Memling rug, fragment

From the second half of the 15th century, when Sunnite aniconism rejecting naturalistic representation strengthened and the so-call gol motifs, the strongly geometrized symbols of the Central Asian nomadic Turkmen tribes spread, the Anatolian carpets with animal figures (cf. Batari–Crivelli carpet fragment) were replaced by carpets of strictly geometric patterns composed in squares adorned with simple or more intricate geometric design. The types of these 15th–16th century early Ottoman carpets were named after the painters in whose pictures typical variants of these rugs appear. Thus, we differentiate Memling, Holbein and Lorenzo Lotto carpets. Hans Memling (c. 1430–1494) often painted throne carpets in his Madonna pictures in which rhomboids of hookshaped or stepped edges (Memling-gols) are placed into octagons. One of the earliest known specimens of such Memling carpets with gols is represented by these two fragments bought by the Museum of Applied Arts from the carpet collection of Emil Sigerus (1854–1947), a historian and ethnographer of Nagyszeben in 1917. Memling depicted such a rug e.g. in his Donne Triptych around 1485 (London, National Gallery) and on the back of his Portrait of a Young Man at Prayer, in the Flower Still Life of around 1485–1490 (Madrid, Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza).

See also: Museum With No Frontiers