BURSA, OTTOMAN TURKEY, 17TH CENTURY

According to Nurhan Atasoy this design of repeating serrated palmettes, decorated with a myriad of smaller floral forms, was one of the most popular categories of design among the velvet weavers of Bursa (Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, Louise W. Mackie and Hülya Tezcan, Ipek, The Crescent and the Rose, Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets, London and Istanbul, 2001, p.314). Occasionally the motif was confined within an ogival lattice, but the free-floating format, like ours, seems to have been preferred. A very similar length, catalogued as first two-thirds of the 17th century is in the Topkapi Palace Museum (inv.no.13/1444). Another, catalogued as first half 17th century and woven into a Russian Orthadox dalmatic (sakkos) is in the Kremlin Armoury Museum in Moscow (inv.no.TK-2293; both published in Atasoy, Denny, Mackie and Tezan, op.cit., nos.338 and 341, pp.415-15). A yastik of similar design, catalogued as circa 1600, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Maryam D. Ekhtiar, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby and Navina Najat Haidar, Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011, no.213, p.325).