Carpet
This tapestry-woven carpet with threads wrapped in precious metal belongs to a group produced in Kashan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Unlike carpets produced for shrines, this example contains a central lobed medallion with flying cranes, a motif repeated in the four corner pieces. The animal combats in the field recall earlier sixteenth-century pile carpets except that here the scale of the animals is large and the drawing quite free. Carpets of this type are known to have been sold to Polish nobility in the early seventeenth century and others were presented as gifts by Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587–1629).
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