Weiner Mihályné szerk.: Az Iparművészeti Múzeum Évkönyvei 12. (Budapest, 1970)
IPARMŰVÉSZETI MÚZEUM — MUSÉE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS - Egyed, Edit: On a Textile from the Safavid Period
art — by known and unknown artists. The examination including regions and periods allows only the conclusion to draw that the representations of animal scene visible on our textile have a long past and a great tradition. The presentation of a "carpet with animal'' from the beginning of the 16th c. belonging to the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts should be the first in the review of the contemporary analogies. In the red grounded right side of the senne knotted carpet there are several animal scenes in a tangle of different types of stylized pomegranates and palmettes; there are not animals fighting each other but animals chasing one another. A spotted gueparde runs after a spotted artiodactyl. Beside the above mentioned animals some other kinds of running animals appear on the carpet. The colours used are different shades of red, white, blue and green. The publications hitherto put the place of its production to N. W. Persia, and it is dated to the mid 16th century. Though moving figures running one after the otther and not fighting animals are visible on the carpet, the drawing of this carpet fragment is particularly connected to the design of our textile. According to our observation several groups can be differentiated in the scenes appearing on textiles. In one of the types the movement of the animals is not so dynamic, the parts of the body are not so elaborated (first of all it is meant here that e.g. the representations of ribs are not emphasised with the same care in all of the cases), moreover the fight scenes of animals also disappear from the products of certain workshops, the designer artists represent frightened animals in running. Some time another carpet fragment (the Hatvány carpet 16 ) also belonged to a Hungarian collection — unfortunately it disappeared during the second World War — on which beside the central field scenes of animal fights also appear. The characteristics of the representations on the Hatvány carpet are already nearer to the ornamentation of our coat. In the medallions of the Kashan carpet from the late 16th century there are also representations of animal fights 17 , which show very close relationship to those of our coat (fig. 3.). Another carpet, which in the publication on it appears to be from Kirman, 18 can also be considered as an analogy. Again another carpet defined as from Kirman can be included here, on which beside the animals human figures also are visible 19 . Surveying the material at our disposal, though we can observe a rather frequent appearance of animal fight scenes on textiles from Kirmian, but there is some restrain in their dynamism, movement, and the animals face pairs of animals different from those above and the division by plants is also different from our piece. Studying also the representations of the Kirman carpets with animals, we cannot get nearer to defining the place of production of our coat. The design lfi Pope, A. V.: History of Persian Art. Oxford, 1938. 17 Pope: op. cit. p. 1195. 18 Pope: op. cit. p. 1210. w Pope: op. cit. p. 1213.
