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Lot Essay
Multi-niche prayer rugs, or safs, have a long tradition of furnishing mosques to accommodate large gatherings of worship. Only very few complete safs are known today and many have rather survived in fragmentary form, such as the present example. The earliest depiction of a saf carpet is in a fifteenth century Timurid manuscript of the Khamsa of Nizami in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1994.232.4) which shows Layla and Qais (who would go on to become Majnun) meeting for the first time at a mosque school. The ground is adorned with two saf carpets, each with two rows of polychrome mihrabs with a mosque lamp suspended from the apex.
One of the larger examples preserved today is in the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (inv.no. LNS 34R), and a comparable fragment to this was sold in these Rooms, 25 September 2007, lot 426. The Al-Sabah carpet, displays two rows of mihrabs with a comparable red ground to the present lot and similarly drawn flowering blossoms and palmettes in the spandrels, although each compartment is adorned with a hanging mosque lamp.
The layout of the present rug is more similar to a fragment with an alternating red and green plain ground said to come from the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque) of Bursa in western Anatolia which sold in these Rooms, 10 April 2008, lot 206 (see Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, New York and Oxford, 1993, pp.308-309, and Walter Denny, The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets, Washington D.C., 2002, p.115, no.50, for an almost identical, but smaller, fragment). The fragments share an arrangement of alternating larger and smaller niches, the larger displaying the triple cusped arch spandrels. Each is drawn with simplified columns with flaring capitals and meandering scroll guard stripes.
One of the larger examples preserved today is in the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (inv.no. LNS 34R), and a comparable fragment to this was sold in these Rooms, 25 September 2007, lot 426. The Al-Sabah carpet, displays two rows of mihrabs with a comparable red ground to the present lot and similarly drawn flowering blossoms and palmettes in the spandrels, although each compartment is adorned with a hanging mosque lamp.
The layout of the present rug is more similar to a fragment with an alternating red and green plain ground said to come from the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque) of Bursa in western Anatolia which sold in these Rooms, 10 April 2008, lot 206 (see Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, New York and Oxford, 1993, pp.308-309, and Walter Denny, The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets, Washington D.C., 2002, p.115, no.50, for an almost identical, but smaller, fragment). The fragments share an arrangement of alternating larger and smaller niches, the larger displaying the triple cusped arch spandrels. Each is drawn with simplified columns with flaring capitals and meandering scroll guard stripes.