One of the very best Persian carpets ever woven is the Emperor Carpet – a gift from Czar Peter the Great, which ornamented the Summer Palace of the Hapsburgs.
Click above to see the fascinating 8-minute video from the Met chronicling its recent three year restoration process – including the removal of 700 patches.
And click and scroll down from here to read all the poetic inscriptions on this supreme Persian carpet, including about the ‘emerald throne of dew’ and how:
“The meadow displays a thousand green tents of rosebuds
at dawn, when the cloud pitches a tent over the rose garden”
I’m interested, though, in how the carpet was shown in 1931 in the Burlington House Exhibition of Persian Art – as organised by Arthur Upham Pope. It was displayed under tinted stage lighting … to ‘bring out’ the Persian colours. The 1931 catalogue says it was lent by Mrs Rockefeller McCormick, Chicago. But if you probe a little deeper, it was sold to Arthur Upham Pope for Mrs McCormick in 1928 – and then sold again to Pope in 1943, for the Met.
Pope is known to have published articles in the Illustrated London News as a kind of sales catalogue. For the Emperor Carpet, he wrote an article in Art News; and then used his position as Advisor for the Art Institute of Chicago to re-publish this in their Bulletin. Whatever I think about Pope amalgamation of dealing, exhibiting and ‘scholarship’, he does write well about the beauty of the carpet:
“The patterning of the carpet itself is as complicated and as perfectly designed as a symphony. The first impression is one of most unfathomable intricacy. Vines swing in great colliding spirals enriched with huge leaves and blossoms, interwoven with patterns of smaller tendrils moving with a lighter and more vivacious rhythm. In and out among the great floral forms are seen powerfully drawn animals, some ranging free and others locked in furious combat. These animal delineations show a superb mastery of expressive silhouette. A great golden lion fells a huge mythical beast with startling ferocity…”