Ghirlandaio type Anatolian Turkish rug, formerly Eberhart Herrmann collection, Munich (dated to the 17th century)


The pattern of this rug takes its name from the Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, who portrayed a carpet of this type in his mid-fifteenth-century painting Madonna Enthroned, originally created for the church of San Giusto alle Mura and now preserved in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Although no surviving carpet has been identified as an exact match for the one represented in the painting, the field composition of the present example closely corresponds to that depicted by Ghirlandaio and to a group of related carpets sharing the same design tradition. Variations of this pattern are known from Anatolian weaving as early as the fifteenth century and remained in production through the nineteenth century. In her study Historical Turkish Carpets (Istanbul, 1981, pp. 59–65), Şerare Yetkin categorizes the carpet illustrated by Ghirlandaio, together with comparable examples, as a Type III Holbein carpet, identifying the octagons enclosed within square compartments as the defining feature of the principal medallions.