OTTOMAN EMBROIDERY

Maltzahn

Detlef

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ranged far beyond the preference of traditional embroiderers for offset rows of motifs derived from drawloom textiles. In a sense they were freer and more creative in their use of borrowed designs. It is also clear that our group, like traditional embroidery, was not created in just one set of circumstances. Although all are relatively free in their drawing compared to court workshop pieces, one of our medallion design embroideries ( XI ) clearly has a more ‘rustic’ appearance than the other ( IV ). In other examples the care and skill of the drawing of similar motifs varies widely. We saw above how tiger stripes are drawn with sinuous sophistication in one instance ( II ), yet are barely recognisable in another ( III ). Clouds are drawn with

IX .Below: Three Balls on Waves, Ottoman embroidered panel. Silk on silk, o.62 x 0.81m (2'0" x 2'8"). Courtesy Rippon Boswell, Wiesbaden

11. Left: Çintamani design wool carpet (detail), possibly Selendi, west Anatolia, late 16thearly 17th century. The Textile Museum, Washington DC, 1976.10.1

12. Right: Ottoman çintamanidesign çatma (silk and metal thread velvet) panel (detail), Turkey, 16th century. David Collection, Copenhagen, 25/1962

great fidelity in one border ( I ), while stylised leaves are crudely represented in an analogous border ( X ). We have no evidence for which Ottoman commercial centre could be the source of these pieces, even if some candidates seem more likely than others. For silk textiles, Rogers cites the production of velvets and brocades at Aleppo, Amasya, Caffa, Mardin, and on Chios, but notes that we have no way of distinguishing what was made where. 19 Christian Erber cites 16 different urban centres, both in Anatolia and elsewhere in the empire, where public workshops produced embroideries. 20

An Ottoman provincial centre such as Caffa in the Crimea could certainly have provided the necessary economic and artistic conditions to create our group. Sultan Selim I and his son Süleyman the Magnificent were each in turn apprentice governors in Caffa, which, according to Brian Williams, was “a frontier microcosm of the Sultan’s multi-ethnic capital [Istanbul] and the main economic center for trade between the peoples of the northern Black Sea and Anatolia… the Sultans embellished this city with numerous mosques… public baths, fountains, bazaars, caravanserais, and medreses”. 21 Few of these buildings are still standing and movements of population have left little evidence of the material
culture of Caffa in the 16th and 17th centuries. 22

In fact there were various Ottoman centres of artistic production capable of producing our embroideries. The problem is that we have no evidence for where this particular group was made, nor of a specific patron. Sending a son, brother or cousin of the Sultan to govern a provincial centre was a common means of limiting the influence of potential political rivals and such a high-born exile would have the financial resources and access to the high-style artistic products necessary to inspire a local embroidery production to use a metropolitan repertoire. In spite of the design parallels documented above, we cannot be sure of the dating of our group. Designs from the golden age of Ottoman art continued in use into the 18th and 19th centuries in various media. Indeed, the 18th century even saw revivalist movements in Ottoman art; one such was the establishment of a tile manufactory in Istanbul, prompted by the decline of the great Iznikbased production. Wherever our embroideries were made, changing economic and political circumstances must eventually have brought access to professional draughtsmen and fashionable designs to an end. Subsequent production would most likely have depended on existing embroideries or the makers’ memories of them as models. With no professional artist to do the drawing, the embroiderers’ imaginations came more to the fore. Subsequent attempts could be imaginative or clumsy depending on the individual maker. Fortunately we often see happy results. The lack of provenance for our group, their absence from museum and private collections and their tendency to feature elements of the appealing çintamanidesign, oblige us to ask whether they might in fact be modern products intended to

X . Below right: Lattice,Ottoman embroidered panel. Silk on silk, o.64 x 0.89m (2'1" x 2'11"). Private collection

13. Right: Detail of a harem scene fromthe Codex Vindobonensisof ca. 1590, showing a çintamani lattice wall-hanging very similar to ( X ). Osterreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. After Sumru Belger Krody, Flowers of Silk & Gold, Four Centuries of Ottoman Embroidery, Washington 2000, p.72

StephenPetegorsky

OTTOMAN EMBROIDERY

carpet in Philadelphia (Charles Grant Ellis, Oriental Carpets in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988. pl.17). The tiger stripe lattice also appears in the arts of the book, as in a book cover in Ùerare Yetkin, Historical Turkish Carpets, Istanbul 1981, fig.70. Notably, however, there is a closer correspondence of design in (x)

to (13) than in any of the other examples from different media. 17| Atasoy et al., op.cit., p.257. 18| Rogers, op.cit., points out, for example, that the technical expertise needed to create designs for the drawloom made it likely that the master weaver played an important part

in determining which designs to adapt for his use. The nakkaÎhanecould produce designs that set the fashion, but in most media it did not control the process of production. 19| Ibid, p.15. 20| Erber, op.cit., pp.25-26. 21| Brian G. Williams, The Crimean

Tatars, Leiden 2001, pp.56-57. 22| Ibid.; Russian rule led to large migrations of the local population in the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating with the Stalinist deportations of the 20th century. 23| One need only think of the fake Turkish classical carpets made by

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