The Impact of Timurid Art on Safavid Carpets

This paper was presented by the author during the 8th International Congress of the World Society for the Study, Preservation, and Promotion of Uzbekistan’s Cultural Heritage (WOSCU) "The Heritage of the Great Ancestors: The Foundation of the Third Renaissance" held in Tashkent and Samarkand, 23-26 August 2024.

Seven thematic sections were organized to discuss and debate required projects related to exhibitions in the halls of the Center for Islamic Civilization and the Imam Bukhari Museum. Francesca Fiorentino participated in the session "Architecture, Arts and Crafts"

The paper not only focused on a specific feature of Timurid Art pretty consonant with the nascent Safavid court art but importantly remarked on one specific theme absent in the several thematic exhibition halls to be prompted in the grand project of the new Center of Islamic Civilization in Uzbekistan. Finally, the paper, while showing the revolutionary presence of gardens and figurative images in Safavid carpets, dramatically pointed to the need for an exhibition place dedicated to the importance of greenery spaces in the new urban planning following the legacy of 14th and 15th-century Timurid architecture, painting, and urbanization. Gardens, water basins, horticulture and arboretums must be regarded the most for the upcoming general health of society, citizens and the planet.

The project was among the many approved.

The Paper aims to present the revolutionary impact of Timurid art on the new carpet iconography developed in the Safavid court ateliers.

It will show how the glorious Timurid Art of the Book was esteemed as an apex of Cultural Enlightenment. New achievements in the Safavid Golden Age will, in turn, influence the following centuries showing how Islamic Art could surpass differences and divisions in the name of the highest aesthetic values.
As such a long-lasting presence in Islamic Art and Civilization will appear.

In Herat from the time of Shah Rukh, Timurid culture greatly thrived, yet during the reign of Sultan Hoseyn Bayqara and his vizier Ali-shir Navaj it reached a culmination that revealed unsurpassed for the centuries to come. The painter Behzad is considered one of the highest representatives.

   

Timurid Art received diverse impulses within the developing Islamic culture, a culture that acted as a porous ground able to host and adapt to diversity.

As Maria Szuppe highlights, during the Timurid period there existed a sort of dual Islamic culture – Turko-Mongol and Turko-Iranian – where common Central Asian ancestry was the premise of cultural affinities.

The Timurids, a Turko-Mongol dynasty from Central Asia, reigned also over the Turko-Iranian world for about a century coming in contact with the culture shaped by medieval Turcoman tribes and the heirs of the Ilkhanids. Tabriz and Shiraz during the Aqquyunlu and Qaraquyunlu reigns are good examples, the school of Baghdad is a jewel as well.

              

Further on, the Timurid intimacy with the Iranian world took especially place in Herat and Khorasan, once part of Samanid Transoxiana where Ferdowsi composed his famous Shanameh, the most celebrated Iranian epic. Interestingly, both the Timurids and Safavids compiled two exemplary shining copies of it - the Baysonghur and the Thamasp.

After the fall of the Timurid Empire, in 1506, a new political entity was ready to compete in the international scenario. In 1501 Ismail, heir of a Sufi Azeri order, proclaimed himself Shah of Iran. He shaped strong foundations for the Empire - vindicated religious ascendency from the seventh Imam and relied on ancient Iranian culture forged with and adapted to Shia Islamic values. He entertained tight relations with Turcoman clans and the Qizilbash, militant Shia warriors, and bearers of ancestral tribal legacy.

While the Safavids never claimed a Timurid lineage, they recognized in 16th-century historiography the continuity of the dynasty and presented Herat as the predecessor of the Safavid State.

Despite the war moved against the Shaybanids to reunite the Iranian core region of Khorasan and Herat in 1510, the Safavids had appeared as friendly guardians from a distance. Shah Ismail’s filial affection for Sultan Hoseyn is documented, while Herat served as a model for Qazvin, the second capital of Shah Thamasp. Let’s recall that Thamasp Mirza spent his childhood as Governor of Herat (1516-1521) and that the city became the seat of the Safavid heir apparent.

In that period was the Safavid turn to get intimacy with the culmination of Timurid culture in Herat.

Lamia Balafrej masterly describes the qualities of ripe Timurid art which we will associate with Safavid carpet features.

It exhibits a taste for technical sophistication and drawing virtuosity, materializing a culture of intricacy, a visual density accomplished through the art of miniaturization and multiplanar drawing. A variety of themes and details remain, though, within the crystalline limits of clarity. The preciously refined art of calligraphy played also a big role in the exquisite treatment of the line.

Balafrej further explains how this complex yet limpid imagery was used to embody meaning beyond the descriptive level, as per the strong Sufi vein of Timurid literature and poetry. In fact, it appears that painting borrowed from poetry the art of mu’amma (riddle solving), performed during the majalis, by which further meanings were encrypted in content and form.



Aside from these aesthetic features some figurative themes prominently emerged in the painting - Moving Encampment, Royal Hunt, Park and Garden as a multifarious setting. Usual habits in Central Asian traditions since ancient times, in the 15th century, were finally included in the Islamic conventions with a rainbow of symbols.

All features here enumerated are to be found in Safavid court carpets roughly from the beginning of the dynasty to the early 17th century.

Nonetheless, Safavid ateliers could envision and materialize in carpet patterns a unique novel blend. Figurative themes appear within an array of decorative and fantastic drawings – spectacular solar disks, hunters, noble characters, pavilions, thrones, fantastic animals, trees and birds, angels and heavenly landscapes.

They manifested a magic variety of forms that claimed wonder and rarity. Great sophistication challenged the viewer’s understanding seemingly adhering to the canon of the ajab, the desirable experience of pleasurable wonder not being able to fully comprehend designs. Designs were again allusive and ambiguous figures overcoming the mere illustration of royal pageantry and power, as it was in late Timurid paintings.

Schuyler Camman in his studies on religious symbolism in Safavid carpets provides more information. He shows how visual and verbal puns used in their designs reveal hidden religious content. Safavid literati, in fact, delighted in subtle verbal plays solving riddles through verbal dexterity, a practice similar to the performances held in the Timurid majalis above mentioned.

Safavid designers dramatically innovated carpet motifs – they looked like painting designs accomplished with the best weaving technicalities.

In so doing they boldly departed from previous carpet patterns based on geometric designs and floral decoration. 

Further on, as they encrypted religious messages in a period of high spiritual aspiration, they closely equated the sacred figurative Sufi painting of the late Herat, where an intertextual system of signification combined literary discourse and mystic beliefs. It is not strange, in fact, to find calligraphic scripts both religious and poetic that raise carpets to the highest culture domain.

Finally, the paper elaborates on how the new achievements in the Safavid Golden Age prove Islamic Art to be able to always bring new fruits.

It also suggests a greater Project – to illustrate the pivotal role of the Timurid Renaissance in the development of Islamic Civilization. Significant inferences will appear. One rarely underlined is the striking presence of green spaces continuously interacting with Man as the best companion. The Islamic Garden convention conveyed in so many precious paintings should represent an ‘early form of Ecology’ to a modern eye. Miniature Gardens are really a monument to the paradisical place Earth can be, and to Nature as a gifted balm to body, mind and spirit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Barfarah, Investigation of the Role of Shia in Political Revival of Iran in Safavid Era 2019

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Courtly Riddles, Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry, 2010

Bagh-e Nazar, The Impact of Timurid Gardens in Samarkand on Safavid Gardens in Isfahan (Chaharbagh), 2016

C. Melville, Visualising Tamerlane: History and its Image, 2019

C. Chia, Sufi orthopraxis: visual language and verbal imagery in medieval Afghanistan, 2012

L. Balafrej, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting, 2019

L. Golombek and M. Subtelny, Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century, 1992.

M. Gharipour, Transferring and Transforming the Boundaries of Pleasure: Multifunctionality of Gardens in Medieval Persia, 2011

M. Szuppe, L’évolution de l’image de Timour et des Timourides dans l’historiographie safavide du XVI e au XVIIIe siècle, 1997

M. Szuppe, L.’heritage centre-asiatique chez les Safavides, Table Ronde Tradition et innovation dans l’Orient ottoman et iranien, Mulhouse 1995

P. Berlekamp, Wonder, Image and Cosmos in Medieval Islam, 2011

S. Camman, The Interplay of Art, Literature, and Religion in Ṣafavid Symbolism 1978

Shades of White

Who knows the reason why white ground carpets have since ever exerted a special fascination, as if white wool were not a usual commodity for weavers? 

One would dare guessing white wool did receive less processing than dyed wool, therefore it is more resistent to use. What is with white colour in western imagination? Purity?Transcendence? Was it the same in the countries and traditions from which these rugs sourced? Perhaps. Obviously, we, the westerners and the 'others', share also similar symbolisms.

Let us just mention the Muslim canon of colours, each with its own meaning - according with the observation of Muslim scholars, white is on top of scale as it is chosen by Allah for the Prophet. It refers to purity and transcendence. The white lily plays the role in Christianism.

But white is not just one, white has its prism of shades. And, as they are connatural to the material (wool) as much they are redolent with complementing colours. And this for the reflecting nature of the soft glossy pile. Different fragrancies imbue the all-ecompassing colour. Various actions are induced in the beholder guided by the choice of the weaver - tout se tient. 

Anatolian white ground carpets survived from earlier periods are not that rare. 

Seljuk carpet, 14th, TIEM

Saph carpet, 15th (?)TIEM

Here we consider a broad family depicting various layout - the so called Bird and Scorpion, the Chintamani, the Niche - reportedly attributed to the Ushak area and in some cases to Selendi, a village within it. 

Curiously, the Bird and Scorpion recall the white ground tile revetments of the period (16th-17th century), and in fact no bird flies nor scorpion creeps, but floral stylisations rythmically punctuate the field, re-worked and stylised to adapt to the weaving and the local esthetical sensitivity.

Bird carpet, V&A

Scorpion rug, Budapest 17th

More properly, the Chintamani is a major pattern in rich textiles for costumes and furniture. It gains, though, a starring role also in some carpets. Competing with the luxurious silk kaftan it graces the field of a group of 16th Cairene Ottoman carpets.  Usually, it sports a combination of three discs and two wavy lines variously arranged, sometimes just the disc triad. 

Court kaftan, Ottoman, Topkapi Saray Muzesi

Chintamani, Ottoman Damascus tile 1550-60 V&A

Chintamani carpet, the Textile Museum

'Karapinar' Small Medallion carpet (photo reconstruction)  with triad motif.

Children kaftan with triad motif, Ottoman, TopKapi Saray Muzesi

Aside are few other formats punctuated by the mystical triad.

As to the Niche format, it seemingly manifests in two small classes pretty differing from each other. The first exhibits floral ornaments comparable to those seen in other urban or well-organised workshops. The second promotes a simpler geometrical layout and a coarse weave (one of the coarser in  Ottoman Anatolian production, as Stefano Ionescu said).

To the first class belong some 6 items. 

One of them is in the TIEM  (it was impossible to get information from the Museum and elsewhere). It offers typical period designs although a crisp surprise arises from their arrangement. The spandrel ornament is a common Ottoman Anatolian motif (a gable leaf created by two split leaves closed to the apex added with tendrils). Usually woven in various colours here is nearly monochromatic - almost an embroidery. The airy lace shelters at both sides the exquisite stepped niche profile from the multicoloured grand frame. And, how elegant la petit reprise of the stepped line surfacing amidst the descending tendrils in the niche flanks. The sandals of the Prophet bottom field evoke the reason and scope of beauty and labour, while the standard-like finial on top of the vault admits no diversion. 

The spectacular border is shared by the Chintamani rugs club woven in the same area. In the accompanying picture, a fragment of good age (late 16th)  residing in the Philadelphia Museum epitomises it. A proper drawing of the reciprocal palmette motif associates chronologically the two. 

 Niche carpet, TIEM

Chintamani carpet frag., 16th , Philadelphia Museum

In the Bavarian National Museum, Munich,  a sibling of the TIEM rests, with slight variants in the ornamenting designs and a somewhat collapsed niche shape. The Museum curator couldn't provide me a colour picture and the pandemic impeded me from going there to see study it (such serious consequence for a rug lover!)

Niche rug, Bavarian National Museum Munich

Again in the TIEM a relative, not anymore fluently drawn. Stereotyped as the schematically drawn border confirms. Question of age, presumably (Stefano Ionescu kindly informed me that the date inside the niche cusp reads 1726-27 by the Museum caption)

White Ground Niche rug, TIEM


One more beautiful exemplar dramatically changes the border, pretty charming and unusual yet. A precious addition to the canon.

Sold at AAA 1914

Although there are no records of this pattern to be favoured in the European trade, Pieter Paul Rubens had one of these for a model in his powerful narration of Samson and Delilah recount. A variation, though, for it depicts within the niche a floral tracery of a type similar to some woven in Transylvanian double niche carpets. The accurate border rendering (proper, detailed and schematic the least) gives trust to that of the field as well to an early dating, end of the 16th century. We should consider the early 17th century a likely time frame for the two sibling carpets - in the TIEM and Munich.

P.P. Rubens, Samson and Delilah 1609-1610, The National Gallery London

detail

The carpet delights us with a lush composition enhanced by a rainbow of colours (reportedly, a lush palette is a sign of age and rich workshop as well). The generous supply of yellow, apricot and pink conjures up sunny dawn as if the goddess Eos had woven it with her rosy fingers.

A rich woman, enamoured with the dawn-pink rug and jealous of the goddess weave, ordered the colour to be the theme of a pair for her luxurious rooms, and more luscious ornaments to go with it. That is why an arabesque - of Persian accent -  scrolls through the frame of the carpet (once with the late Halevim) and steps moulded round draw the niche vault. More luxurious for an affluent setting (like miniatures confirm), the triad motif allusive of the leopard fur punctuates the bare field.

The Ex-Halevim Niche carpet

Garden assembly, Safavid folio, Sultan Muhammad Tabriz 1520s

 

Incoronation of Selim I, 1512 Ottoman miniature.

Dramatically divergent, a powerful, dramatic 'black & white' version exists to delight a 'dark lady' - the triad is lost in a simple poi pattern (which might mimic a cheetah skin), the airy tracery is solved into a simple creeping, a wrought-iron vegetal scroll inexorably locks the dizzy prayer within. 

The Ex-Bernheimer Niche carpet

The speckled triad shows up in one more group of Anatolian rugs. Reportedly included in the same wide family from Ushak, where specialists distinguish those more finely woven from those less, those with more colours from those with less and, not least, those depicted with simplified geometrical patterns from those with a fluent floral style. Different workshops were at work, disparate financial resources, weaving abilities as well as commissions, different markets finally. This group belongs to the less refined subgroup which has received some favour in Transylvania in the 16th-17th century, as much as the less refined Bird rugs above mentioned. The village of Selendi has been pointed out by period documents as sourcing place.

One of the most prised is the Boehringer carpet. Scholars seem to agree on this type belong to what in an Ottoman 1640 document are mentioned as 'Prayer rugs - Selendi style with leopard design' (Inalcik, ICOC 1983). Indeed the term 'leopard' is never used as addressing the pattern with discs and waves. And, importantly, is an original, rare term referred to carpet designs found in period Ottoman records.

Tracing back the source of the Chintamani pattern would simply confirm its antique origins - pre-Islamic - its various manipulations in diverse cultures and the impossibility to assign to it a univocal description. Two main sources are mentioned - the leopard/cheetah pelt design (a powerful animal/symbol in formative periods of mankind) and the Sanskrit use of the term as a wishful-filling jewel, probably three pearls (Buddhism became probably a main vehicle of later diffusion for this motif). 

Often, Ottoman art presents the three discs along with two waving lines - commonly attributed to the tiger pelt (one more significant animal in Eurasia). The populations from eastern and central Asia seem to have early prised the two assembled. Furthermore, leopard and tiger pelt seem to be a prerogative of costumes and equipment (horse saddle, scabbard, quiver) of nomad warriors which moved westwards from eastern Asia diffusing characteristics traditions and costumes. 

North China, Xianbei, 6th c tomb, Xianbei Museum

Uyghur fresco, 7th-9th, Bezeklik caves, the Hermitage Museum

Nomadic traditions percolated in the varied uses of these fur hides transmitting the symbol of the hunter's value, the leader's power, hence the transfer of royal 'farnah' sort of from the animal to the person wearing it- god blessing, protection and favour.

Definitely highly prized, the leopard and tiger furs became a must-have in any affluent Turk context being often depicted in book folios in centuries till the 16th. Worn by important characters they testify high status. Interestingly, the folio below offers evidence of a leopard pelt carpet with cloud band border in a Safavid garden assembly (Rustam, the legendary Iranian heroe is typically characterised with a tiger or leopard cloak since earliest depictions). The Ottoman Turk use of it applies differently - the use of the chinatamani double design (waves and discs) is typical infact, and the single leopard spots as well. A way of distinction from the opponent Safavid power and cultural claims?

Garden assembly, Safavid folio, Sultan Muhammad Tabriz 1520s

Aside from the 'secular/royal' character of the animal pelt, interesting cultural associations are submitted by its religious traits.

Meditation on a leopard skin, Timurid period folio, Central Asia

Animal skins were early revered by sufi masters (qalandars). They wore them as hide and ceremonial seats as well. Animal skins and pelts came to symbolise the perpetual presence of imams and saints to which by the tradition of hadits they belong. Dervishes particularly revered these fleeces to the point to prostrate before them as if in presence of their invisible owners. Indeed, because hadits talk of saints and important characters  sitting each on their own animal skin when speaking and meditating, these skins became endowed with miraculous powers.  

Traditionists trying to block these heterodox Islamic tendencies in the 14th century banned such 'blasphemous use, mentioning also the leopard skin. However, the practice was never erased. And, in Anatolia, the legacy was in good part conveyed into the rising powerful sufi brotherhood, the  Bekhtashi order, which bloomed in Anatolia and the Balkans.

Whether this rare, small group of rugs with leopard pelt design still retain traces of the mystic narrative is impossible to ascertain. With certainty yet, they could bypass the Sultan edict, 1610, prohibiting to trade to unbelievers rugs with religious signs (qa'aba, mihrab, prophet's sandals, lamp). That the edict was addressing only orthodox signs seems probable.

Their decorative system better fishes into traditional early motifs - the kotchak on top of vault, geometrical kufesque corner fillings, eight-pointed stars, whirling swastika and rosettes. They share a restricted palette and a simple, concise format with minute ornaments. The border lace-like decoration is typical of the group. It merits a dedicated issue.

Leopard pelt niche rugs, rugtracker.com photocredits

Some of these leopard rugs found their way to Transylvania where, presumably, their sobriety favourably engaged with the reformed Saxon puritanism.

However, never forget the taste for exoticism. As a sign of status was quite diffused also in Northern and North-Eastern Europe. 

H. Mielich, Ladislau von Fraunberg, Count of Haag, 1557

Curiously, a carpet with the pelt speckles and a triangular niche reminder appears and decorates the inside walls of a city house in the Main Square in Tarnòw-Poland (photo credits to B. Biedronska-Slota), reportedly at the end of the 16h century.

Curiously yet conveniently, the parade closes with a rug format encompassing the main themes here touched upon - the white colour, the prayer rug and the animal pelt.

Animal pelt carpet (prayer carpet), Anatolia, Vakiflar Museum

Indeed, because the shayk, head of a dervish order, is termed pust-nishin, that is the one sitting on the animal skin,  all along the 16th century (especially in Turkey and Eastern Europe, Kuhen 2018), and the dervishes used to pray over their takht-i-pust, that is a seat of animal skin as if a rug onto which perform the salat, it seems logic to recognize this rooted practices in carpets depicting animal skins.

Dervish on an animal skin, Bijapur 17th

Very few in Anatolia, these rugs share a basic field design - a rectangular shape with a kotchak motif at both ends and four legs. An earlier exemplar (here below) epitomises it. Kotchaks reportedly depicts ram's horns. Whether just sheep or any type of two horned domestic and/or wild four legged animals, they are redolent with the ancestral life-world and beliefs of Eurasian pastoralists and nomads deeply rooted also in Asia Minor.

Islam and its several branches quite soon adopted local traditions, although the traditionalists often tried hard to contrast the cult of wild animals. But sacred texts abound with saints sat on animal skins, the sheep's fleece one of them. Specifically, the Book of Poverty enumerates four different skins used by the mystics - that of the mufflon with spiralling horns one of them (two more are the skin of a liand of the black gazzelle with white legs and skin of a deer). 

Animal skin carpet, Anatolia

Some period depictions could help identify the speckled surface of the fleece. Curls appear to characterise the long as well as the short type of wool. Possibly, the curl went simplified in the weaving technique into a tiny diamond.

Indian painting of a dervish, 17th, exact copy of a Timurid folio 15th.

Post scriptum

In as much so few extant rugs help to investigate the design, one could venture to submit that the tiny "c" punctuating densely the white ground of some Anatolian carpets - the Kiz Ghiordes group - could depict the curly wool flocks. Not differently the 'Karapinar' fragment already touched upon shows a speckled design. 

We won't add to prove or enhance this idea the fact that sometimes the white reserve in these carpets looks like flayed skin. It is not actually. The characteristic shape is borrowed from the most famous Small Medallion Ushak format which is itself one of the many variants outsourced from the Ushak workshops during the 16th century. The four spandrels, and their typical drawing, are quartered large medallions where the principal indentation creates the well-known trefoil form - a cloud collar in fact. (see below the Yellow Ground Small Medallion Ushak as perfect proof).

Karapinar Small Medallion carpet (photo reconstruction)

Yellow Small medallion Ushak

Kiz Ghiordes rugs (photocourtesy rugtracker.com)

 Typifying felines' pelt with a sort of pointillism rendition of the fur design is an early use indeed as this eastern Zhou dynasty exceptional jade shows, the features of the animal convey the image of a tiger as the Cleveland Museum curators suggest. 

Eastern Zhou dynasty, tiger carved jade, The Sam and Myrna Meyers Collection

Eastern Zhou dynasty, tiger carved jade, Galerie Zacke

Bibliography

S. Kuhen, Wild Social Transcendence and the Antinomian Dervishes in A. Kallhoff, Morality of Warfare and Religion 2018

J. Rageth, A Selendi rug: an Addition to the Canon of White-GroundChintamani Prayer Rugs, Hali issue 98

S. Ionescu, Antique Ottoman Rugs in Transylvania 2006

B. Biedronska-Slota, Turkish carpets in Poland 2011

Diyarbekirli and Pinner, Four Rugs in Aksaray, Hali 39

H. Inalcik in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies, 1983 

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, al-Faqr wa al-Thawra (The Book of Poverty and Revolution) 1965

Mushin al-Musawi, Arabic Poetry - Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition 2006