A rare antique Kazak rug with Memling Guls in an indigo blue ground

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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

For more information about the above rug or to place an order please email vd@azerbaijanrugs.com
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