Carpet (1500s): Art, History and Details

Carpet (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Mughals, with their nomadic Central Asian roots, were constantly on the move. They were adept at transporting the trappings of their residences and bases of operation from place to place. Fine carpets and canopies demarcated places of importance, and could be rolled up and moved when the ruler was ready to consolidate his power at a new location. When they settled in stone palaces in India, the interiors were covered with carpets, lending a warmth to the spaces that cannot be felt at the sites today. This carpet is of the type that the Mughals would have acquired for their residences. Mughal paintings are filled with depictions of carpets and textiles, many ornamented, like this one, with delicate and complex palmette-dominated arabesque patterns that evoke a paradisiacal setting.

Object facts

• Title: Carpet
• Date: 1500s
• Culture: Iran, Herat, 16th century
• Type: Carpet
• Technique: senna knot: wool and cotton
• Dimensions: Average: 771.7 x 307.3 cm (303 13/16 x 121 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1962.263

A detail from the museum

In the Senna knot, surface yarn ends are twisted around adjacent warp yarns.

Collection credit

Florence and Charles Abel Oriental Rug Collection by exchange

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pope, Arthur Upham, Phyllis Ackerman, and Theodore Bestermann. A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.
• Wyche, Lois. "A Sixteenth-Century Persian Carpet." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 50, no. 2 (1963).
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.