have probably taken four years to make.
The fourth line of the inscription is also important. It provides the date of the carpet, AH 946. The Muslim calendar begins in the year 620 CE when Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina; this year is known as the year of the Hijra or flight (in Latin anno hegirae). AH 946 is equivalent to 1539/40 CE (the lunar Muslim calendar does not exactly match the Gregorian Calendar, used in the west).
The design of the Ardabil carpet and its skillful execution is a testament to the great skill of the artisans at work in north-west Iran in the 1530s.
How the Carpet Came to the V&A
Many great treasures from around the world have legally made their way into the collections of western museums. Many objects were legally purchased by collectors and museums in the 19th and 20th centuries; however, many works of art are still illegally exported and sold. British visitors to the shrine in 1843, noted that at least one carpet was still in situ. Approximately thirty years or so later, an earthquake damaged the shrine, and the carpets were sold off.
Ziegler & Co., a Manchester firm involved in the carpet trade purchased the damaged carpets in Iran and “restored” them in fashion typical of the late nineteenth century. Selections of one carpet were used to repair the other, resulting in a “complete” carpet and one lacking a border. Vincent Robinson and Co, a dealer based in London, put the larger carpet up for sale in 1892 and persuaded the V&A to purchase it for £2000 in March 1893.
The second carpet was secretly sold to an American collector, J.P. Getty, who donated it to the LA County Museum of Art in 1953. Unlike the carpet in the V&A, the carpet in LACMA is incomplete. Throughout the twentieth century, other pieces of the carpets have appeared on the art market for sale.
Essay by Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Additional resources:
Ellis, Charles Grant. Oriental Carpets in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988).
Erdmann, Kurt. Oriental Carpets: An Account of Their History, translated by Charles Grant Ellis (Fishguard, Wales: Crosby, 1976).
Jon Thompson, Carpet Magic (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1983).
Jon Thompson, Carpet Magic (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1983).
Jon Thompson, Milestones in the History of Carpets (Milan: Moshe Tabibnia, 2006).
Want to join the conversation?
- What is indigo? I know it is also the name of a dark blue colour, but how would one make a dye this colour?(9 votes)
- This type of dye is substracted from a plant (Indigofera tinctoria), most probably it originated from India.(10 votes)
- In the 5th paragraph, I have never heard of "pomegrante rind" dye before. When I first read it, my brain translated it to "pomegranate red". :)
What exactly is "pomegrante rind" dye, and what was used to make it?(2 votes)- More than I ever wanted to know about pomegranate rind dye:
http://www.environmentaljournal.org/1-2/ujert-1-2-5.pdf(9 votes)
- Why is this carpet so important?(2 votes)
- If anything I'd say it's important just as is, as a hand-made carpet. Can you imagine how much effort it would take to make a carpet like that? It's a beautiful, enormous piece of art that's been crafted by hand. To weave you basically interlace thread from side to side in several other threads that run up and down. This carpet has so many different colours in different places, you'd have to tie off colours and weave with other threads in very carefully designed sections so the entire thing isn't messed up by a single knot being out of place. The Ardabil carpet has about 25 million knots in total, it has 340 knots per square inch—a commercial rug today has an average of 80-160 knots per square inch. Commercial rugs can and are made with giant machines, in factories, rather than by hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYWlevX7Kw0
That's a video on how woven fabrics are made in factories today, now imagine that process done by people, by hand. But also with several different colours, cutting and tying off single threads to create patterns instead of just dyeing the whole thing. I find it very, very impressive and it's important to acknowledge the roots in which we've come from. Intricate and amazing hand-work like this, I'd say it's important. I can't even fathom what it would be like to make 1/16th of that rug, or how long it'd take.(7 votes)
- what are the formal qualities of this work? other than geometric patterns(3 votes)
- Aside from the lamps, much of the carpet is asymmetrical. Are there any theories as to why this is so?(2 votes)
- I found this article on symmetry in Islamic art. Perhaps you may find it enlightening. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82142303.pdf(2 votes)
- Why was it a pair, in other words, why did they make two exact copies of the same carpet?(2 votes)