Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Chalice Cover
Russia; Textile: Turkey, for the European market
Not on view
The textile used to make this chalice cover, featuring serrated saz leaves on an undulating vine, represents another major stylistic group within the Ottoman silk-making tradition. The rhythmic arrangement of vines is thought to derive from fourteenth-century Chinese brocaded silks, but by the sixteenth century the pattern had been modified into a distinctively Ottoman style.
Turkish silks were especially prized in Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At formal events, Russian nobility wore clothing made of richly brocaded Turkish textiles, and in Russian churches the clergy wore vestments and used objects fashioned from Ottoman silks such as this wine-chalice cover.
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