Professor Sandra Busatta argues:
‘Oriental carpets, that is pile-woven carpets from the Islamic world, began to show up in Europe after the crusades in the 11th century. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Oriental carpets could be seen in different paintings. Actually, many groups of Islamic carpets from the Middle East are today called by the names of European painters who depicted them: Lotto, Holbein, Ghirlandaio, Crivelli, and Memling are among the European painters whose names are now used to describe certain groups of carpets woven in Ottoman Turkey. By the sixteenth century, carpets were frequently depicted in portraits as a signifier of high social and economic status. By the seventeenth century, depictions of carpets were widespread throughout Europe.’
This thesis is debated by many scholars. Christopher Alexanders and Dickran Kouymjian, for instance suggest that the Anatolian rugs featured in paintings by many European artists predate the Ottoman annexation of Anatolia, and while traded by the Ottoman merchants to European courts as early as the beginning of the second millennium, were in fact relict of previous epochs.
Christopher Alexander dates the most renowned carpets e.g. the Dragon and Phoenix carpet as being several centuries old at the time of being arguably immortalized by the Italian Renaissance artist Bartolomeo degli Erri of Modena in 1460.
In conclusion, while pile-woven carpets which first reached Europe came from the Islamic world, they may have originated in Anatolia, within and without the Ottoman Empire, in pre-Islamic period.
The complexity of the problem is supported by ‘ the [common] idea that whatever was produced historically in the boundaries of a modern nation-state or, in an earlier time, an empire, must be subsumed under the name of the dominant political constituency of the country.’ (-) Dickran Kouymjian.
References:
Dickran Kouymjian. (Haig Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies, Emeritus, California State University, Fresno & Paris)
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander a British-American architect and design theorist, and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley
Sandra Busatta, professor at University of Urbino
