decorative pillows

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decorative pillows - Stitched onto velvet, the gauze backing would sink into the pile and disappear from view, leaving the impression that the embroidered pattern was floating on the surface of the fabric. Bright colors and a vase-and-niche motif reveal a strong Turkish influence in the ten repeats of pattern in this length of buratto. It is still stitched to its original backing of blue paper, which protected the gauze from distortion when handled or rolled. Like the ancient Egyptians and the Chinese, pre-Columbian peoples interred their dead with f_urnishings for the afterlife. In coastal Peru's dry climate ancient textiles have survived in remarkable numbers, emerging from their long darkness with astonishing freshness of color. Some date to two thousand years before Spanish contact. Mantles, turbans, ponchos, shirts, and belts were wrapped in as many as four layers around the body to form a conical mummy bundle; a single burial might include as many as twenty pieces of clothing. This mantle, a precious early example of the weaver's craft, was found in the necropolis at Paracas on the south coast of Peru. Its vivid coloration is typical, as is its composition of native alpaca wool woven on cotton warps. Weaving in Peru goes back to about 2000 b. c. and displays considerable sophistication and technical expertise. This mantle is composed of two longitudinal pieces and the borders, which have been sewn together and then embroidered with stitches, such as stem and buttonhole, still used today in hand sewing. The design includes motifs typical of Paracas textiles: reversed interlocking figures, often with frontal heads, and composite animals. Here the double-headed serpent of the borders has a cat's head; another feline creature provides a secondary motif. These catlike creatures are probably jaguars, shamanic animals of ancient mythological lineage and a frequently used motif in pre-Columbian textiles. Great garden builders as well as warriors, certain Persian rulers were known to have had outstanding plant collections, particularly of the exotic tulip. They often commissioned arts that featured images of the flowers they grew and prized. As a result Persian manuscripts and textiles reveal a catalogue of Near Eastern plants; the lost gardens of Safavid Iran have been reconstructed in part from these works. Carnations or pinks, the large upright standards of the iris, and the cupped petals of tulips are identifiable in this textile. This particular design is typical of Persian art of the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars have suggested that it was influenced by the work of Shafi-i-Abbasi, a court painter who visited Mughal India and was inspired there by court interest in botanical illustration. He produced a number of naturalistic drawings for textiles, which seem to have been widely influential in Iran. Although the flower forms are natural, there is an element of artifice and restraint in the repeating vine pattern, which sprouts such disparate blooms, and the birds, which perch at such regular intervals. This balance between abstraction and naturalism was a permissible way to deal with Muslim theological opposition to the depiction of living forms. The weaving of this brocaded compound twill is exceptional in its fineness and detail. Prized in the Near East and coveted in the West, these fabrics found their way into European royal collections and churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the world's most

famous artifacts, the Ardabil carpet and its mate in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, are products of the great floweri_ng of the arts, particularly those of textile and the book, under the Safavid rulers of Iran. The site of Ardabil in northwest Iran was sacred to these Shiite rulers; tradition holds that both carpets were presented to the shrine there as royal gifts, and current scholarship confirms this. Magnificent gifts to this shrine—an entire library of sacred and secular Islamic texts, a treasure of Ming dynasty porcelain, as well as lamps, si_lk brocades, and candlesticks confirm the esteem in which these princes held it. Both versions of the carpet are signed and dated early in the reign of Shah Tahmasp I, a renowned patron of the arts, and were probably made in Tabriz, a site of royal textile manufacturi_ng (r. 1524 - 1578). This carpet contains 35,000,000 knots and probably took eight to ten craftsmen more than three years to complete. The carpet's subtle design, dominated by a large central medallion, is typical of Tabriz work. The overall scheme seems largely abstract, but individual motifs have figural sources. Sixteen ogival shapes surround the central sunburst medallion, and a pair of mosque lamps in the vertical axis flank the design. The undulating border forms derive from Chinese cloud-band motifs. Over the shimmeri_ng indigo surface is a meticulously balanced, if botanically improbable, meander of blossom-laden vines. The blossoms are a typical Sasanian lotus palmette crossed with a Chinese peony, some in full bloom and others barely emerging from buds. At the center of the great medallion is a roundel shaped like a geometrical pool of the kind that still exists in the Islamic gardens of the Alhambra in Spain. Such pools were essential to both the design and concept of Persian gardens, an art form that evoked the pleasures of paradise for the Muslim believer. Identical inscriptions are woven into each of the carpets: "Except for thy haven, there is no refuge for me in this world: / Other than here, there is no place for my head. / Work of a servant of the court, Maqsud of Kashan, 946. " This evocation of a heavenly refuge is particularly appropriate for a work of art that recalls the abundance and fertility of the garden, the most powerful symbol of physical and spiritual peace in the Muslim world. This dalmatic is part of a rare complete set of ecclesiastical vestments surviving the troubled period of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Holland. Its preservation and that of its companion pieces today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are of special interest because the robes share a linked symbolism and can be dated to 1570 from an inscription on one of the Metropolitan garments. "We are bent, not broken by the waves", reads the motto woven on the banderoles of the design, a particularly appropriate sentiment for Dutch Catholics. From the 1560s they had endured Protestant hostility against the church and its clergy, a situation prevailing in Utrecht until 1580, when Roman Catholic public worship was finally suppressed. This robe bears the coats of arms of the Van Der Geer and Van Culenborch families of Utrecht, probably confirming that the set was commissioned for use in a private chapel, a timely decision in light of events. The biblical imagery is also fitting; the bulrushes rising above the waves allude both to the inscription and to Moses, who led the Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt.

decorative pillows