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Length of Velvet

From the late fifteenth century on, velvet was made in increasing quantities to meet the high demand of the Ottoman court. One grade was made for furnishings such as cushion covers and summer carpets. A higher grade was used for clothing, tailored into robes worn by the royal family and robes of honor presented to esteemed visitors to the court. In his travel account, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who passed through the Ottoman capital in the 1660s, also mentions particularly extravagant throne covers made of gold-brocaded velvet, as well as black, white, and violet velvets that had been embroidered with pearls, rubies, and emeralds.[1]

Despite the initial high quality of both technique and design of local velvets, standards dropped in the early sixteenth century, as the textile makers started to substitute cheaper materials, use less dye, or reduce warp and weft counts. As a result, velvet from Italy became highly prized. This shift in preference, evidenced by the great number of Italian-velvet garments preserved in the imperial collections of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, opened an extremely lucrative market to Italian manufacturers, who quickly adjusted the design and size of their fabrics to suit Turkish taste and usage.

In turn, contemporary velvets made in Turkey took on a strong Italian flavor. The preference for red grounds is said to come from this source. In Turkey the red was created with Kerria lacca, a crimson lac dye, that was used to tint the silk weft threads; once woven, the finished fabric was dipped in filtered indigo to augment the hue.[2] Brocaded designs of metal-wrapped thread, often gold, further enhanced the velvet, but weavers in Turkey never created the multiheight pile that remained a hallmark of Italian production.

With its double ogival lattice, this length of fabric represents the shared Italianate-Ottoman aesthetic that characterizes sixteenth-century velvets, but about the time it was produced, official constraints on imports from Italy—enacted to bolster the local economy—stimulated changes. As locally made velvets once again gained a larger place in the market, their designs shifted along with those of other Ottoman decorative arts. Gradually, the ogival framework was replaced by motifs that became typical of the seventeenth-century Ottoman repertoire. Artichokes, pomegranates, carnations, tulips, and rosebuds were applied in large repeating patterns across the width of the fabric, and velvet started to appear in purple, blue, green, and other shades.

Marika Sardar in [Peck 2013]

Footnotes:

1. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. Collections of Travels through Turkey into Persia, and the East Indies. London: Moses Pitt, 1688, quoted in Atasoy, Nurhan, Walter B. Denny, Louise W. Mackie, and Hulya Tezcan. Ipek: The Crescent and the Rose; Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets. London: Azimuth Editions, 2001, pp. 32–33.

2. A 1502 document records the complaints of master weavers that some workshops were substituting madder and unfiltered indigo for these costly materials. Quoted in Atasoy, Denny, Mackie, and Tezcan 2001 (see note 1), p. 163.

[ Dikran G. Kelekian (American, born Turkey), New York, until 1917; sold to MMA]

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800," September 9, 2013–January 5, 2014, no. 4.

Peck, Amelia, ed. Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. no. 4, pp. 143–44, ill. pl. 4.