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McMullan blue "Lotto" rug, ca. 1700, Western Turkey, Ushak Region. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accession Number:1972.80.8 |
Medium:Wool (warp, weft and pile); symmetrically knotted pile
This type of carpet was formerly dubbed "Holbein" but, unlike two related
groups with the same designation, it never occurs in the paintings of this
Swiss painter. It is found, however, in works of Lorenzo Lotto and is now
usually assigned his name. It also appears in other sixteenth-century
Venetian paintings and in Flemish and Dutch pictures of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Its disappearance from Western art after 1700
suggests that the once popular carpet went out of fashion and was no
longer produced in quantity or in the original production center. Here, as
in other instances, European representations are of great importance for
establishing a chronology, especially as there are no related designs in
contemporary Turkish art that would allow us to date the group by analogy.
The identifying characteristic of the "Lotto" carpets is their stark
allover design of stiffly frozen yellow arabesques placed on a bright red
ground. This McMullan carpet is a unique exception to this rule, inasmuch
as the ground is dark blue. The general arrangement and design are so
striking that the underlying composition scheme of staggered rows of
octagons and cross-shaped units both outlined by yellow arabesques was not
recognized for a long time. This arrangement was hardly changed in the
group's two hundred years of existence, except that in later examples, as
in this case, the size of the pattern became too large in relation to the
whole carpet, allowing only a very limited number of units to appear in
the field and interfering with the effect of an allover repeat pattern.
Also, in this example some of the lateral extensions of the crosslike
units are rendered in red (instead of yellow), which indicates a breakdown
of the design and implies a late production date. One realizes, of course,
that this color substitution as well as the use of red in the core of the
crosses was
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