The intricate tendril designs on this textile form elegant palmettes which enclose pearled borders and blooming heart-like buds in its interiors. This cotton textile which uses block-printing and mordant dye techniques points to the province of Gujarat as the place of production and a key center for the manufacture of textiles through the centuries. The ornamental features of this textile were meant to replicate luxury woven fabrics often found on the silks from Ikhanid Iran and Mamluk Egypt during the fourteenth century. Printed in Gujarat, this fragment not only represents Gujarat as a major exporter of printed and dyed textiles, but highlights the demand and taste for these textiles in Fustat, Egypt.
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Dimensions:L. 9 3/8 in. (23.9 cm) W. 12 5/8 in. (32.1 cm)
Classification:Textiles-Painted and/or Printed
Credit Line:Purchase, V. Everit Macy Gift, 1930
Accession Number:30.112.28
Textile with Arabesque and Palmette Design (MMA 30.112.28) and Textile with Lotus and Arabesque Design (MMA 30.112.34)
In this textile (MMA 30.112.28), elaborate vine tendrils form inticate symmetrical arabesques that enclose the signature motif of the design, a heart-shaped lotus bud in a palmette. The fabric is block-printed and mordant-dyed a dark red-brown or aubergine. Several variations of this design are known from textile finds in Fustat (Cairo), Egypt, and all have been identified as Indian imports from Gujarat.[1] No versions of this design have been recorded among Southeast Asian finds, and given the strong Islamic flavor of the design, it may be assumed to have been made in Gujarat as an inexpensive imitation of the woven luxury cloth produced in Egypt or Iran during the fourteenth century.This pattern is best known in silk and gold lampas, sometimes brocaded, associated with both Ilkhanid Iran and Mamluk Egypt. (MMA 46.156.41) The Mongol conquests in West Asia resulted in the dislocation and sometimes forced resettlement of skilled weavers, directly contributing to an unprecedented hybridity of style and of weaving techniques and making secure attributions problematic.[2] Resonances of Mongol China are apparent in this textile, where the imported Chinese motif of the lotus-palmette has been reordered into a new symmetry by designers working in the Islamic tradition. A related fourteenth-century Chinese silk damask with the longetivity character inset in a lotus, reportedly found in Egypt, confirms that contemporary Chinese silks were also in circulation at the time.[3] Egyptian Mamluk silks probably provided the immediate model for this printed cotton. Samples of such Mamluk woven cloth must also have been sent to western India, where this dyed-cotton version was produced for export back to Egypt.
A related fragment (MMA 30.112.34), produced with the same mordant technique, also shows a clear debt to Chinese models in the center field, whereas the border is very Indian, with its variegated banding and its square-and-star pattern evoking tie-dye (bandani). The center field pattern is that of a lotus flower in full bloom, viewed frontally, set in arabesque leaf-and-flower ogival enclosures—a motif and treatment that draw directly on Chinese designs of the Yuan period (1271–1368). This imagery is shared with blue-and-white porcelain of the period, most notably fourteenth-century Jingdezhen wares intended for the Islamic export market.[4] An early Yuan silk with frontally positioned lotuses provides one such textile model.[5]
John Guy in [Peck 2013]
Footnotes:
1. Pfister, R. Les toiles imprimées de Fostat et l'Hindoustan. Paris: Les Éditions d'Art et d'Histoire, 1938, pl. XIIb; Barnes, Ruth. Indian Block-printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, vol. 2, nos. 689, 769, Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1997; and Gittinger, Mattiebelle. Master Dyers to the World: Technique and Trade in Early Indian Dyed Cotton Textiles. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: The Textile Museum, 1982; for variant types.
2. Komaroff, Linda, and Stefano Carboni, eds., The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002, p. 262.
3. Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 66.156.20.
4. See, for example, a faceted storage jar collected in Iran before 1876 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. 1599-1876). See also Guy, John. "China in India," In China and Southeast Asia: Historical Interactions, edited by Geoffrey Wade and James K. Chin. Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia. Oxford and New York: Routledge, forthcoming.
5. Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 52.8.
[ Art market, Near East, until 1930; sold to MMA through Maurice Dimand ]
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800," September 9, 2013–January 5, 2014, no. 2A.
Dimand, Maurice S. "A Recent Gift of Near Eastern Art." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, o.s., vol. 26 (March 1931). p. 12.
Peck, Amelia, ed. Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. no. 2A, pp. 140–41, ill. (color).
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