St Cross College, Oxford

College Seminar given on 2 November 2000

There is archaeological evidence that the art of weaving knotted-pile carpets was already well developed in western Asia by the middle of the first millennium BC. Rare survivals in Europe suggest that western interest in this art form began at the time of the crusades, however it is safer to say that eastern carpets first came into fashion in Europe when Italian merchants began to import them from Asia Minor in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century the eastern carpet had lost its appeal and French taste became the fashionable norm in Europe. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century European interest in eastern carpets returned and scholars were faced with the task of establishing some kind of classification and chronology for the mass of undocumented material available. The foundations of carpet studies were laid by scholars of the Austro-German school, though the Swedish dealer F.R. Martin must be given credit for many penetrating insights published in his monumental work 'A History of Oriental Carpets before 1800' published in Vienna, 1906-1908. The techniques used to bring order to this field are numerous. Inventories were consulted for information relating to identifiable surviving carpets, historical records and customs documents were examined for mentions of where things were produced, and the accounts of travellers in those times were searched for other clues. A fruitful course of information was the study of European painting, especially Italian painting of the fifteenth century and Dutch paint of the sixteenth. The almost photographic quality of some paintings provides excellent evidence for dating. The value of this source was dramatically established by the recent finding of a carpet with a design previously known only from a depiction in a fifteenth century Italian painting. Scholars had hitherto supposed that the carpet in the painting was a product of the artist's imagination. The evidence available from European sources was refined by scholars of Islamic art who were able to compare carpet designs with the decorative style of other objects of known age and provenance. By these means a broad consensus was established as to which country most of the older carpets had come from and when, more or less, they were made. Many problems nevertheless remained. The next advance was made by adopting a 'botanical' approach to carpet taxonomy. Experience shows that patterns change in response to what a weaver considers fashionable or desirable, whereas craft habits remain relatively stable. Weavers learn their craft in childhood, and, like handwriting, the way they do things remains recognisably the same throughout their life. The line of study that follows from this simple observation involves a detailed structural analysis of the carpet - the spin and ply of the yarns, the type of knot used, the number and configuration of the wefts, details of side and finishes and observations of the way colour is used. This laborious work has turned out to be a valuable tool in separating out clusters of carpets of varying design derived from a single source. Put together with the earlier evidence, the structural approach to the classification of carpets established the existence of several distinct regional styles, though it could not say precisely where these were located. For example, carpets bearing designs in fashion at the Ottoman court in the mid sixteenth century bear the tell-tale technical signs of carpets made by craftsmen trained in Egypt. This, of course, leaves open the question as to whether the carpets were actually made in Egypt, or by Egyptian craftsmen working in turkey - a problem still unresolved. In spite of such difficulties, the technical classification of carpets, the speciality of two independent scholars, Charles Grant-Ellis and May Beattie, put the classification of carpets on a firm scientific footing. May Beattie, it should be noted, left a substantial endowment to Oxford University for the support of carpet studies in the future. White Beattie and Ellis were dissecting carpets, other specialists were refining micro-methods for applying scientific tests to the materials used in making carpets, in particular analysing the dyes, 'fingerprinting' wool and determining fibre age by Carbon-14 measurement. Dye analysis has been particularly useful in identifying carpets with synthetic dyes, first introduced commercially in the 1860s. The finding of synthetic dyes in the original fabric of a carpet provides a terminus post quem and a number of fakes in museum collections have been exposed in this way. This technique has also been valuable in identifying the plant source of certain dyes. For example yellow dyes (as opposed to pigments) are so abundant in nature that they were rarely, if ever, traded. A puzzling group of carpets has been found to employ a yellow dye derived from a plant found in Iran but not in turkey. Efforts to 'fingerprint' wool have so far met with little success, proving too crude to be really useful. Carbon-14 dating has proved a mixed blessing because unequivocal results can only be achieved for specimens more than 350 years old. Furthermore the way the results are presented in terms of statistical probabilities are not generally well understood and tests are often interpreted according to the result a person wishes to see. That said, the recently refined micro-method for C-14 analysis has already added significantly to our knowledge of carpet history.

While our understanding of the chronology of carpets has progressed steadily, the same cannot be said for questions of provenance. There are still major groups of carpets for which no convincing evidence exists as to their source, and even if the country of origin is known, there is no agreement as to where within that country, they were made. There seems to be a deeply felt need among those studying the artifacts of past cultures to give everything a name that includes its date and the place where it was made. In the world of carpets, attributions have been made on the flimsiest of grounds and the frequent repetition of such attributions has tended to crystallise them into accepted historical facts.

Current scholarship seeks to re-examine and take forward the results of earlier work by combining and refining existing methods of enquiry. A careful study of the objects themselves can still teach us a great deal about the craft habits of weavers and the technology they used centuries ago. This line of enquiry reveals that the working model derived from an extrapolation into the past of craft practices known today is built on false assumptions. When this evidence is combined with the results of recent work by scholars in other fields of the arts, it becomes possible to gauge more precisely the socio-economic conditions under which specific carpets were made. This in turn can yield valuable information as to their possible provenance. Meanwhile fresh developments in the field of material science offer new possibilities for applying scientific techniques to the solution of longstanding art historical problems.

Jon Thompson