NORTH WEST PERSIA, MID 16TH CENTURY

The present lot is a fragment comprising part of the field and border of a mid sixteenth century Tabriz carpet. Tabriz by this stage was no longer the capital; that had moved to Qazvin in 1548 as a result of the frequent Turkish incursions into North West Persia. The court style had also changed; Timurid influence is far less visible in painting of the period. The carpets made in this period in Tabriz reflect this, lacking the monumentality of conception of the early examples, and often becoming far more intimate in scale. The present lot is a fragment from just such a carpet. It relates closely to examples such as that in the Berlin Museum (Kurt Erdmann, Kurt Seven Hundred Years of Oriental Carpets, London, 1970, fig.155, p.128). It is possible that the original complete carpet did not contain a central medallion or spandrels, similar to an another example in Berlin (Friedrich Sarre and Herrmann Trenkwald, Alt-Orientalische Teppiche, Vienna and Leipzig, 1928, vol.II, pl.11).