Turkish rugs occupy a special position within the history of the rugs and carpets. During the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, they were the decorative rug par excellence, dominating the market in Europe and even in Middle East itself. As early as the late thirteenth century the famous traveler Marco Polo commented on the high esteem in which Turkish carpets were held.[1] Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the great master painters of Europe relied upon Turkish rugs as background props that could immediately suggest the status and prestige of the various personages they depicted. Only in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did Persian rugs and carpets of the Safavid period attain the standing they now occupy as the pre-eminent type of ‘classical’ oriental carpet, those produced with sophisticated urban designs of complex, curvilinear arabesque floral vinescrolls, grand ‘palmettes,’ and finely wrought minor floral detail.
But already by about 1500 or so, Ottoman Turkish weavers had begun to compete with such classical Persian carpets, especially in the courtly productions now attributed to the town of Ushak in western Turkey. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ushak produced a remarkable range of such classical floral carpets in response to those of Safavid Persia, first the ‘Star Ushak’ type with complex radial arabesque medallions of variable form, and then the so-called ‘Medallion Ushaks,’ with their large circular or oval central medallions and multi-lobed corner pieces.[1] The coloration of Ushaks tended overwhelmingly to shades of rich red and blue, with additional effects of vibrant yellow, green, and ivory. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, their design evolved toward a sort of Persian mina khani design, an allover trellis pattern of sweeping vinescrolls forming diamond or rhombus shapes linked vertically and horizontally. Set within the intervening spaces of this trellis there were usually grand, complex rounded arabesque palmettes. The production of this latter type of design seems to have shifted over time to various other western Turkish localities, although they were generally labeled ‘Smyrna’ or ‘Izmir’ carpets, after the town from which they were primarily exported.[2]
With its grand sweeping mina khani design the example here appears at first to belong to the so-called Smyrna type. It features an elaborate trellis of soft blue arranged in alternating horizontal rows – some with ruffled sickle leaves arranged in a flatter diamond shape surrounding small dark blue rosettes, and others with the soft blue vinescrolls arranged in a taller diamond-shaped form enclosing blue-ground quatrefoils. In the intervening spaces within the mina khani trellis, elaborate rounded palmettes outlined in deep blue contrast effectively with the surrounding red ground of the field. The floral detail within these palmettes as well as the linking vine forms are rendered in yellow, green and ivory, in the true Ushak fashion. The main border consists of rounded palmettes and rosettes arranged in radial sprays. Their components, rendered in soft blue and red against a dark blue ground, reverse the tonality of the field design, while its somewhat smaller scale echoes this contrast. Narrow minor borders with small flowers on a soft blue ground with rich yellow guard stripes affirm this contrast further.
The palatial scale and sheer monumentality of the design itself on this carpet can only be appreciated at firsthand. Indeed, such scale might at first seem to place it carpet within the Smyrna production of the eighteenth century, which generally produced carpets of considerable size. But a good number of the later Ushak medallion carpets were also made on this palatial scale, and some display the very same main border design of repeating rounded palmettes and rosettes arranged radially.[3] This, as well as the carpet’s stunning, saturated red and yellow, along with its finer weave (80 knots per square inch), all seem much more in keeping with classic Ushak production, rather than the coarser carpets of so-called Smyrna type. The carpet is therefore likely to be a rare, transitional piece of relatively early eighteenth-century date, perhaps the last of the original, true Ushaks that inspired very earliest of the Smyrna series. Given such great age, the carpet is in incredibly good condition despite some evidence of wear – a magnificent survival of a lost age of splendor, luxury, and refinement.