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decorative throw pillows
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decorative throw pillows - In China the weaving of si_lk, which dates from the Shang dynasty, developed into complex patterns including moiré, damask, and brocade. Brocade is characterized by a compact warp-effect background with one or more fillings used in the construction to make the motif or figure. The filling threads, often of gold or silver in the original fabrics of this name, float in embossed or embroidered effects in the figures. Motifs may be of flowers, foliage, scrollwork, pastoral scenes, or other design. Its uses include curtaining, hangings, pill_ows, portieres, evening wraps, and church vestments. Similar techniques are used in the manufacture of brocades made of cotton and synthetic fibers. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the republic of Venice was the hub of Europe's trade with the East and a dominant power in the Mediterranean. The collaboration of bankers, merchants, and fine craftsmen had made the city the center for a number of luxury trades, among them the manufacture of si_lk and fine lace. Lace making in Venice maintained its high quality into the seventeenth century, even after the industry, challenged by competition in France and Spain, had declined in the rest of Italy. In Venice it was sustained by wealthy patrons and the strength of the lace-makers guilds. In buratto work, darning stitches are worked with a needle on fine gauze or net (called lacis) to create the pattern. A form of counted canvas embroidery, it is finer, looser, and more flexible than needlepoint. Buratto was used as border trim on clothing and various draperies. 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. decorative throw pillows 
