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Article: Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols.
- Article from:
- The Magazine Antiques
- Article date:
- December 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Western fascination with oriental carpets dates from the fifteenth century, when European painters began to celebrate the artistry of pile carpets imported from the Islamic world. The Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1441) was the first to emphasize the beauty of exotic carpets, but his descriptions of them are unreliable. (1) Beginning in the 1450s, numerous Italian artists depicted Turkish and other identifiable eastern Mediterranean carpets with painstaking accuracy, and this practice spread to other European painters during the sixteenth century. When late nineteenth-century German art historians noticed the remarkable correspondence between the few antique ...