Antique Kazak rug with Memling Guls in an indigo blue ground
Code:
KZMG01
Age: ~1860-1870
Size: 153x210cm
Size (ft): 5'0"x6'10"
Structure: wool pile, brown wool warps and
dark red wool wefts.
Knots: Gördes (Turkish, symmetrical)
Condition: Scattered small repairs and reweaves
Design: The indigo blue field with small multicoloured Memling guls,
in a yellow main border of polychrome flowerhead and tree motif, between
charkh-i falak (wheel of life or fortune) motif and meander minor borders.
This well-known design appears
in a number of early European depictions of oriental carpets; for example,
on the reverse of the eponymous late-fifteenth-century panel portrait of a
young man by Hans Memling (Flemish, 1430/5-1494) in Madrid is painted a
still life in which a vase of flowers rests on a small carpet with similar
medallions.
Flower Still-life, c. 1490, Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. By Hans Memling (b. ca. 1440,
Seligenstadt, d. 1494, Bruges) |
Recent scholarship suggests that these
medallions are of a type known as gül, often thought to symbolize a
particular Turkic tribal group. Two earlier carpets with the design have
survived, one in Budapest and another in Konya. Similar motifs are found
in surviving weavings from several Turkmen tribes of central Asia, as well
as in carpets woven by Turkic nomads and villagers in Transcaucasia,
southern Iran, and in many different locations in Anatolia (Asiatic
Turkey) today. Memling also painted similar carpets under the feet of the
Virgin in several of his altarpieces, including, for example, the Virgin
and Child Enthroned in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; inv. 939.
Another early depiction of a "Memling" carpet appears as a bedroom
furnishing in a ca. 1460 miniature painting from the Livre du coeur
d'amours espris in the National Library in Vienna, Cod. Vind. 259 (Lit:
Walter Danny)
a detail from "Triptych", c. 1485. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, by Hans Memling
by Bartelemy d'Eyck, the Dream from The Livre of Rene de Anjou, ca. 1460
Vienna |
Small Memling Guls
Caucasian rugs with small memling gulls are very rare and this
group usually contains pre-commercial period samples. Here the Memling gul
is smaller in size than the usual Memling guls and is depicted as an
individual, not within an octagon. Also, the lower and upper ends of the
polygon have a more pointed and protruding shape.
|
Te other known Small Memling Gul rugs:
Private collection (formerly with Patrick Pouler) |
Bonhams |
Rudnick Collection |
Nazmiyal Collection |
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