Islamic art is a part of Islamic culture and encompasses the visual arts produced since the 7th century CE by people who lived within territories inhabited or ruled by Muslim populations. Referring to characteristic traditions across a wide range of lands, periods, and genres, Islamic art is a concept used first by Western art historians in the late 19th century. Public Islamic art is traditionally non-representational, except for the widespread use of plant forms, usually in varieties of the spiralling arabesque. These are often combined with Islamic calligraphy, geometric patterns in styles that are typically found in a wide variety of media, from small objects in ceramic or metalwork to large decorative schemes in tiling on the outside and inside of large buildings, including mosques. Other forms of Islamic art include Islamic miniature painting, artefacts like Islamic glass or pottery, and textile arts, such as carpets and embroidery.
A Persian carpet or Persian rug, also known as Iranian carpet, is a heavy textile made for a wide variety of utilitarian and symbolic purposes and produced in Iran, for home use, local sale, and export. Carpet weaving is an essential part of Persian culture and Iranian art. Within the group of Oriental rugs produced by the countries of the "rug belt", the Persian carpet stands out by the variety and elaborateness of its manifold designs.
Uşak is a city in the interior part of the Aegean Region of Turkey. It is the seat of Uşak Province and Uşak District. Its population is 236,366 (2022).
Uşak carpets, Ushak carpets or Oushak Carpets are Turkish carpets that use a particular family of designs, called by convention after the city of Uşak, Turkey – one of the larger towns in Western Anatolia, which was a major center of rug production from the early days of the Ottoman Empire, into the early 20th century.
An oriental rug is a heavy textile made for a wide variety of utilitarian and symbolic purposes and produced in "Oriental countries" for home use, local sale, and export.
In art and iconography, a motif is an element of an image. The term can be used both of figurative and narrative art, and ornament and geometrical art. A motif may be repeated in a pattern or design, often many times, or may just occur once in a work.
Bergama Carpet refers to handwoven Turkish carpets, made in the Bergama district in the Izmir Province of northwest Turkey. As a market place for the surrounding villages, the name of Bergama is used as a trade name to define the provenience.
Anatolian rug is a term of convenience, commonly used today to denote rugs and carpets woven in Anatolia and its adjacent regions. Geographically, its area of production can be compared to the territories which were historically dominated by the Ottoman Empire. It denotes a knotted, pile-woven floor or wall covering which is produced for home use, local sale, and export. Together with the flat-woven kilim, Anatolian rugs represent an essential part of the regional culture, which is officially understood as the Culture of Turkey today, and derives from the ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism of one of the most ancient centres of human civilisation.
A Lotto carpet is a hand-knotted, patterned Turkish carpet that was produced primarily during the 16th and 17th centuries along the Aegean coast of Anatolia, Turkey, although it was also copied in various parts of Europe. It is characterized by a lacy arabesque, usually in yellow on a red ground, often with blue details. The name "Lotto carpet" refers to the inclusion of carpets with this pattern in paintings by the 16th-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, although they appear in many earlier Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting.
Carpets of Middle-Eastern origin, either from Anatolia, Persia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Levant, the Mamluk state of Egypt or Northern Africa, were used as decorative features in Western European paintings from the 14th century onwards. More depictions of Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting survive than actual carpets contemporary with these paintings. Few Middle-Eastern carpets produced before the 17th century remain, though the number of these known has increased in recent decades. Therefore, comparative art-historical research has from its onset in the late 19th century relied on carpets represented in datable European paintings.
In 1292, Marco Polo was the first to make mention of the Konya carpets in writing when he called them the most beautiful in the world. Konya carpets are named for the region in which they were made. Renamed from the Greek “Iconium” when the Seljuk Sultans of Rum made it their capital, Konya is one of the largest, oldest and continuously occupied cities in Asia Minor. When Polo wrote of the Konyas, he had probably seen them in manufactories that were attached to the Seljuk courts. In the early 20th century, large carpets were found in the Alaadin Mosque in Konya; they are now housed in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. Scholars and collectors alike, primarily for their bold tribal designs and magnificent color combinations not to mention their rarity, covet Konya rugs.
Quba rugs and carpets are named for a town that is located in Azerbaijan Republic not far from the Caspian Sea; therefore, making Kubas a sub-division of Caucasian carpets. 1 Kuba is at once a city and an area that was formerly a Khanate of Azerbaijan.2 Within the Kuba genre itself, there exist many subdivisions including: Alpan-Kuba, Karagashli, Konaghend, Chi Chi, Perepedil, Seychour and Zejwa.3
A gul is a medallion-like design element typical of traditional hand-woven carpets from Central and West Asia. In Turkmen weavings they are often repeated to form the pattern in the main field.
Ganja rugs or Geunge rugs are a category of Caucasian rug from the town of Gəncə, Azerbaijan, also written Geunge, Gendje or Ganja. Gəncə is located between the weavings areas of Karabagh, Kazakh and Shirvan and it also acted as a marketing centre for weaving from those surrounding areas.
Kurt Erdmann was a German art historian who specialized in Sasanian and Islamic Art. He is best known for his scientific work on the history of the Oriental rug, which he established as a subspecialty within his discipline. From 1958 to 1964, Erdmann served as the director of the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. He was one of the protagonists of the "Berlin School" of Islamic art history.
The name Transylvanian rug is used as a term of convenience to denote a cultural heritage of 15th–17th century Islamic rugs, mainly of Ottoman origin, which have been preserved in Transylvanian Protestant churches. The corpus of Transylvanian rugs constitutes one of the largest collections of Ottoman Anatolian rugs outside the Islamic world.
Anatolian animal carpets represent a special type of pile-woven carpet, woven in the geographical region of Anatolia during the Seljuq and early Ottoman period, corresponding to the 14th–16th century. Very few animal-style carpets still exist today, and most of them are in a fragmentary state. Animal carpets were frequently depicted by Western European painters of the 14th–16th century. By comparison of the few surviving carpets with their painted counterparts, these paintings helped to establish a timeline of their production, and support our knowledge about the early Turkish carpet.
Many motifs are used in traditional kilims, handmade flat-woven rugs, each with many variations. In Turkish Anatolia in particular, village women wove themes significant for their lives into their rugs, whether before marriage or during married life. Some motifs represent desires, such as for happiness and children; others, for protection against threats such as wolves and scorpions, or against the evil eye. These motifs were often combined when woven into patterns on kilims. With the fading of tribal and village cultures in the 20th century, the meanings of kilim patterns have also faded.
Ernst Wasmuth Verlag GmbH & Co. is a publisher based in Tübingen, in southern Germany. The themes of architecture, archaeology, art and design are the key topics of the publishing house, which was established in Berlin in 1872.
Many studies have been conducted on Mamluk carpets, but scholars have not come to a consensus as to when or where they were made. Production of surviving Mamluk carpets started from the second half of the fifteenth century until the middle of the sixteenth century, and continued even after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. The group of carpets produced in this period were initially called "Damascene" carpets after their attribution to Damascus, Syria. However, a Cairene origin was established after some fragments of carpets in this style were unearthed in Fustat. Furthermore, there are several eyewitness accounts by travelers placing a center of carpet production in Cairo.
Verrocchio's Madonna with Saint John the Baptist and Donatus 1475-1483.
Master of Saint Giles, Mass of Saint Giles , c. 1500, with a Type III Holbein carpet.
French ambassador to England Jean de Dinteville in "The Ambassadors" , by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. This is a "large-pattern Holbein", Type III.
