OTTOMAN EMBROIDERY

What can we infer about how and when our group were made? For the Ottomans, textile production was an important economic and artistic endeavour, highly organised in guilds and regulated by the state. 8 Patterns for fabrics such as silk brocades, velvets, and embroideries were based on designs that originated in the nakkaÎhane, or royal design ateliers. These created a repertoire of motifs for use in many media, including ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour, carpets, textiles and woodwork. The objects were manufactured in both royal and commercial workshops. The high style of 16th century Ottoman court art can be seen in the collections of the Topkapı Saray Museum in Istanbul, for instance in silk, gold and silver thread embroidered kaftans (14), or in a velvet portfolio embroidered with a cloudband design, also in silk, gold, and silver (9). But while these products of court workshops represent Ottoman embroidery at its grandest, most of what has come down to us in this medium consists of commercial and domestic production. In a culture where decorative textiles played an important role in daily life, embroidery offered a simple and accessible way of producing

IV . Right: City Medallion, Ottoman embroidered panel. Silk on silk, o.61 x 0.89m (2'0" x 2'11"). Private collection

5. Below left: Ottomangold embroidered leather book binding, Turkey, late 16th century. The central medallion design originatedin the arts of the book, but was also usedin ceramics, carpets, metalwork and wood-carving. Rare in traditional Ottoman embroidery, it appears in at least four of our group, including ( IV ) and ( XI ). Istanbul University Library, A6570. After Esin Atıl, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent,Washington 1987, pl.19

StephenPetegorsky

fashionable designs. It required little in the way of equipment or capital and was by its nature the least organised of textile productions, much of it remaining a domestic activity outside the realm of guilds, regulations or organised marketing. 9 Thus most embroideries are worked in a style that is at several removes from the nakkaÎhane. Domestic or commercial embroideries show a freedom in motif interpretation that clearly differentiates them from court-designed objects. Although the patterns were still often drawn by specialist designers, their proximity to the

royal workshops and the extent to which they chose to replicate workshop designs varied widely. Embroidery has few technical limits as to what can be drawn, and close adherence to designs created by a court artist was always feasible. Yet such fidelity is only occasionally evident (5,9). 10

The most common compositions in traditional early Ottoman embroidery, published in numerous sources, 11 consist of short design repeats, either single elements in rows, or rows of alternating primary and secondary motifs. Sometimes they are in an ogival arrangement, or

NOTES

1| One exception is a small square example offered at the 10th ICOC dealers’ fair in Washington, DC in April 2003, which included some white and yellow. Since I saw the first one in March 2000 I have examined 23 examples, of which four are square, the rest yastık-shaped.

2| The first example to be published (IX) was sold as lot 143 at Rippon Boswell in Wiesbaden on 20 November 2004 (HALI 139, 2005, p.117). 3| Examples may yet be uncovered in museum collections. However, according to Walter Denny, during the ten years preceding the publication of Ipek. The Crescent & The Rose. Imperial

Ottoman Silks and Velvets(Nurhan Atasoy, Walter Denny, Louise Mackie and Hulya Tezcan, London, 2001) the authors visited the world’s major museum repositories of Ottoman silk textiles and came across no such silk embroideries. 4| An early large cover on a yellow silk ground and a later yastıkon a

yellow silk ground are published in Roderick Taylor, Ottoman Embroidery, Wesel, 1993, pp.76 and 182. An embroidered yastıkon yellow ground is published as pl.S 9/1 in Christian Erber (ed.), A Wealth of Silk and Velvet, Bremen 1993, although the composition of the ground fabric is not specified. An embroidered bohçaon

HALI 144 I 61