Silk Fragments with Palmette Blossoms (700s): Art, History and Details

Silk Fragments with Palmette Blossoms (700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The stunning pattern of palmettes within diamond-shaped compartments is still visible in this rare four-color silk, despite its fragile state. Small human faces within circles appear at the points of the diamonds.

Object facts

• Title: Silk Fragments with Palmette Blossoms
• Date: 700s
• Culture: Egypt or Syria, Umayyad period (661–750) or Abbasid period (750–1258)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: complementary weft-faced twill with inner warps (samit)
• Dimensions: Overall: 22.5 x 29.5 cm (8 7/8 x 11 5/8 in.); Mounted: 27.9 x 34.9 cm (11 x 13 3/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Coptic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1951.91

Collection credit

Gift of The Textile Arts Club

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wardwell, Anne E. Material Matters: Fifty Years of Gifts from the Textile Arts Club, 1934-1984 : [Exhibition] 21 November-30 December 1984, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Museum, 1984.
• Baker, Patricia L. Islamic Textiles. 1995.
• Williams, Elizabeth Dospěl. "Textile Aesthetics." In Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt, 96-99. Washington: The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, 2019.

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.