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Lot Essay
Inscription:
In green on the cream ground bismillah al-rahman al-rahim
In green on yellow ground ya husayn madhlum
In crimson pink nasr min allah wa fath qarib wa bashir al-mu'minin 'help from Allah and an imminent victory, so give good news [O prophet] to the believers'
Parallel to the advancement of velvet production in Safavid Iran, silks were produced and highly prized as luxury commodities, particularly those woven in the seventeenth century using a variety of techniques. The damask technique, used in this textile, allowed weavers to reach the full calligraphic potential of the textile since the reverse mirrored the inscriptions on the face resulting in the muthanna (mirror-image) style of writing (Anthony Welch, Calligraphy in the Arts of the Muslim World, New York, 1979, p.154).
The thuluth inscriptions on both the present lot and lot 75 are Qur'anic and include to the person enshrined, playing with various colour combinations. Welch notes that the inscriptions were successful both in terms of their contents, relating to physical and spiritual victory, and for their visual impact.
The dynamic use of polychrome in this example is comparable to a tomb cover housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (acc. no. 1922-22-90). Both share an arrangement of blue, red and green ground cartouches flanked by narrow rows of stylised scrolls and flowers. Another similarly designed comparable fragment is in the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs, Lyon. The Lyon fragment retains a section of the original border which bears a date of AH 1052 1642/1643 AD making it likely that our fragment was created around the same period in the mid-seventeenth century.
In green on the cream ground bismillah al-rahman al-rahim
In green on yellow ground ya husayn madhlum
In crimson pink nasr min allah wa fath qarib wa bashir al-mu'minin 'help from Allah and an imminent victory, so give good news [O prophet] to the believers'
Parallel to the advancement of velvet production in Safavid Iran, silks were produced and highly prized as luxury commodities, particularly those woven in the seventeenth century using a variety of techniques. The damask technique, used in this textile, allowed weavers to reach the full calligraphic potential of the textile since the reverse mirrored the inscriptions on the face resulting in the muthanna (mirror-image) style of writing (Anthony Welch, Calligraphy in the Arts of the Muslim World, New York, 1979, p.154).
The thuluth inscriptions on both the present lot and lot 75 are Qur'anic and include to the person enshrined, playing with various colour combinations. Welch notes that the inscriptions were successful both in terms of their contents, relating to physical and spiritual victory, and for their visual impact.
The dynamic use of polychrome in this example is comparable to a tomb cover housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (acc. no. 1922-22-90). Both share an arrangement of blue, red and green ground cartouches flanked by narrow rows of stylised scrolls and flowers. Another similarly designed comparable fragment is in the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs, Lyon. The Lyon fragment retains a section of the original border which bears a date of AH 1052 1642/1643 AD making it likely that our fragment was created around the same period in the mid-seventeenth century.