VI . Right: Fine Wavy Vines, Ottoman embroidered panel. Silk on silk, o.58 x 0.94m (1'11" x 3'1"). Private collection

8. Left: Ottoman cloth-of-gold silk salvar(detail), Turkey, first half 17th century. The deeply serrated leaf in the border of ( VI ) is a rare form associated with seraser or cloth-ofgold. Topkapı Saray Museum, Istanbul, 13/1898. After Nurhan Atasoy et al., Ipek.,The Crescent & The Rose, London 2001, pl.9

OTTOMAN EMBROIDERY

lattice on a white ground. The painting has an earlier date than that usually assigned to analogous early Ottoman embroideries. Walter Denny has suggested that larger traditional white-ground embroideries imitate wall tiles, 14 while in his turn Michael Rogers has pointed out that tiles often took their inspiration from the layouts of silk brocades and textiles. 15

It is not surprising to find crosspollination between textile and tile designs. Here we are dealing with the powerful influence of fashion. What is significant is the expanding list of correspondences between the designs of our group and those in a wide variety of other media. 16

Perhaps the most surprising correspondence is between a leaf motif in our group and one found on seraser, or cloth-of-gold, the rarest and most expensive of Ottoman silk fabrics. It is a material that often carries unusual design schemes and configurations drawn from beyond the Ottoman mainstream. 17 For example, the particular style of deeply indented leaf form seen in the border on one of our group ( VI ) appears only in seraser textiles (8). Indeed, the combination in these embroideries of yellow or cream

StephenPetegorsky

silk grounds with seraserdesigns may be a conscious evocation of rare and beautiful silver and gold covered seraser fabrics. Just like many traditional early Ottoman embroideries, our group is clearly not court workshop production. Some examples are naïve or provincial in their drawing ( XI ), others less so. Certain design elements show a surprisingly faithful rendition of court motifs, as in the drawing of the cloudbands in the border of one example ( VII ), in which the field design is quite

rudimentary and the corner motifs have the nondescript look of space fillers. Yet the cloudbands show an articulation and precision stylistically at odds with the simplicity of the field. The detail of the cloudbands, including the shape of the reserves of their interiors, is just as we see it in the high style velvet portfolio in the Topkapı Saray Museum (9). This mixture of provincial drawing with fidelity to courtly models is not typically found on traditional early embroideries, where each individual

a yellow satin ground in the Topkapı Saray Museum is published in Yanni Petsopoulos (ed.), Tulips, Turbans, and Arabesques, London 1982, pl.148. It has the same field design as (V). In all cases the technique shows these examples to be very different from our new group.

5| An unpublished member of the group seen on the New York art market is not readable from the back. 6| Of the examples illustrated here, only two (V) and (VIII) have a further feature: in the border of both embroideries, and also in the field of (V), the very long floats are couched at

close intervals to give a ribbed effect, a stitch also present in the larger example on the New York market mentioned in note 5 above. 7| Later Ottoman embroideries often have openwork on the ends or in the field that is different in execution from the side treatments here.

8| J.M. Rogers (ed.), Topkapi Textiles, New York 1986, pp.20-23. 9| See Walter Denny in Petsopoulos, op.cit., p.131. 10| With its designs embroidered in gold and silk thread on leather, this shows co-operation between embroiderers and the book artists of the

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