Tapestry with golden lions and palmettes (1200s or earlier): Art, History and Details

Tapestry with golden lions and palmettes (1200s or earlier) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This reversible tapestry (kesi) fragment, woven with silk and metal thread, is a section from yardage likely intended for a garment, but no contemporary paintings exist to confirm this. A fringe of warps and a striped starting edge are preserved at the bottom of this fragment, as is a selvage along the left edge. Iranian golden lions, traditional symbols of royalty, are depicted amid large palmette leaves on vines. This kesi is different from other Central Asian silk kesi in the repetition of lions and palmettes in horizontal rows, facing alternate directions in an asymmetrical Chinese-inspired layout. But the depiction of lions with parted manes and tilted heads dates from the Sasanian dynasty of Iran (226–637 CE). The palmettes are common to both the Iranian world and Central Asia. This kesi may have been woven by Uyghurs living in the vicinity of Khotan, where the influence of Iranian culture was strong.

Object facts

• Title: Tapestry with golden lions and palmettes
• Date: 1200s or earlier
• Culture: Central Asia
• Type: Tapestry
• Technique: silk, gold thread; tapestry weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 63.5 x 34.7 cm (25 x 13 11/16 in.); Mounted: 73.7 x 45.7 cm (29 x 18 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1991.3

A detail from the museum

Dye analysis has been done on some of the colored yarns in this fragment. The orange, scarlet, and pink dye comes from the safflower plant, the red and darker pink dye from the bark of a small evergreen tree called the China brasiliensis, and the blue dye from the indigo plant.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Simcox, Jacqueline. "Silks from the Middle Kingdom." Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles, Issue 43, (February 1989), pp. 16–33.
• Taylor, George. "Official colours: dyes on Chinese textiles of the Northern Song Dynasty." Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles, Issue 58, (August 1991).
• Turner, Evan H. "Selected 1991 Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 2 (February 1992): 63–83.

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.