Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism [1 ed.] 1032250429, 9781032250427

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Introduction
Part I: Ritual Spaces
1 The Red Tent in the Red City: The Caliphal Qubba in Almohad Marrakesh
2 "He Will Lift Off the Covering Which is Over All the Peoples": Seeing Through Medieval Lenten Veils
3 Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together
Part II: Public and Private Interiors
4 Le Rideau Tiré: Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France
5 The Fabric of the New: Mediating Architectural Change in Late Colonial India
6 Contrast and Cohesion: Textiles and Architecture in 1930s London
Part III: Materiality and Material Translations
7 Textiles by Other Means: Seeing and Conceptualizing Textile Representations in Early Islamic Architecture
8 The Textility of the Alhambra
9 The Textile Foundations of Ancient Andean Architecture
10 The Ruler's Clothes and the Manifold Dimensions of Textile Patterns on Muslim Funeral Architecture in the Mausoleum of the First Crimean Khans
11 A Tented Baroque: Ottoman Fabric (and) Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century
Index

Citation preview

TEXTILE IN ARCHITECTURE

This book investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today, and textile furnishings have long been used in interiors. Beyond its use as a material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. The essays edited and compiled here work across disciplines to provide new insights into the enduring relationship between textiles and architecture. The contributors critically explore the spatial and material qualities of textiles as well as cultural and political significance of textile artifacts, patterns, and metaphors in architecture. Textile in Architecture is organized into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political, religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors” explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. Including cases from Morocco, Samoa, France, India, the UK, Spain, the Ancient Andes, and the Ottoman Empire, this is essential reading for any student or researcher interested in textiles in architecture through the ages. Didem Ekici is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She is the co-editor of Housing and the City (Routledge, 2022) and Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017) as well as the author of numerous articles on modern architecture culture. She is currently working on her monograph titled Body, Cloth, and Clothing in Architecture from the Age of Mass Manufacture to the First World War. She has held research fellowships from The Wellcome Trust, The

German Academic Exchange Service, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her first book, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014), investigates the relationship between patronage, politics, and architectural style after the integration of the region into the Mongol empire. Her second book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022), analyzes how transregional exchange and the use of paper shaped building practices across the Ottoman realm. Blessing’s work has been supported by ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the British Academy, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Barakat Trust, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Basile Baudez is Assistant Professor of architectural history in the Art & Archaeology department at Princeton University. His first book Architecture et Tradition Académique au Siècle des Lumières (2012) questions the role of architects in early modern European academies. He co-edited several volumes dedicated to French architecture and curated exhibitions on architectural drawings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Art. His latest book, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021), questions the role of color in Western architectural representation from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. He currently works on an urban history of textiles in eighteenth-century Venice.

TEXTILE IN ARCHITECTURE From the Middle Ages to Modernism

Edited by Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing and Basile Baudez

Designed cover image: Erin Wurm, 2020. Stephansdom, Vienna, Austria. Photo: Wikimedia Commons First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing and Basile Baudez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing and Basile Baudez to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ekici, Didem, editor. | Blessing, Patricia, editor. | Baudez, Basile, 1974– editor. Title: Textile in architecture : from the Middle Ages to modernism / edited by Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing and Basile Baudez. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022060748 (print) | LCCN 2022060749 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032250441 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032250427 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003281276 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Textile fabrics and architecture—Case studies. Classification: LCC NA2542.6 .T49 2023 (print) | LCC NA2542.6 (ebook) | DDC 746.09—dc23/eng/20230314 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060748 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060749 ISBN: 978-1-032-25044-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25042-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28127-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of figures Contributors Introduction Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, and Basile Baudez

vii xiii 1

Part I

Ritual Spaces Didem Ekici

9

1 The Red Tent in the Red City: The Caliphal Qubba in Almohad Marrakesh Abbey Stockstill

12

2 “He Will Lift Off the Covering Which Is Over All the Peoples”: Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils Clare Frances Kemmerer

27

3 Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together Anne E. Guernsey Allen

45

Part II

Public and Private Interiors Basile Baudez 4 Le Rideau Tiré: Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France Mei Mei Rado

63

65

vi Contents



FIGURES







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xii Figures

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Haci Geraya, 94). © Bahçesaray Tarihi-Medeniy ve Arkeolojik Müze Koruması / Bakhchisarai Historical, Cultural and Archaeological Museum-Reserve Detail of a silk lampas (kemhâ) textile fragment from the crypt of the Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum. Italy or Ottoman Turkey. First half of the sixteenth century. © Bahçesaray Tarihi-Medeniy ve Arkeolojik Müze Koruması / Bakhchisarai Historical, Cultural and Archaeological Museum-Reserve a and 10.10b The tomb of the Moldavian boyar, diplomat, and statesman Luca Arbore, in Arbore, Romania. Portrait with his wife and two sons, displaying lavish Italian textile patterns (1503). General view and detail. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari Imitation of luxury textile from a detail of a representation showing the Moldavian ruler Stephen the Great, his wife Maria of Wallachia, and his sons Alexandru and Bogdan. Wall painting in the church of Voroneț, Romania (1488, painting dated to 1498). Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari Tent wall with “draped curtain” motifs, eighteenth or nineteenth century, silk, appliqué and embroidery, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, inv. no. 29-8, © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National Palace Administration Büyük Mecidiye Camii and its interior decoration and illusionistic draped curtains, commissioned by Abdülmecid, architects Garabet Balyan and Nikoğos Balyan, 1853–1856, Ortaköy, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig Four-columned marquee, first half nineteenth century, silk and metallic threads, appliqué and embroidery, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, inv. no. TSM 29–33, 29–34, 29–58, © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National Palace Administration Tent-painted ceiling (Hamidian period), Çapanoğlu mosque, 1779, Yozgat. Photo: Emily Neumeier Perdeli Kiosk with curtains in Kağıthane, “Vue du Perdeli-Kiosque”, nineteenth century, İstanbul Üniversitesi Rare Works Library Yıldız Albums, inv. no. 90489-0004 Alay Pavilion (Procession Kiosk), commissioned by Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), at Gülhane Park, adjacent to Topkapı Palace, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig Beylerbeyi seaside kiosk with crimped sloping roof, Hagop Balyan and Sarkis Balyan, commissioned by Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76), 1861, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig Bab-ı Âli “Sublime Porte” (Gate of the Grand Vizier’s Office) at Gülhane Park, adjacent to Topkapı Palace, 1844, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig

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CONTRIBUTORS

Anne E. Guernsey Allen is a Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University Southeast. She

received her MA in Art History from California State University in San Diego and her PhD from Columbia University in New York, where she specialized in the arts of Oceania and the Native Americas. Her dissertation is Space as Social Construct: The Vernacular Architecture of Rural Samoa. Her recent work focuses primarily on the architecture, cloth, and ritual in Samoa with a particular emphasis on the spatial concept of vā. She served as the editor of Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Art Association from 2008 until 2020. Basile Baudez  is Assistant Professor of architectural history in the Art & Archaeology

department at Princeton University. His first book Architecture et Tradition Académique au Siècle des Lumières (2012) questions the role of architects in early modern European academies. He co-edited several volumes dedicated to French architecture and curated exhibitions on architectural drawings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Art. His latest book, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021), questions the role of color in Western architectural representation from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. He currently works on an urban history of textiles in eighteenth-century Venice. Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Art &

Archaeology at Princeton University. Her first book, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014), investigates the relationship between patronage, politics, and architectural style after the integration of the region into the Mongol empire. Her second book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022), analyzes how transregional exchange and the use of paper shaped building practices across the Ottoman realm. Blessing’s work has been supported by ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the British Academy, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Barakat Trust, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

xiv Contributors

Olga Bush  is a scholar of Islamic Art and Architecture focusing on the medieval Mediterranean and also nineteenth- to twenty-first-century European and American Orientalism. Recently, she was both a member of The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a Resident in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She is author of the monograph, Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial (2018), book chapters, and essays in Muqarnas, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Gesta, among others, as well as co-editor of Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing in and Beyond the Lands of Islam (2015). Currently, Dr. Bush is a Visiting Scholar at Vassar College, USA. Ashley Dimmig  is the Crossman Gallery Director at the University of WisconsinWhitewater, where she also teaches art history in the Department of Art and Design. After completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan (2019), she held the position of Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. With a fine arts background in fiber arts, Dimmig is especially interested in textiles across the Islamic world. Dimmig has published various articles on approaches to Islamic art in the museum and on subjects related to her dissertation, “Making Modernity in Fabric Architecture: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period.” Didem Ekici is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She is the co-editor of Housing and the City (Routledge, 2022) and Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017) as well as the author of numerous articles on modern architecture culture. She is currently working on her monograph titled Body, Cloth, and Clothing in Architecture from the Age of Mass Manufacture to the First World War. She has held research fellowships from The Wellcome Trust, The German Academic Exchange Service, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. Andrew James Hamilton is associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of

Chicago, where he helps steward collections of art of the ancient Americas, colonial Latin American art, and contemporary Native American and Indigenous art. He is also a lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Scale & the Incas (Princeton University Press, 2018) and of a forthcoming monograph on a royal Inca tunic conserved at Dumbarton Oaks. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and holds a PhD from Harvard University. Nicole Kançal-Ferrari  is associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at

Marmara University, Istanbul. She is the author of several books, book chapters, and articles on Turkish and Islamic art and architecture. Her special interests include the material culture of the Northern Black Sea Region, with a special focus on the Golden Horde and Crimean Khanates; the culture of death in the Ottoman environment; and Islamic visual and architectural culture and its agency. Her recent publications include inventories of Muslim heritage based on extensive fieldwork in Crimea and Georgia and an edited volume on the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (miraj) and the three sacred cities of Islam (Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem) in Ottoman culture.

Contributors  xv

Clare Frances Kemmerer  is a graduate student in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies the art of the late Middle Ages, especially textiles produced in Germany. She received her MA in Religion and Visual Art from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music in 2022 and her BA in the History of Art and Religious Studies from the University of Chicago in 2020. Theodore Van Loan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Islamic Art at Washington and Lee University. He received his PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. He has been a visiting lecturer at Smith College and the University of Pennsylvania. He has received several fellowships including the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), an ACOR-CAORC predoctoral dissertation fellowship, and a summer scholarship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Abigail McGowan is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Vermont, USA. A historian of South Asian material culture in the late colonial period, she has published widely on craft development, the gendered politics of consumption, design history, domesticity, housing, retail, and domestic furnishings in India, with a focus on how changing ideas about home and domestic space have shaped the city of Bombay. She is currently researching the history of mid-century interior design in India focusing on the iconic Bombay interiors firm Kamdar, Ltd. Emily M. Orr is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt include Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols (2023–2024), Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer (2021–2022), Botanical Expressions (2019–2022), and Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s (2017). She has written essays on a range of design history topics and is the author of Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019). Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor of Textile and Dress History at Bard Graduate Center in

New York. She specializes in textiles and dress of China and France from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, with a focus on transcultural exchanges. Dr. Rado has published in the journals such as The Burlington Magazine, Fashion Theory, and Perspective: actualité de la recherche en histoire de l’art, and in edited volumes including Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and Arachné: un regard critique sur l’histoire de la tapisserie (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017). Her book The Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles in the Qing Court will be published by Yale University Press in 2024. Abbey Stockstill received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and is currently Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Southern Methodist University. She has published essays in journals such as Muqarnas and HespérisTamuda, as well as contributed to various edited volumes. Her most recent work focuses on the intersections of architecture, landscape, urbanism, and identity in the medieval Islamic West, themes explored in her forthcoming book Marrakesh & the Mountains (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024).

INTRODUCTION Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, and Basile Baudez

The concrete façade of Nottingham Contemporary, an art gallery which opened in 2009, incorporates a historical pattern designed by lace artist Louise West paying homage to the city’s textile heritage. Soft, delicate tendrils of light and airy lace contrasts starkly with the solidity of raw concrete it is embossed on. Textile is evoked not only in the surface pattern, but also in the folded precast concrete elements wrapping the building like pleated drapery (Figures 0.1 and 0.2). The architects of the building, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, belong to a generation of designers who have incorporated or taken inspiration from woven materials in novel ways using computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. Although their methods are new, the intersection of textile and architecture is millennia old. Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today. Textile furnishings have long been utilized in interiors. As portable, pliable elements, textiles have defined, enhanced, and animated architectural settings. Beyond its use as actual material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Traditional buildings from around the world as well as modern and contemporary architecture result from fabrication techniques and patterns borrowed from weaving crafts. Textile, weaving processes, and costume have been used as metaphors in architectural theory from Vitruvius to John Ruskin and Tim Ingold expressing the rapport between body and building, enclosure, social status, zeitgeist, function, materiality, etc. This book examines the theoretical and practical intersections between architecture and textile from the Middle Ages to modernism across diverse geographies. Chapters in the volume discuss both literal use and abstract conceptions of textile in ritual settings and public and private spaces. The material and symbolic aspects of fabric as spatial enclosure, architectural elements, and furnishings as well as textile motifs, forms, and fabrication techniques translated into other materials in built space are explored. Textile can be defined either by its structure—woven or twisted and braided as lace—or by its qualities—such as ephemerality, pliability, permeability, fluidity, softness—essential to its ability to shape and transform space.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-1

2  Didem Ekici et al.

FIGURE 0.1

Nottingham Contemporary designed by Adam Caruso and Peter St John. Photo: Didem Ekici.

FIGURE 0.2

Detail of the lace patterned façade. Nottingham Contemporary. Photo: Didem Ekici.

Introduction  3

Architecture’s enduring relationship with textiles has not always been manifest in Western theories of architecture. In medieval Europe, textiles constituted the most important part of architectural décor and were closely associated with architecture in the canonical texts of architectural theory. Such was the case in Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon (ca. 1120), which categorized weaving and architecture as mechanical arts at the bottom of the hierarchy of arts.1 As a series, mechanical arts moved outward from the body and dealt with the necessities of life. Accordingly, fabric making was the first and architecture—as a subset of armament—was the second mechanical art. Both provided external protection for the body by encasing it, albeit at different scales. Renaissance authors conceptualized architecture as an intellectual practice rather than a manual one. By defining the architect as a man of “learned intellect and imagination” who could project forms in mind “without any recourse to the material,”2 Leon Battista Alberti was aiming to raise the status of the architect above that of the craftsman, dissociating architecture from the mechanical arts to become one of the three arts of drawing along with painting and sculpture.3 The identification of these three arts as a set, most notably expounded by Giorgio Vasari, would have a long shelf life. Eventually, architecture was recognized as a fine art by the academic movement that spread during the Enlightenment.4 The new theories of aesthetics developed by Lord Shaftesbury, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten reinforced the fine arts—architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, and music—as a distinct artistic group with its own theoretical principles. Mechanical arts, to which weaving belonged, also received attention from art theorists on the presupposition that they had a lower status.5 In the nineteenth century, mechanization of manufacture in Europe dramatically increased textile production and made textiles more affordable leading to their abundant use in nineteenth-century interiors.6 Textile industry became one of the most potent sources of wealth while acting as an agent of oppression for the brutally expanding European colonial empires. At the same time, it triggered a crisis of fabrication due to the division of labor and loss of artistic quality and meaning in commodified objects. Textiles consequently gained increasing attention from scholars and professional design circles. This was fuelled by the increasing blurring of boundaries between decorative and fine arts promoted by movements from the Arts and Crafts in Britain to the Wiener Werkstätte and the Bauhaus.7 International exhibitions and newly established museums of applied art showcased textiles contributing to their study by scholars. Architect Gottfried Semper who took part in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 dramatically foregrounded textiles in architectural theory by highlighting the role of crafts, particularly textile arts, in the creation of space. He traced the origins of spatial enclosure to textiles, claiming “the beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles”.8 According to Semper, as textiles gave way to more durable materials, the primordial enclosure motive, which he associated with textiles, gradually transformed into the principle of Bekleidung (clothing, dressing).9 Semper’s focus on textile materials and fabrication processes in the generation of architectural form and symbols left a lasting imprint on architecture and art history. Early art historians like Julius Lessing, Jacob von Falke, Alois Riegl, Otto von Schorn, Auguste Demmin, and Aby Warburg studied garments, tapestries, rugs, furnishing fabrics, as well as textile techniques.10 Although investigations of textiles continued in architectural modernism, the expulsion of ornament by certain of its most vocal actors relegated textiles as “decorative” arts to a less prominent standing than architecture.11 Even in the Bauhaus, which sought to unite crafts and the fine arts as one of the most progressive art schools of the time, the

4  Didem Ekici et al.

weaving workshop was segregated from the rest of the school and weaving was construed as “primarily a woman’s field of work”.12 Textiles’ association with women’s work, often in domestic or in Christian monastic contexts, and their lower status in relation to the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture banished them to the margins of art history. Textiles were relegated to “design history” or in the context of some “non-Western” cultures, moved into the realms of ethnography.13 Nevertheless, sporadic studies examined textiles in architecture particularly in ancient, mediaeval, and “non-Western” contexts.14 Within the study of Islamic art history, for instance, an emphasis on textiles appeared early, especially on carpets that also play a central architectural role as interior floor coverings, but were also used in garden settings and in tents during military campaigns.15 In the decades following World War II, the ground-breaking work of architect and engineer Frei Otto on tensile and lightweight structures and transient, flexible architecture envisioned by such avant-garde groups as Archigram gave a new lease of life to the textile medium in architecture.16 Over the past few decades, architects and designers have rethought the endless possibilities of building with or taking inspiration from woven materials due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering.17 David Adjaye, Caruso St John, SANAA Architects, Bjarke Ingels, Thomas Heatherwick, Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma, Lars Spuybroek, Herzog & de Meuron, and Rem Koolhaas have applied textiles as well as textile motifs, forms, and technologies in novel ways in their building designs.18 This is part of a broader turn to materiality and a resurgence of craftsmanship in architectural practice in recent years.19 Architects have explored the atmospheric aspects of built space through materials, an approach stemming partly from the phenomenological readings of space, which have foregrounded experience, affect, and tactility bringing material qualities under scrutiny.20 A parallel shift has taken place in art, which has investigated the role of materiality in artistic processes. Accordingly, textile works presented in major art exhibitions have increased in number and fiber artists have been recently more and more showcased, as has the work of artists who evoke textiles in other materials.21 This trend is reflected in scholarly work as well. There has been a surge of critical interest in the study of textiles in art history as exemplified in the book series Textile Studies edited by Tristan Weddigen.22 Another driver of this surge of interest is the problematization of decorative and fine arts as exclusive categories. The recent studies on craftsmanship have questioned the schism between manual and intellectual labor in the process of making physical things.23 Textiles have played a central role in conceptualizing the process of making in recent scholarship due to their rich material properties, associations with craft, skill, and knowledge as well as metaphorical implications expressed via such words as “thread,” “fabric,” “knitting,” and “weaving.” Such is the case in Tim Ingold’s concept of “textility of making,” through which he defines making as “a practice of weaving,” an interplay between materials, forces, and human action.24 The present volume brings together diverse methodologies ranging from textual analysis to anthropological approaches reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of textile studies. It features thematic sections analyzing the spatial and material qualities, as well as cultural and political significance of textile artefacts, patterns, representations, and metaphors in relation to the built environment. It is not intended as a comprehensive survey of the textile medium in architecture around the world. Instead, the thematic sections generate dialogues across diverse periods and geographies in reconstructing the use and meaning of the textile medium in architecture. Textile in Architecture is divided into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political,

Introduction  5

religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors,” which explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. This last set of essays analyzes the productive and complex interconnections between weaving processes, motives, and patterns of soft architecture and the materiality of hard architecture.

Notes 1 Hugh of Saint-Victor, Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. and ed. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 2 Alberti quoted in Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 49. 3 Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940); Basile Baudez, Architecture et tradition académique au siècle des Lumières (Rennes: PUR, 2012). 5 Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert challenged the perceived lower status of mechanical arts in their Encyclopedia (1751). Isabelle Frank, “Introduction,” in The Theory of Decorative Art, ed. Isabelle Frank (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3–5. 6 For example, from 1780 to 1830, the production cost of a yard of calico cloth fell by 83 percent and that of a yard of muslin by 76 percent. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 214. 7 See the recent Brenda M. King, The Wardle Family and Its Circle. Textile Production in the Arts and Crafts Era (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019); Angela Völker, “Bauhaus und Wiener Werkstätte. Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede am Beispiel der Textilabteilungen,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Werkstätte, ed. Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Anne-Katrin Rossberg, and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2020), 182–99; T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory, From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 8 Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), 227; Spyros Papapetros, “World Ornament: The Legacy of Gottfried Semper’s 1856 Lecture on Adornment,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 309–29. 9 On Semper’s Bekleidung principle, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 85–88, 180–81, 293–302; Heidrun Laudel, Gottfried Semper: Architektur und Stil (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1991), 101–50; Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70–75. 10 Julius Lessing, Altorientalische Teppichmuster (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1877); Josef von Karabacek, Die persische Nadelmalerei Susandschird (Leipzig: Seeman, 1881); Otto von Schorn, Geschichte des Kunstgewerbes in Einzeldarstellungen Band 3: Die Textilkunst (Leipzig: G. Freytag, 1885); Jacob von Falke, Geschichte des deutschen Kunstgewerbes (Berlin: G. Grote, 1888); Jacob von Falke, Kunstgeschichte der Seidenweberei (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1913); Alois Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig: C.H. Tauchnitz, 1891); Alois Riegl, “Textile Hausindustrie in Osterreich,” Mittheilungen des k. k. Österreichischen Museums für Kunst und Industrie 4 no. 43 (1889): 411–19; Alois Riegl, “Textilkunst,” in Geschichte der technischen Künste, ed. Bruno Bucher (Stuttgart: Union deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1893); Auguste Demmin, Die Wirk- und Webekunst (Wiesbaden: Rud. Bechtold, 1893); Aby Warburg, “Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries (1907),” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, ed. Kurt W. Forster (Santa Monica: Getty Publications, 1999), 315–323, 484. 11 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” in Adolf Loos: die Schriften zur Architektur, ed. Oliver Ruf (Stuttgart: avedition, 2019), 8–17. See Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), notably 217–29 and her introduction written with Gülru Necipoğlu to Histories of Ornament, from Global to Local (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–6.

6  Didem Ekici et al.



­









Introduction  7

Bibliography Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft. New York: Berg, 2007. Andrews, Peter A. Felt Tents and Pavilions: The Nomadic Tradition and Its Interaction with Princely Tentage. London: Melisende, 1999. Atasoy, Nurhan. Otağ-i Hümayun: The Ottoman Imperial Tent Complex. Istanbul: MEPA, 2000. Baudez, Basile. Architecture et tradition académique au siècle des Lumières. Rennes: PUR, 2012. Blessing, Patricia, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, and Eiren L. Shea. Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, 300–1500. Cambridge Elements Series on the Global Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Böhme, Gernot. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Demmin, Auguste. Die Wirk- und Webekunst. Wiesbaden: Rud. Bechtold, 1893. Dickson, Michael. “Frei Otto: Researcher, Inventor and Inspired Instigator of Architectural Solutions.” AA Files 50 (2004): 36–49. Drew, Philip. New Tent Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Ettinghausen, Elizabeth S. “Woven in Stone and Brick: Decorative Programs in Seljuk and Post Seljuk Architecture and Their Symbolic Value.” In Art Turc—Turkish Art: Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Turkish Art, Geneva, 1995, edited by François Déroche, Charles Genequand, Günsel Renda, and Michael Rogers, 315–24. Geneva: Fondation Max van Berchem, 1999. Falke, Jacob von. Geschichte des deutschen Kunstgewerbes. Berlin: G. Grote, 1888. Falke, Jacob von. Kunstgeschichte der Seidenweberei. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1913. Fanelli, Giovanni and Roberto Gargiani. Il principio del rivestimento. Prolegomena a una storia dell’architettura contemporanea. Roma: Laterza, 1994. Feilberg, Carl Gunnar. La tente noire: Contribution ethnographique à l’histoire culturelle des nomades. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944. Frank, Isabelle. “Introduction.” In The Theory of Decorative Art, edited by Isabelle Frank, 1–26. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Garcia, Mark, ed. “Architextiles” special issue. Architectural Design 76, no. 6 (2016): 5–11. Golombek, Lisa. “The Draped Universe of Islam.” In Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, edited by Priscilla Soucek, 25–50. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Helmhold, Heidi. Affektpolitik und Raum: Zu einer Architektur des Textilen. Köln: Walther König, 2012. Hugh of Saint-Victor. Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts. Translated and edited by Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ingold, Tim. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013. Kapustka, Mateusz and Warren T. Woodfin, ed., Clothing the Sacred: Medieval Textiles as Fabric, Form, and Metaphor. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2015. Karabacek, Josef von. Die persische Nadelmalerei Susandschird. Leipzig: Seeman, 1881. King, Brenda M. The Wardle Family and Its Circle. Textile Production in the Arts and Crafts Era. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019. Krüger, Sylvie. Textile Architecture. Berlin: Jovis, 2009. Lange-Berndt, Petra, ed., Materiality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Laudel, Heidrun. Gottfried Semper: Architektur und Stil. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1991. Lessing, Julius. Altorientalische Teppichmuster. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1877. Loos, Adolf. “Ornament und Verbrechen.” In Adolf Loos: die Schriften zur Architektur, edited by Oliver Ruf, 8–17. Stuttgart: avedition, 2019. Löschke, Sandra Karina, ed. Materiality and Architecture. New York: Routledge, 2016. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

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Muslimin, Rizal. “Learning from Weaving for Digital Fabrication in Architecture.” Leonardo 43, no. 4 (2010): 340–49. Necipoğlu, Gülru, and Alina Payne. “Introduction.” In Histories of Ornament, from Global to Local, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, 1–6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Nerdinger, Winfried, ed. Frei Otto: Complete Works. Lightweight Constructions, Natural Design. Basel: Birkhauser, 2005. Nicolaisen, Johannes. Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Tuareg: With Particular Reference to the Tuareg of Ahaggar and Ayr. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Copenhagen, 1963. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005 (1st ed., 1996). Papapetros, Spyros. “World Ornament: The Legacy of Gottfried Semper’s 1856 Lecture on Adornment.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 309–29. Parcell, Stephen. Four Historical Definitions of Architecture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. Payne, Alina. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Payne, Alina. From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Peck, Amelia and Amy Elizabeth Bogansky. Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500– 1800. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Picon, Antoine. The Materiality of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Prussin, Labelle ed. African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Riegl, Alois. “Textile Hausindustrie in Osterreich.” Mittheilungen des k. k. Österreichischen Museums für Kunst und Industrie 4, no. 43 (1889): 411–19. Riegl, Alois. Altorientalische Teppiche. Leipzig: C.H. Tauchnitz, 1891. Riegl, Alois. “Textilkunst.” In Geschichte der Technischen Künste, edited by Bruno Bucher, 333–400. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1893. Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Schorn, Otto von. Geschichte des Kunstgewerbes in Einzeldarstellungen. Band. 3: Die Textilkunst. Leipzig: G. Freytag, 1885. Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den Technischen und Tektonischen Künsten; oder, praktische Aesthetik. Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde, vol. 1. Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Smith, T’ai. Bauhaus Weaving Theory, From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Spuybroek, Lars, ed. Textile Tectonics. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011. Völker, Angela. “Bauhaus und Wiener Werkstätte. Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede am Beispiel der Textilabteilungen.” In Die Frauen der Wiener Werkstätte, edited by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Anne-Katrin Rossberg, and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, 182–99. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020. Warburg, Aby. “Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries (1907).” In The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, edited by Kurt W. Forster, 315–323, 484. Santa Monica: Getty Publications, 1999. Weddigen, Tristan, ed. Unfolding the Textile Medium in Early Modern Art and Literature. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2011. Weddigen, Tristan ed. Metatextile: Identity and History of a Contemporary Art Medium. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2012. Weltge, Sigrid Wortman. Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. Wilckens, Leonie von. Die textilen Künste von der Spätantike bis um 1500. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991. Yonan, Michael. “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 232–48. Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006.

PART I

Ritual Spaces Didem Ekici

This section explores the role, significance, and meaning of textiles in the performance of ritual practices in built environment. Textiles have always embodied spiritual and symbolic value across time and societies. As Beverly Gordon has shown, they serve as metaphors for core cultural concepts throughout the world and archetypal myths feature frequent references to thread and cloth.1 Due to their material and symbolic attributes, thread and cloth figure in a great variety of individual and communal rituals, shaping ritual context as well as facilitating spatial interactions. According to Jean and John Comaroff, ritual is “a signifying practice” that transforms the environment in which it occurs. It is “a vital element in the processes that make and remake social facts and collective identities.”2 Textiles draped, spread, hung, and assembled to enclose, cover, demarcate, communicate, protect, and decorate have played a vital role in transforming the spaces within which ritual practices occur.3 Chapters in the section examine various ways in which textiles transform ritual contexts and define processes that shape social, political, religious concepts and identities. First, textiles form spatial enclosure or act as architectural implements either to convert a profane space into a sacred one or to define hierarchies within a sacred space. Second, thread and cloth used in ritual bonding, worn as ceremonial garments, given as votive offerings, and exchanged as gifts facilitate spatial interactions that structure ritual performances. In some cultures, fabrics themselves have been venerated and provided a focus in spaces where rituals and ceremonies take place. The symbolic and spiritual meanings attributed to such fabrics stem not only from the ritual context where they are displayed, but also from their social contexts of production and circulation.4 Weaving ritual cloth, which can be very laborious, has been one of the defining cultural practices, and the process of weaving and spaces dedicated to it have been sacred.5 Material qualities of fabric have afforded it an essential role in ritual settings. Its ephemerality and portability make the fabric particularly suited to the notion of transformation highlighting the temporal and spatial dimension of the ritual. The malleability of fabric renders rigid built space versatile by regulating movement, vision, touch, and light during ritual performances. As permeable interfaces, textiles divide and give access; conceal, layer, and reveal.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-2

10  Didem Ekici

They animate ritual contexts through their fluidity. The iconography of fabric mediates rituals by encoding the cultural beliefs and events that support community identity and by materializing the connections to land, sacred places, and the ancestral past. The iconographic content can be experienced in changing ways due to malleability and permeability of fabric. The motion of the fabric and changing light conditions either reveal or conceal possible meanings.6 The iconography and versatile qualities of textiles in ritual settings are explored by Abbey Stockstill and Clare Kemmerer. Stockstill examines the significance of the Almohad caliphal tent, the qubba, utilized during ceremonies in Marrakesh and military campaigns. The ambiguity of the Almohads’ ideological program was manifested in the qubba in terms of its expression of diverse facets of Almohad identity, its temporality, and its physical setting apart from the public. Changing visual permeability of textile is central to Kemmerer’s analysis of the mediation of the gaze through Lenten veils, which were widely used during Lent to mask the space of the altar in the late Middle Ages in German-speaking regions. She discusses how the periodic deployment and removal of fabric in the same context signify the different phases of the ritual cycle. Pliable and soft, ritual fabrics can be remarkably large manifesting an architectural scale. The Almohad banner/qubba flap and Lenten veils, respectively, in Stockstill’s and Kemmerer’s analysis are such large-scale fabrics laden with symbolism. In some cultures, these largescale fabrics when unfolded connect participants of the ritual providing visual, physical, and conceptual links between them. Anne Allen explores such use and significance of textiles during ceremonies in the Polynesian archipelago of Samoa. The intersection of architecture and cloth in the fale, the traditional Samoan building, and on the village malae, the site for important religious and community activities, provide a compelling means to express and establish social and political ties.

Notes 1 Beverly Gordon, Textiles The Whole Story: Uses, Meanings, Significance (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 18. 2 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Introduction,” in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, eds. Jean Comaroff and Joan Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xvi. 3 On ritual uses of textiles, see John Vollmer, “Textiles,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, May 14, 2018, https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ textiles-0; Maria Evangelatou, “Textile Mediation in Late Byzantine Visual Culture: Unveiling Layers of Meaning through the Fabrics of the Chora Monastery,” in Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection, ed. Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams (Washington, DC: 2019), https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/essays/evangelatou; Urmila Mohan, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Timothy Carroll, “Textiles and the Making of Sacred Space,” Textile History 48, no. 2 (2017); Cecilie Brons and Marie-Louise Nosch, eds., Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2017); Mateusz Kapustka and Warren T. Woodfin, eds., Clothing the Sacred: Medieval Textiles as Fabric, Form, and Metaphor (Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2015); Andrea M. Heckman, Andean Textiles and Rituals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). 4 Carroll, “Textiles and the Making of Sacred Space,” 197. 5 See for example, Walter E. Little, “Weaving Ritual and the Production of Commemorative Cloth in Highland Guatemala,” in Dimensions of Ritual Economy, ed. E. Christian Wells and P Patricia Ann McAnany (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008). 6 Visa Immonen, “Artifacts, Iconology, and The Visual Process: Liturgical Objects in Finland and Beyond, c.1350–1550,” Material Religion 7, no. 2 (2011): 194.

Ritual Spaces  11

Bibliography Brons, Cecilie, and Marie-Louise Nosch, eds. Textiles and Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2017. Carroll, Timothy. “Textiles and the Making of Sacred Space.” Textile History 48, no. 2 (2017): 192–210. Comaroff, Jean, and Joan Comaroff, eds. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1993. Evangelatou, Maria. “Textile Mediation in Late Byzantine Visual Culture: Unveiling Layers of Meaning through the Fabrics of the Chora Monastery.” In Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection, edited by Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams. Washington, DC, 2019. https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/essays/evangelatou. Gordon, Beverly. Textiles The Whole Story: Uses, Meanings, Significance. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. Heckman, Andrea M. Andean Textiles and Rituals. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Immonen, Visa. “Artifacts, Iconology, and The Visual Process: Liturgical Objects in Finland and Beyond, c.1350–1550.” Material Religion 7, no. 2 (2011): 194–219. Kapustka, Mateusz, and Warren T. Woodfin, eds. Clothing the Sacred: Medieval Textiles as Fabric, Form, and Metaphor. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2015. Little, Walter E. “Weaving Ritual and the Production of Commemorative Cloth in Highland ­Guatemala.” In Dimensions of Ritual Economy, edited by E. Christian Wells and Patricia Ann McAnany, 121–48. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008. Mohan, Urmila. Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Vollmer, John. “Textiles.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, May 14, 2018. https://www.encyclopedia.com/ environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/textiles-0.

1 THE RED TENT IN THE RED CITY The Caliphal Qubba in Almohad Marrakesh Abbey Stockstill

In 1133, after the death of the Almohad founder and messianic figure Ibn Tumart, his ­successor ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (d. 1163) received an oath of allegiance from the faithful as the new leader of the Almohad community at their mountain refuge of Tinmal. The ceremony was organized in stages: first came the Council of Ten, Ibn Tumart’s inner circle of advisors of which ʿAbd al-Muʾmin had once been a part; then the Council of Fifty, consisting of the leaders of those Berber tribes loyal to the Almohad cause; finally, the entire village bent the knee to ʿAbd al-Muʾmin’s leadership. The procession, which must have nearly filled the entirety of the small mountain town, required a fitting stage for this accession to power. According to medieval author Ibn Abi Zarʿ (d. 1326), such a stage was crafted through the use of a grand tent (Ar. qubba) erected outside of Tinmal’s congregational mosque, a bold setting that drew upon allegorical and martial connotations.1 The tent would appear time and again throughout accounts of imperial Almohad ceremonies and military campaigns, but little remains in the material record of this highly symbolic structure. What it looked like and how it interacted with the surrounding architectural and natural landscape are open questions for the art historian. Like much of the Almohad contributions to the architectural trajectory of the Maghrib in particular, as well as the Islamic west more generally, the answers must be sought through an oblique approach. The account mentioned above is among the earliest in terms of the imperial narrative, although notably later than many of the more contemporarily recorded accounts, as Ibn Abi Zarʿ was writing in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It stages the shift of power between Ibn Tumart and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin in the context of the sacred, the preordained, even if Ibn Abi Zarʿ professes a deep skepticism about Ibn Tumart’s posthumous wishes. The use of a tent announces the authority of ʿAbd al-Muʾmin as the new caliph, as well as integrates the nascent Almohad dynasty (c. 1147–1269) into a long tradition of imperial signs and signifiers that wove together religious righteousness and political authority. The qubba is central to this aura of sanctity, and regardless of the historical development of this motif—whether it was adapted to suit the later Almohad ritual program or was the originator of such a program itself—its use continued throughout the century of Almohad rule.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-3

The Red Tent in the Red City  13

Once fully established as the reigning dynasty in the Maghrib, and having settled in their capital at Marrakesh, the Almohads established a hierarchical series of spaces to mediate between urban and rural, public and elite. Consisting of a royal quarter known by the feminine diminutive Tamarrakusht, as well as a garden complex to the south of the walled urban enceinte called the Agdal, these sites regulated access to the figure of the caliph. Both the royal quarter and the garden were walled, and as they extended southwards, they took advantage of an incremental incline in the topography. This created an optical illusion in which the highly regulated spaces of Tamarrakusht and the Agdal looked over the city, and were set against the dramatic backdrop of the Atlas Mountains, which embodied the spiritual center of the Almohads at Tinmal.2 The mountains were also the tribal homeland of the Masmuda, the Berber confederation to which Ibn Tumart had belonged, and from which the Almohads drew much of their military and political strength. In the first of the spaces, Tamarrakusht, was a large open square known as the ra ḥba that was bordered by a menagerie, an Islamic school (madrasa), and a library.3 Although the ra ḥba was attested to have a number of gates, access into the space was mediated by a chain running across them, forcing entrants to stop and dismount before moving forward.4 The control over this space was part of the general caliphal architectural oeuvre in the Islamic west, and created a distinction between public space and a ritualized, more sacred space.5 At the northern end of the raḥba, positioned at the intersection of the walled city and the newer, more formalized Almohad spaces, stood the qubba. It was here that the Almohad caliph received foreign and tribal dignitaries and held public audiences; it was also the site of a ritual review of the military, organized by tribe, following Berber custom and known as the jumuʿ.6 The qubba is described as being the same one that was also carried into battle, further underscoring the military associations of the tent, and although no specific color is mentioned in relation to the ra ḥba’s qubba, descriptions of battles elsewhere mention a large red qubba erected on the field. Given the martial associations of the jumuʿ, it is reasonable to assume that both qubbas would have been dyed red. The second of these spaces, the Agdal, was also associated with military performances, although these were couched in more spiritual dimensions. Ibn Sahib al-Salat (d. 1198), an Almohad court historian under the second Almohad caliph Abu Yaʿqub Yusuf (d. 1184), chronicled processions through the garden and into the city before and after expeditions from the capital.7 A key component of these processions was the dual appearance of two Qur’ans, one belonging to the early Islamic (often referred to as the rāshidūn or “rightly guided”) caliph ʿUthman (d. 656) and the other belonging to Ibn Tumart. Flags of white, yellow, and red were flown around a carved chest containing ʿUthman’s Qur’an, carried by a red she-camel, which was followed by a mule carrying a chest of gold-plated silver containing Ibn Tumart’s. Both chests were overlain with expensive brocades, and were used in rituals of urban cleansing as well as military celebrations, performed by the caliph.8 As such, they were likely used in conjunction with the caliphal qubba, and added another dimension of political authority and spiritual contiguity to the ever-developing mythos surrounding the figure of the Almohad caliph. The qubba was thus an integral part of the Almohad presence in Marrakesh, and elsewhere in the empire. It created a physical space where the caliph, both a figure of political power as well as a religious leader, interacted with the public in a highly mediated setting. Restricted access to walled spaces that were tangential to yet outside of the city created a liminal atmosphere—a space between the urban and rural, secular and sacred—in which

14  Abbey Stockstill

the performance of ethnoreligious rituals and performances took on an aura of heightened significance for the Almohad court.9 The qubba formed the focal point of these performances, a visual marker of the caliph’s presence.

The Ambiguity of the qubba in Form and Function Although references to the Almohad caliphal tent are fairly well-established in the historical sources, there is a notable vagueness to their descriptions that poses challenges to a direct art historical analysis. The term most frequently used in the Arabic sources is qubba, which carries with it a sense of roundness in space and a domical structure.10 The materiality of such a structure is left implicit however, and the term can refer to either permanent, temporary, or vernacular architecture. Further obscuring direct analysis, references to the Almohad qubba fluctuate between the built, permanent, architectural environment, and a temporary, mobile context. Determining precisely why this term was used, and what it was intended to convey in the Almohad context, requires drawing on comparative examples instead. The term qubba was also used in contemporaneous reference to the pavilion erected in Marrakesh by the Almohads’ predecessors, the Almoravids. The Qubba al-Barudiyyin, a 12-meter-tall stone-and-brick quadrangular structure, stood near the precise center of twelfth-century Marrakesh. Built in 1126, and later acquiring the eponym “al-Barudiyyin” from a nearby street, the qubba features a double-shelled dome supported by four brick piers, covered in plaster and carved in opulent stucco.11 The exterior of the dome, with its bold geometric scheme—an interlacing series of arches topped by a radiating seven-pointed star—belies the soft, almost organic nature of the interior, where shell motifs, muqarnas niches, and floriated leaf forms dominate (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The effect is one of structural dichotomy: sharply delineated and static on the exterior, alive and flowing on the interior. The Qubba al-Barudiyyin was likely an auxiliary structure attached to the new congregational mosque erected under the Almoravid emir ʿAli ibn Yusuf as part of an extensive campaign to turn Marrakesh into a more cosmopolitan imperial capital. The term qubba may even be an anachronistic misnomer, as the term was more commonly used in an architectural sense in reference to a tomb (although the precise historical moment when this shift occurred in the Maghrib is somewhat ambiguous). Xavier Salmon has proposed that the Qubba al-Barudiyyin was instead a mīdāʾa, an ablution fountain, intended as part of an extensive network of waterworks to bring drinking water, cisterns, and irrigation channels into the city.12 But the Qubba al-Barudiyyin nevertheless remained one of the few structures recognizably identified as a qubba from Marrakesh’s early history, and therefore cannot be disregarded among the comparative meanings of the term, particularly for the period of transition between the Almoravid and Almohad eras. Perhaps a more revealing interpretation of the qubba comes from the realm of philology, which connects the term qubba to its Semitic roots, and associates the tent with creating a sacred space. Historian and theologist Michael Homan has connected the term to the Hebrew description for the tabernacle in Numbers 25:8, as well as the Syriac qbbʾ, referring to a vaulted tent that housed a shrine.13 Further evidence describes the qubba in conjunction with betyls, sacred stones that dotted the pre-Islamic landscape of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. Early Islamic accounts describe these qubba as tents of a smaller proportion than those used as habitations for Bedouin nomads, constructed out of leather rather than hairhide. Even more striking, these same accounts note that these tents were dyed red, and the

The Red Tent in the Red City  15

FIGURE 1.1

Exterior cupola of the Qubba al-Barudiyyin. Photo: Abbey Stockstill.

FIGURE 1.2

Interior of the Qubba al-Barudiyyin. Photo: Abbey Stockstill.

16  Abbey Stockstill

constituent parts were capable of being carried by a single camel.14 It was this tent that was later adapted in narratives of the early Islamic military campaigns, with the qubba serving as the central tent for the Prophet Muhammad, thereby removing the tent’s pagan origins while making good use of its sacred associations. Marrakesh was no stranger to tented architecture; indeed, early accounts of the city’s character describe it as something of an informal camp set up by the Almoravid emir Abu Bakr ibn ʿUmar (d. 1087). Abu Bakr had negotiated for the land within the Haouz Basin, a semiarid region located north of the High Atlas Mountains, as a base from which to expand further into the Maghribi interior. With this purpose in mind, he focused primarily on the utilitarian concerns of the site rather than urban infrastructure and expansion. The Almoravid forces, like their Almohad successors, were formed from a heterogenous group of Berber confederations, many of which had distinct tribal customs and longstanding rivalries that frequently destabilized the empire-building project. Maintaining these traditions was simultaneously an important act of identity expression and a potentially disastrous endeavor. Following the customs of the Lamtuna tribe, who formed the tribal basis of the Almoravids, much of the early settlement was apparently populated by tented structures and surrounded by low, temporary fortifications. The resulting profile was more of an expansive military encampment rather than a clearly defined urban space of permanent dwellings, and it would take successive generations of Almoravid emirs before the city saw a constructed morphology take form.15 The character of Marrakesh in its first generations is uniquely attributable to the Almoravids’ connection to their Lamtuna heritage, a matrix of social customs that informed both their political landscape as well as their cultural habits. Hailing from the Sahara, the Lamtuna economy was based on facilitating trade routes across the desert, an economy defined by their nomadism and their reliance on tented accommodations. Medieval Arabic sources make a clear distinction between those Berber tribes who were mainly nomadic, characterized as “men of tents and desert dwellers,” and the more transhumant or semi-settled populations, who moved in accordance with seasonal herding needs.16 The Lamtuna fulfilled the archetypal expectations of the former category, a perception exaggerated by their symbiotic relationship with the established trading towns on the fringes of the Sahara. This stands in stark, if slightly exaggerated, comparison to the other tribal contingent involved with the founding of Marrakesh, the Masmuda. Occupying the territory from the High Atlas Mountain passes into the Haouz Basin around Aghmat, the Masmuda had been involved in the early negotiations for Marrakesh’s territory. They later settled in Marrakesh as part of the Almoravid military, although they would not rise to wide political prominence until they formed the core elite of the later Almohad movement. Their economy was based on seasonal herding between the mountains and the plains, which required a degree of mobility at least on a seasonal basis, but that did not prevent a tradition of vernacular architecture from developing.17 On the contrary, given the extreme temperature variations, as well as the need for fortification, the early appearance of pisé and mud-brick construction among High Atlas communities is hardly surprising. The Masmuda brought these traditions with them to Marrakesh, contributing to an early urban profile that blended tented and vernacular architecture. The dichotomy set up between these two tribal groups, the Lamtuna and the Masmuda, would in Ibn Khaldun’s (d. 1406) theorization be mapped onto the political tensions between the Almoravids and the Almohads.18 Ibn Tumart, himself a member of the Masmuda, utilized

The Red Tent in the Red City  17

the differences between the two in his incendiary criticism of the Almoravid elite.19 While the extent to which the two groups were separated by sociopolitical factors has likely been exaggerated in the historical record for narrative effect, the distinctions between the two are nevertheless fundamental to reconstructing Marrakesh’s medieval past. Key among these distinctions are their differences in habitat, between the Lamtuna tents and the Masmuda pisé tradition. But rather than posing this comparison as an impassable civilizational gulf—a view neither methodologically sound nor historically accurate—instead I would like to question the role of the Almohad qubba within these social boundaries. The qubba served as the framing architecture for the Almohad caliph’s engagement on a public scale, and as such, mirrors the multivalent modes of engagement that characterized the Almohad expression of identity. For the Masmuda, the clan to which Ibn Tumart belonged and later forming the core of Almohad elite, the tent was not a structure associated with their own habitation practices, or at least, not on a monumental or geostrategic level. Moreover, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (d. 1163), Ibn Tumart’s successor and the first Almohad caliph, was not from the Masmuda, but from the Kumiya branch of the Zanata Berbers, another transhumant group that had historically occupied the central Maghrib. This complicated the political negotiation of power, requiring the Muʾminid dynasty to establish a consistent and reiterated connection with Ibn Tumart and the Masmuda over the course of successive generations of rule. If the tent as a residence was associated with the Sanhaja, the tent as a caliphal space was necessarily something else, and its role within Almohad performance was designed to simultaneously echo this association with Ibn Tumart and his lineages as well as promote an ambiguity between the spiritual and physical planes. This liminality or ambiguity was amplified by the context in which we find the qubba, consistently placed in spaces set apart from the general public. In Marrakesh, the qubba was positioned within the raḥba or the Agdal Garden, both spaces that restricted access to the caliph and which exhibited an ambivalent relationship to the urban enceinte. The same occurred in martial settings as well, as the Almohad armies were continuously on the move in pursuit of expanding or maintaining the heterogenous empire. While on progress, the qubba would have formed the heart of a delineated area known as the afrāg, a term of Berber origin that described a place of refuge in a potentially hostile environment.20 This can certainly describe a battlefield, but it may also have indicated a particular tension within the ranks of the Almohad forces, many of whom had been involuntarily conscripted on a temporary basis. The Almohad solution to countering this tension was to create an enclosed space near the center of the camp in which to erect the qubba, a practice that continued the theme of caliphal distinction while away from an urban setting.21 Ibn Tumart, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, and the dynasty of caliphs that followed were keenly aware of the tension between the heterogenous communities of their empire. To overcome these divisions in favor of a unifying sense of solidarity (what medieval historian Ibn Khaldun would refer to as ʿaṣabiyya), they consciously employed ideological topoi that read ambivalently, connecting the Almohads to multiple histories. This included the creation of genealogies first for Ibn Tumart, and then for ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, that connected them to the family of the Prophet, thereby bolstering the Mahdist claims of the former and the caliphal ambitions of the latter.22 Meanwhile, references to the Andalusi Umayyads were rife, including the Qur’an of ʿUthman mentioned above, and even the use of the red tent may have drawn upon Andalusi Umayyad precedent (although this particular tent was referred to as a surādiq rather than qubba).23 This was set against the background of intertribal politics, in which the

18  Abbey Stockstill

Almohads’ Masmuda elite and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin’s Zanata ancestry threatened to undermine the delicate balance achieved as part of Ibn Tumart’s charismatic teaching. Taken literally, these referents have been understood by modern scholars as chaotic or contradictory, but their evident success over several generations of Almohad caliphs indicates that they functioned multivalently instead. The Almohad qubba harkened back to both Prophetic and Umayyad lineages, while the use of a temporary structure for public caliphal engagement placed the figure of the caliph in a liminal temporal and geographic space.

Material Clues to the Almohad Qubba The historical references to the qubba and its etymological associations establish the A lmohad tent as a central component of Almohad performance, integrating it into a liminal landscape that emphasizes the ambiguity of the dynasty’s ideological program. But any visual interpretations of the qubba must also engage with the materiality of such an object, tying the metaphorical to the physical. Despite a complete absence in the material record of any tent panels from the Almohad period, there does remain a small collection of textiles distributed throughout a number of church treasuries and European museums that can inform us about the physical processes, motifs, and epigraphy associated with Almohad production. There are also more oblique references in manuscript paintings and narrative descriptions that expand upon the nature of tents in the medieval Islamic west more generally. Utilizing these sources is key to moving beyond the summary mentions of the qubba in the contemporary Almohad chronicles. One of the few extant textiles that can be reliably connected to the Almohad court is the pennant infamously referred to as the “Banner of Las Navas de Tolosa,” housed in the Monastery of Santa María de la Real de Las Huelgas in the northern Spanish city of Burgos (Figure 1.3). According to legend, this banner was part of the loot carried back to the kingdom of Castile after the Almohads lost the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on July 16, 1212. Still considered by many to be a turning point in the course of the Reconquista, the battle quickly took on mythological dimensions, and the banner became a talismanic relic of Spain’s nascent victory over Islam. Recent scholarship has debated the legend of the banner’s origins, and it is now widely considered not to be part of the 1212 spoils of war, but rather a tribute obtained by Ferdinand III in the course of his Andalusi conquests in the middle of the thirteenth century.24 The textile, in its current condition, measures 3.3 × 2.2  m, although restoration analysis has revealed that it was originally much larger, with narrow strips cut from the two longer sides as well as a possible epigraphic band naming a patron, date, or place of production from the bottom edge (although this latter assertion is largely speculative).25 Successive restorations in the seventeenth century, in 1860, and in 1955 have changed both the proportional ratios of the banner’s inscriptions and decorative motifs; thus, while the original today is roughly twice the average height of a man, the original was probably much larger. Woven from red, white, and gold silk, the banner uses the split weave technique, creating an extraordinarily fine ground into which the rest of the ornamental elements are integrated. Four Qur’anic inscriptions encased in bands of white braid form a square around the center of the banner, interspersed with four stars of interlaced tracery at each corner of the square. These surround a central motif of an eight-pointed star contained within a ring of alternating stars and circles. The star is formed out of the word al-mulk, “the dominion” or

The Red Tent in the Red City  19

FIGURE 1.3

Banner of Las Navas de Tolosa, thirteenth century, 3.3 × 2.2 m, Monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, Burgos.

20  Abbey Stockstill

“the power”, woven in a fine Maghribi calligraphic script, inscribed eight times and interwoven with its repetitions. Three bands are outlined in the same white braid along the upper register; the upper and lower feature horizontal lozenges containing the shahāda, the Islamic profession of faith: “There is no God but God, Muhammad is his Messenger,” while the central band contains another Qur’anic quotation. Known as the Surāt al-Naḥl (16:98), the verse reads “In God I find refuge from Satan the accursed,” and is followed by a partial blessing on the Prophet (ta ṣliya), “The blessing of God be upon our lord and master Muhammad, the honored prophet, and upon his family and friends. Health and Peace.” Eight lobes run along the bottom edge of the banner, white circles encased by golden crescents, and are inscribed with invocations for specific blessings. Although they are now much deteriorated, Rodrigo Amador de los Ríos was able to record them in his 1893 study of the banner. From right to left, they read: “everlasting well-being” (al-ʿāfiya al-bāqiya), “unceasing exultation” (al-ghibṭa al-mutta ṣila), “perpetual integrity” (al-salāma al-dāʾ ima), “…well-being” (al-ʿāfiya…, the inscription was corrupted), “…blessings” (al-baraka…), “…well-being” (al-ʿāfiya…), “perpetual integrity” (al-salāma al-dāʾ ima), “everlasting well-being (al-ʿāfiya al-bāqiya).26 The banner’s various inscriptions and motifs are highly talismanic, incorporating blessings and Qur’anic quotes over most of the fabric’s surface. The pattern of apparent repetition along the lower lobes, moving toward the center and back out again, creates a ritualistic invocation, while the Qur’anic quotation along the top of the banner echoes the request for protection. Whether these inscriptions were read or not, their presence and the practice of weaving them into the cloth would have imbued the banner with potentially magical or religious protective properties. This quality is only heightened, however, by the careful and detail-oriented craftsmanship that allowed the banner to be read from both sides. In her analysis of the banner, Miriam Ali-de-Unzaga has demonstrated that the two bands running vertically on the leftand right-hand sides of the banner were inscribed in a reversed script that would have been more legible from the opposite side of the fabric.27 Requiring a great deal of technical skill and detailed labor, the reversible weaving flipped the direction of the banner’s legibility, allowing for a fluid quality that shifted its meaning depending on which side the viewer engaged with. Looking at the Qur’anic quotations forming the central square in more detail, we see verses from the Surāt al- Ṣaff (61, “the chapter of the Ranks”) divided into four parts. The first verse, 61:10, runs along the top of the banner and is legible from the front, saying, “O you who have attained faith! Shall I show you a bargain that will deliver you from a painful torment?” The next verse, 61:11, is split between the vertical band on the left and on the right, and only legible from the back of the textile. It begins on the left, “You are to believe in God and His Apostle, and to strive hard in God’s cause with your possessions and your lives.” The right continues the verse, and begins the next, 61:12, reading as “This is better for you, did you but know it. He will forgive you your sins and will admit you into gardens.” The verse is continued on the bottom band, read from the front, “through which rivers flow, and to fine dwelling places of perpetual bliss…” though the end of the inscription has been lost in the course of the banner’s various restorations. The character of Surāt al- Ṣaff is both martial and paradisiacal, promising heavenly rewards to those who fight for the Islamic cause. As such, it is a particularly apt verse to include in a military textile such as this banner; a comparative example from Merinid Fez also adapts the same verses in a similar construction, although they notably do not feature the reversed script of the earlier banner.28 This has led some scholars to propose a later date for the banner, and some have questioned its Almohad provenance, placing it instead among a

The Red Tent in the Red City  21

collection of Merinid-era (1248–1465) banners in other Spanish ecclesiastical treasuries. But while this interpretation of the banner’s origin is certainly possible given the chaotic provenance and questionable historical preservation, it neglects other well-attested connections to the Almohad court and overemphasizes the more generic conventions of Qur’anic phrasings. The use of Surāt al-Ṣaff on the banner was part of a tradition among the Almohads that utilized the Qur’an in conjunction with Ibn Tumart’s own compendium of religious teachings, known as Aʿazz mā yuṭlab (“The Greatest Object of Desire”). He advocated for personal responsibility and issued a moral imperative to command right and forbid wrong, striving forever in the course of God’s cause, echoing the exhortation in the sura.29 The Almohads can certainly not lay sole claim to the usage of the verse—both the Andalusi Umayyads before them and the Merinids after them would incorporate it—but the phrasing does take on a particular resonance in light of the Almohad philosophy. In particular, the verse’s usage ritualized military action by placing the Almohads into a longer, deeper history with their forebears, among them the Andalusi Umayyads as well as the Prophet Muhammad and the early community of believers. There is also the striking red color of the banner to consider. Red was demonstrably favored for objects associated with Almohad imperial performance, most notably the red qubba. Other objects included a covering for ʿUthman’s copy of the Qur’an (itself an object taken from the Andalusi Umayyad treasury in Córdoba), a binding for the copy of Ibn Tumart’s teachings and the Qur’an, as well as official documents that utilized red ink and

FIGURE 1.4

Detail of Canticle 181 depicting the Almohad forces at right, under a white banner. Cantigas de Santa Maria, Codex Rico, MS TI.1, El Escorial.

22  Abbey Stockstill

FIGURE 1.5

Detail of Canticle 181, showing the upper left panel (L) and the lower right panel (R). The Merinid forces are on the left, with the blue-and-white zigzag pennants hanging from their tents; that pennant is absent from the Almohad tents shown on the right. Cantigas de Santa Maria, Codex Rico, MS TI.1, El Escorial.

red paper.30 The association between the Almohads and the color red was so strong that the Merinids consciously adopted white and green in their own architectural foundations, and utilized yellow banners in their military offensives against their predecessors, deliberately avoiding red in their imperial contexts.31 There is one more knot to untangle with regard to the Almohad banner, and that is whether or not it was a banner at all. Most accounts attest that the Almohads were known for flying white banners, not red ones, thought to evoke purity of purpose. Indeed, they were identified by their white flags even in Christian accounts of their exploits, as evidenced by the depiction of the Almohad forces lead by Abu Hafs ʿUmar al-Murtada (d. 1266) in the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria (Figure 1.4). The banner’s original size was likely a quarter to a third larger than its current state, and it is reasonable to suggest that it was instead part of the red caliphal qubba that appeared on the battlefield.32 This would also explain the use of the reversed Qur’anic inscriptions discussed above; if the panel was long enough to be pulled aside as part of the entrance into the qubba, then both portions of the sūra would have been legible. In two other panels of the same cantiga, the forces of both the Merinids and the Almohads are shown with their tents erected on the field of battle, the only distinction between their two camps being the blue-and-white zigzag pattern on the  Merinids’ flag (Figure 1.5). In both configurations, the front flaps of the tent are depicted pulled back, revealing the central support in what is presumably a rounded tent. The lower border is tacked back, and in the case of the Almohad banner from Las Huelgas, this would have made the lower inscription describing the paradisical garden illegible from the front. But the central verse of the sūra, emphasizing the dual exhortations to believe and to strive, would have been clear for all to see. The tents in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, although useful for speculating on the use and manipulation of fabric panels, cannot be understood as direct depictions of Almohad tents however. While banners and flags were a common identifier in medieval miniatures, architecture (both permanent and temporary) was more frequently depicted as a stylized yet

The Red Tent in the Red City  23

anonymous setting. Moreover, the tents depicted were part of the general military encampment, not the ceremonial qubba of the Almohad caliph. As discussed above, the qubba was a decidedly different structure from the nomadic or military tent, domed rather than peaked. Later, post-Almohad descriptions of tents, such as those from Don Gonçalez de Clavijo, reveal an awareness of different types of tented construction among Spanish Christians, even as late as the fifteenth century. De Clavijo, a Madrid nobleman serving as an ambassador to the court of Timur in 1404, describes the tents of the Central Asian court with a highly developed technical vocabulary, differentiating between different structural techniques and material practicalities. In particular, he uses the term copa, or dome, to describe a particular form of trellis tent construction, smaller in size than other residential tents and used in imperial receptions.33 The connection to qubba, and its ceremonial usage, suggests that a rounded or domed tent was tied to specific cultural memory, and while de Clavijo may not have been thinking of the Almohads in comparison, this etymological link may give us a clue to the qubba’s original form.

Ideological Contradiction & Tactile Fluidity The Almohad caliphal qubba was part of an imperial program of performative presence that blurred historical and social boundaries. It drew upon precedents from Prophetic and Umayyad traditions that incorporated Almohad reformism into a much longer trajectory of faith-based militarism. The red tent, both martial and spiritual in origin, collapsed these histories into the immediate present, making the past—imagined and mythologized— tangible. Originally crowning the transfer of power between Ibn Tumart and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, the qubba was neither an emblem of a nomadic past, which had been definitively associated with their Almoravid predecessors, nor an expression of purely militaristic intent. As it was displayed and utilized in Marrakesh, the qubba instead occupied the interstitial space between urban and nomadic, creating a stasis in which the figure of the Almohad caliph occupied both identities simultaneously. Its military connotations were echoed by the Qur’anic quotations that may have been associated with it, ritualizing military action as dictated by the caliph’s leadership, and casting a sacral tone over the spaces it occupied and those who engaged with the tent itself.34 These apparent contradictions were, in fact, part of the fluidity of the Almohad program, creating an imperial identity that could “code switch” depending on context and audience. The portability of the qubba, and its historical associations, were the visual expression of this tendency to contradiction and fluidity, and became so indelibly associated with the Almohads that successive dynasties avoided using the color red in excess quantities so as to distinguish themselves apart.

Notes 1 Ibn Abī Zarʿ, Rawd al-Qirtas, trans. Ambrosio Huici Miranda (Valencia: Intellect, 1964), II: 371. 2 Abbey Stockstill, “From the Kutubiyya to Tinmal: The Sacred Direction in Mu’minid Performance,” in The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics, ed. A. Hilal Uğurlu and Suzan Yalman (Chicago: Intellect, 2020), 211–13. 3 Amira Bennison, “Power and the City in the Islamic West,” in Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society, ed. Amira Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne (London: Routledge, 2007), 87. 4 al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-ab ṣār fī mamālik al-am ṣār: l’Afrique moins l’Egypte, ed. and trans. M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris: Geuthner, 1927), 184–85.

24  Abbey Stockstill









The Red Tent in the Red City  25







26  Abbey Stockstill

Fierro, Maribel. “Red and Yellow: Colors and the Quest for Political Legitimacy in the Islamic West.” In And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, 79–97. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Garía, Sénén A. “The Masmuda Berbers and Ibn Tumart: An Ethnographic Interpretation of the Rise of the Almohad Movement.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 18, no. 1 (1990): 3–24. Ghouirgate, Mehdi. “Un palais en marche: le camp caliphal almohade.” In Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212–2012: miradas cruzadas, edited by Patrice Cressier and Vicente Salvatierra Cuenca, 159–70. Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2014. Higuera, Teresa Pérez. Objetos e imágenes de al-Andalus. Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, Lunwerg Editores, 1994. Homan, Michael M. To Your Tents, O Israel! The Terminology, Function, Form, and Symbolism of Tents in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Boston: Brill, 2002. Hopkins, J. F.P., and Nehemia Levtzion, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Hubert, Serge. “La semantique politique du jeu de couleurs merinide: pureté et clarité, blancheur et verdeur (xiii-xv siècles).” Al-Masāq 29, no. 1 (2017): 13–40. Huici Miranda, Ambrosio. Historia Política del Imperio Almohade. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000. Ibn Abī Zarʿ, Rawd al-Qirtas, trans. Ambrosio Huici Miranda (Valencia: n. p., 1964) Ibn Abī Zarʿ, Rawd al-Qirtas. Edited by Abdelwahab Benmansour. Rabat: Imprimerie Royale, 1999. Ibn al-Qattan, Na ẓm al-Jumān li-tartīb mā salafa min akhbār al-zamān. Edited by Mahmūd ʿAlī Makkī. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1990. Lammens, Henri. “Le culte des bétels et les processions religieuses chez les Arabes préislamites.” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 17 (1919): 39–101. Pavón Maldonado, B. “Arte símbolo y emblemas en la España musulmana.” Al-Qantara 6 (1985): 397–450. Salmon, Xavier. La Qubbat al-Bârûdiyyin: Trésor almoravide de Marrakech. Marrakech: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication du Royaume du Maroc, 2018. Stockstill, Abbey. “A Tale of Two Mosques: Marrakesh’s Masjid al-Jamiʿ al-Kutubiyya.” Muqarnas 25 (2018): 65–82. Stockstill, Abbey. “From the Kutubiyya to Tinmal: The Sacred Direction in Muʾminid Performance.” In The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics, edited by A. Hilal Uğurlu and Suzan Yalman, 197–217. Chicago: Intellect, 2020.

2 “HE WILL LIFT OFF THE COVERING WHICH IS OVER ALL THE PEOPLES” Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils Clare Frances Kemmerer

The practice of Lenten veiling, widespread in the late Middle Ages in German- speaking regions, expanded the fasting practice associated with Quadragesima to incorporate abstention from images in addition to abstention from certain foods. The Lenten veil was in the Middle Ages referenced as a cortina, vela picta, or velum quadragesimale1; in the sixteenth century, the terms Fastentüch and Hungertüch replaced the earlier Latin terminology.2 These various terms describe liturgical textile used during Lent to mask the space of the altar, creating or enhancing the physical divide between the altar and the congregation.3 The earliest references to the existence of the textile can be found in a Swiss text from 895, but the practice does not seem to have become widespread until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by which time the textiles are referenced in the inventories of many monasteries and parish churches in England and in German-speaking Northern Europe.4 In some places, as in Worcester (1240) and Exeter (1287), the textiles were a required component of parish church treasuries.5 The textiles played a complex and key role in the liturgies of Holy Week, in which they worked in tandem with permanent architectural features to affect perceptions of sanctity and distance from the divine through the manipulation of vision.6 While these veils have most often been interpreted by scholars of medieval textiles as tools of division, creating a “fast of the vision” by separating the altar from the nave, in this essay I will explore Lenten veils as permeable, temporary supplements to ecclesiastical architecture.7 Functioning in a membrane-like fashion, these monumental textiles restricted and modified the kinds of sight possible within the sacred space of the church, governing the light and images passing into the nave and the gazes laid upon the altar. This governance was key to the congregation’s preparation for Easter, encouraging fasting, self-examination, and willingness to clearly see the story of Christ’s resurrection. This paper will explore how embroidered and painted veils used their differing material and iconographic aspects to model appropriate types of devotional looking. Today, Lenten veils from the medieval and early modern periods are housed in museums, cathedral treasuries, and monastic houses throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; no

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-4

28  Clare Frances Kemmerer

English examples are known to have survived, having likely perished in the Reformation.8 Survivals are extensive enough that different forms can be discerned: blank, geometric, and checkerboard sheets as at Halberstadt; embroideries of the Passion as at Lüne; and cycles of Old and New Testament scenes, often painted rather than embroidered as at Gurk and Zittau (Figures 2.1–2.5).9 Johannes Emminghaus has explored these categories in specific relation to geography and church context; this essay will focus particularly on veils with surface images, namely whitework Lenten veils produced in Germany in the fourteenth century, and painted veils produced in Germany and Austria in the fifteenth century. These decorated veils offer a particular complication to the fasting function of the hungertüch, as they add images to the church space rather than subtracting them in the manner of the earlier blank or cross-marked sheet.10 Lenten veils have received significant scholastic attention in German art historical scholarship. However, these magnificent textile additions to architecture have received passing mentions in English-language studies of medieval church architecture and textile production. Joseph Braun’s 1912 Handbuch der Paramentik traced the origins and evolution of the Lenten veiling tradition in Western medieval Christianity, while also providing a near-complete list of existing Lenten veils.11 This history of the Lenten veil has since been expanded by Emminghaus, who in the late 1970s provided further context for the ritual use of the veils, their styles, and archival materials recording the creation and use of veils throughout Europe.12 Two themes primarily emerge from these histories of the Lenten veil: the use of veils as pseudo-architectural divides, encouraging the fast of the congregation

FIGURE 2.1

Lenten veil. 1250–1325. Linen. 190 × 340 cm. Halberstadt Cathedral Treasury, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Inv. Nr. 276. Photo: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archaeologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Juraj Lipták, 2008.

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  29

through physical division, and stylistic trends on the surface of veils, as described above. This essay seeks to unify these two aspects of the veil—its role as a massive architectural supplement and as an illustrated worship aid—to better understand how the textiles worked in tandem with their architectural surroundings to prepare medieval Christians for Easter.

Looking at and Through Veils: Reception and Embroidered Technique The materiality, scale, and mode of decoration shaped the types of looking demanded by Lenten veils. Of the surviving German veils, almost all are part of the tradition of opusteutonicum, a form of white-on-white embroidery associated with but not exclusively used during Lent.13 Whitework examples exist from Heiningen, Isenhagen, Altenberg, Brandenburg, Zehdenick, and Lüne; of the locations, all but Brandenburg were female monasteries for which textile production was a primary occupation.14 Two of the four veils discussed at length in this essay come from this tradition of textile makership: both are fourteenthcentury veils produced at Kloster Lüne in Lower Saxony, one depicting a series of Biblical scenes, culminating with the Crucifixion at center (Figure 2.2); the other illustrating Christ in Majesty (Figure 2.3).15 In these veils, the material (embroidered linen) and the color (white) reflected the fast of the congregation during the Lenten season, depriving adherents both of clear sight of the altar and challenging them to look at, around, and through

FIGURE 2.2

Maiestas Domini veil. 1300. Linen. Kloster Lüne, Lower Saxony, Germany. Photo: Klosterkammer Hannover, Ulrich Loeper.

FIGURE 2.3

Crucifixion veil. 1325–1350. Linen. Kloster Lüne, Lower Saxony, Germany. Photo: Das Lüneburgische Museum, Leipzig, 1927.

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complex, near-invisible images. As Amy Knight-Powell has examined in her history of deposition rites, a third form of Lenten veil, composed of many painted squares, deflected the gaze in a different manner; this mode of looking will be explored later in the essay.16 The material of the Lenten veil was subject to allegorical interpretation by medieval liturgists, sharing color symbolism and fiber metaphors with other forms of liturgical textiles from the same period.17 Writing broadly on the appropriate material for altar cloths, William Durandus suggested that linen was the appropriate material for liturgical textiles because the production of linen from plant materials reflected the toil of Christ’s victory over the grave through suffering.18 Further allegorical interpretations of the Lenten veil, compiled by Braun, included the veil as a representation of original sin, which separated human beings from the perfection of God (spatially reflected in the separation of the laity from the altar). Linen was also linked to original sin, relating to the agricultural labor that Adam is cursed to partake in Genesis 3:17, due to its laborious production process and organic origins.19 Further associations with the material included the shroud of Christ (supposed to have been from linen) and the purification of the soul in Purgatory, which was understood in relation to the bleaching of the textile necessary to create a pure-white effect. Each allegorical understanding of the materiality of the Lenten veils shows clear connections to the period of Lent as one that anticipates the death and resurrection of Christ.20 White (or unbleached cloth) was one of the two liturgical colors affiliated with Lent by the fourteenth century; the other, violet, occurs in some Lenten veils but is considerably more rare.21 Whitework Lenten veils inhabited a liminal space between blankness and illustration, blockade and lens; they served more to mediate sight of the altar rather than to obstruct it. Stefanie Seeberg, in her study of the embroidered Altenberg linens, establishes that whitework cloths were near-inscrutable from a distance. The white thread on white ground creates a surface that, to viewers in the nave, would have appeared blank unless approached closely or viewed under specific lighting conditions.22 In the case of some whitework Lenten veils, as with the Altenberg veil (now in Cleveland) (Figure 2.6) and the veil at Brandenburg Cathedral, the embroidery would have originally been outlined in a dark thread, and now vanished due to corrosive materials used in the dyeing of dark brown and black thread. Both veils, contemporary to those at Lüne, show empty valleys of cloth where darker thread once existed; these valleys themselves now serve to demarcate boundaries between different fields of white.23 Colored thread is used sparingly, if at all; at Brandenburg, it is present in the crowns of saints and the Virgin Mary. The veils made at Lüne lack the “valleys” left by missing dark stitch-work; thick white stitching and translucent cloth are combined to create surface images through differences in depth. These boundaries suggest that, while these images would have been very challenging to discern in the dim light of a church interior, they were designed to be seen. Untold hours of painstaking labor were put into creating the iconographically and materially complex images that cover the surfaces of these massive textiles.24 Rather than encouraging viewers to look away (as in the case of undecorated cloths), these textiles seem to have encouraged intimate, close and slow looking, necessitating regular contemplation and the movement of the viewer’s body towards the altar for clear comprehension. The Lenten veils produced at Kloster Lüne in the first quarter of the fourteenth century offer strong examples of how opus teutonicum could be integrated with changing lighting conditions to create a sense of permeability between altar and nave, and to encourage attentive looking on the part of the viewer. These veils use the technique of drawnwork to

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  31

create a net-like ground, which cradles the figures depicted on the veil’s surface.25 These laborious techniques, which use methods of pulling and stitching to separate out the warp and weft of the cloth, would allow significant amounts of light to pass through the veil; viewers in the nave might also have been able to glimpse parts of the altar through the net.26 The thin linen used as a base for both Lüne veils is also permeable to light; when backlit, the thick white stitching appears as firm black lines on the cloth’s surface.27 The veil, hanging in the church through the cycle of daily services, has been viewed in a variety of states: light might variably shine out from the netted ground, cradling the body of the Risen or Crucified Christ in a corona of light, or illuminated the embroidery, as in a shadow-box, from behind (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). Attending various services throughout the day, viewers would contemplate the veil from numerous perspectives. The veiled altar might be engaged with images that anticipated the upcoming Easter celebration (Christ’s death and resurrection); glimpses of the altar itself, made both foreign and tantalizing through the mediating influence of the cloth; and austere blankness, encouraging inward preparation in addition to external close-looking. Not only light but distance mediated the relationship between the viewer and the whitework image. The most privileged viewers of these textiles were the women who made them—for the nun-needleworkers of Lüne, the veils were never blank, as the embroidered patterns could be held forever in the “inner eyes” of the maker.28 The church associated with the Lüne convent, where these veils would have been displayed through the Easter season, was accessible to the local laity, many of whom came to worship during the Easter season alongside the daughters, cousins, and aunts of theirs that resided at the convent.29 Services at Lüne may have been particularly popular during Holy Week, due to the performance of liturgical dramas by the nuns; the Lenten veil played its own dramatic role in these liturgies.30 In the small space of the convent church, this embroidered cloth would loom large; representing the labor and skill of the nuns as well as instructing viewers in the penitence and preparation required of the Quadragesima season.

Tearing the Veil: Painted Veils and the Reunification of Sacred Space at Easter The practice of Lenten veiling originated as a re-enactment of a scriptural scene: Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–1151) and others discuss the use of the textile in relation to the tearing of the veil and darkening of the sun at Christ’s death, a detail which is recounted in each of the synoptic Gospels, and which appeared in the set readings of the Wednesday of Holy Week, as well as those of Palm Sunday.31 In Christian tradition, this veil is understood to be the tabernacle veil, first described in Exodus 52 26:31–33. It divides the “holy place and the most holy,” the Ark of the Covenant from the temple. In the same way, the Lenten veil separated the nave of the church from the altar. Lenten veils were often manipulated to emphasize this dramatic aspect of Christ’s death. The seventeenth-century Caeremoniale parisiense, compiled by the Fr. Martin Sonnet for better understanding of medieval rites, lists a number of stipulations concerning the movement of the veil.32 For example, the veil, hung on a rod above the altar, would be drawn back from the altar on high feast days during Lent and on other needful occasions, creating a cycle of division and reunification of sacred space throughout the forty-day period.33 This cycle of division and reunification ended on the Wednesday of Holy Week during the

32  Clare Frances Kemmerer

reading of the Gospels (above); two clerics were assigned to tug on the veil so that it “[might] suddenly fall entirely on the floor of the choir,” to be taken away by the sacristan.34 This dramatic moment of reunification and reveal was as significant to the Lenten veil’s purpose as its role as a temporary architectural divide. Some textiles were created with special features that facilitated easy movement. The Lenten veil produced for the cathedral in Gurk, Austria in 1458 was constructed in two vertical halves, each composed of a large number of painted squares; the priest could pull on the central seam at an opportune moment and break the textile open, revealing the space of the altar behind (Figure 2.4).35 The action of withdrawing of the veil had a triple temporality: commemorating the historical death of Christ, marking the liturgical season of the present time and the celebration of Easter, and signing towards the second coming of Christ at Judgment, when, in the then-common Christian interpretation of Isaiah, the Messiah was to “lift off the covering that is over all the peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations” (25:7). It thus encouraged lay people both to reflect on these significant events of sacred history and to prepare themselves for encounters with the divine—most immediately, with the Body of Christ in the Eucharist at Easter, and in the long-term, with Christ at Judgment. Markedly larger and more ornate than their embroidered predecessors (the Gurk veil measures 8.87 × 8.87 meters), fifteenth-century Lenten veils acted both as formidable temporary walls and as decorative additions to the interior of the church.36 These painted textiles, of a style found throughout Germany and Austria, relied on the technique of “Tuechlein” (glue-tempera painting on unprimed linen) to retain the flexibility necessary for them to be moved, pulled, and torn.37 Produced by the artist Konrad von Friesach in 1458 for the Gurk Cathedral, the surface of the Gurk Lenten veil contains 99 square images, most bounded by small labels containing the name of the scene in Middle High German.38 50 images on the left half of the veil illustrate scenes from the Hebrew Bible, while 49 on the right represent scenes from the New Testament; these two would be ritually separated during the tearing of the veil on Spy Wednesday.39 In the model of the Speculum humanae salvationis, each image of a New Testament Story is aligned with what was understood to be its prefiguration in the Hebrew Bible; some scenes from the textile, including the Annunciation and the Passion, recur in the cycle of wall paintings that decorate the church’s interior.40 A double image at the veil’s lower left corner depicts the unification of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures at Judgment, and the road to salvation. The ritual context of the veil’s use, with its roots in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures, indicates that its role as an object was larger and more complex than simple division or didactics: in both substance and illustration, it served as an example of the reunification of God with his people promised at the end of time by the Christian story. A similar textile, located at the Church of St. John in Zittau, is one of the largest surviving painted Lenten veils in the world. Also constructed from unframed linen and Tuechlein surface painting, it would have, when hung in front of the presbytery, created a huge barrier between the congregation and the altar.41 Donated by merchant Jacob Gurtler to the cathedral in 1472, and measuring 8.2 × 6.8 meters, the textile is also covered in a checkerboard of scenes from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (Figure 2.5).42 These are arranged vertically in columns, beginning with the creation of the Earth in the upper left corner and final Judgment in the lower right. The images are surrounded by lines of rhyming verse, though the small scale of the text arranged on the massive textiles would have rendered the letters, especially those at the top of the veil, largely illegible.43 Indeed, as on the surface

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  33

FIGURE 2.4

Gurk Lenten veil. 1458. Tempera on linen base. 8.87m × 8.87m. Gurk Cathedral, Carinthia, Austria. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 2.5

Zittau Lenten veil. 1472. Tempera on linen base. 8.2m × 6.8m. Church of the Holy Cross, Zittau, Saxony, Germany. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

of the Gurk veil, all but the lowermost images would have likely been indiscernible to viewers in the nave; while lacking the near-blankness of the earlier whitework veils, these textiles enforced in their very scale a kind of inadequate vision.44 Powell, in her analysis of the object, suggests that the large number and tiny scale of the pictures served an adjacent purpose to the more conventional blank sheet: the scale and repetition of the square images created an abstracted surface, which may have prevented the images from being individually “read” and ultimately deflected the gaze.45 The surface of the veil, thus illustrated, served as

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  35

a tool not only of spatial division but of instruction in a limited or appropriate engagement with images—the limitations of one’s ability to see the entirety of the textile reflecting the only partial ability of images to convey the divine.46 The gaze as a tool of Christian devotion was therefore both acknowledged and problematized; the illegibility of the images emphasized the limitations of looking, while the rupturing and removal of the previously wall-like veil suggested the promise of true clarity through correct ritual participation.

Permanent and Impermanent Visual Division in the Nave The medieval church routinely abstained from images: the practice of Lenten veiling was not alone in its ability to mask or close off portions of a church’s interior.47 In German-speaking Northern Europe (notably, the birthplace of Reformation iconoclasm), Lenten veiling was often accompanied by the shuttering of wooden winged altarpieces.48 The “wings” were decorated on the outside with images that were more sober, and sometimes less heavily colored, than the altars’ elaborately carved and painted interiors; shuttering governed access to these more beautiful and legible images from Christian history much as Lenten veiling forced abstention from visual interaction with the altar. Indeed, the grisaille paintings decorating many of these wings visually resemble the whitework Lenten textiles in their lack of color.49 Visual abstention, as in the veiling and shuttering of images, occurred rhythmically throughout the liturgical year, though it was perhaps most strongly emphasized during Lent.50 The contents of these images would likely not have been forgotten by frequent visitors, but visual fasting might have inspired a hunger to reconvene with the holy subject of the image, to be made “worthy” to gaze upon the sacred again.51 Lenten veiling was one of several forms of textile modification that occurred inside the church during Lent: altars were stripped of their elaborate, richly embroidered coverings (colored textiles might be replaced with white ones, like those produced at Altenberg) and side altars, crucifixes, and sculptures were draped in sheets52 (Figure 2.6). The practice of veiling images, as well as altars, is referenced in numerous records from English church treasuries—including those at Salisbury and York, which account for the donation of white linen “for the covering of statues”—and in the miracle legend of the church at Daventry, in which a “lytle ymage of Seint Anne …was shett closed and clasped, accordynge to the rules that, in all Churchis of England, be observyd, all ymages to be hid from Ash Wednesday to Easter in the mornynge”.53 The covering of sculptures and side altars was not a re-creation of a Biblical event, as in the tearing of the Lenten veil, but it did serve to create an environment of emptiness and, thus, to remind viewers of their fasting obligations. By covering the sculptures and shuttering wooden altarpieces, churches pointed viewers to the contents of their mind’s interior, to reflect on their sins of the year before participating in the celebration of Easter.54 The veiling of images was, like the veiling of the altar, required in England by the central Middle Ages, suggesting that a desirable Lenten church was one that abstained from sculpted images and altar access entirely in favor of a strict visual fast.55 Structural division in medieval churches had both impermanent aspects, such as Lenten veils, and permanent aspects, namely the choir or rood screen. These large structures delineated the space of the nave, where most laity stood during the celebration of the Mass, and the choir, where the high altar was located and groups of men or women religious sang the Divine Office.56 Mediating movement between two sacred zones, the choir screen rendered these spaces bounded and mysterious even as it also functioned as a bridge between them.57 The

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FIGURE 2.6

Altar cloth. ~1350. Linen embroidery on linen ground. 154.3cm × 374.5cm. Premonstratensian Convent at Altenberg on the Lahn, Germany. Cleveland Museum of Art, 1948.352. Photo: Cleveland Museum of Art.

screens, constructed of wood or stone, were often surmounted by large Crucifixion groups; the scale and central location of these groups often dominated the interior of medieval cathedrals.58 Like Lenten veils, choir screens have been interpreted as divisive structures, emblematic of a harsh divide between clergy and laity. But, as Jacqueline Jung’s 2012 treatment of the Gothic screen has shown, great “care was taken [during the celebration of the Mass] to include the laity, even if only at the moment of consecration.”59 Following the introduction of the elevation of the host into the ritual of the consecration in the thirteenth century, which was intended to be a public act, clerics developed innovative methods for allowing the laity to participate in, behind, and through the screen, the elevation became a significant site of lay piety.60 Choir screens may have shaped or framed the way that laity looked at the high altar, but largely did not inhibit them from the act of looking entirely. People regularly subverted the architectural (and religious) restrictions of the church in order to place themselves in direct sight of the perceived most sacred space, sometimes to the annoyance of clerical authorities.61 The Lenten veil expanded the constricted yet enticing modes of seeing already enforced by the presence of the choir screen. Veils in some places blocked even significant details of the screen; Margaery Kempe describes the veil as covering the Crucifixion group as well as the altar space, preventing both adoration of the Cross and view of the elevation while raised.62 Given the strong interest medieval people had in looking at the altar, and especially at the Eucharist, it seems that the “hunger” the veil’s obstruction created might have been felt sharply indeed. But an audience accustomed to the mode of looking required by the choir screen—medieval lay persons would be well-placed to understand Lenten veils not simply as barriers to their access to the altar but as complex aids to devotion. The ritual use of Lenten veils was also connected to the social divisions and prejudices that filled medieval cities and their churches during the Middle Ages. The destruction of the veil, highlighted in Holy Week’s Wednesday liturgy with the rupturing of the textile, had a supersessionist aspect: the tearing of the veil during Holy Week commemorated the destruction of the veil in the Temple and the death of Christ, a key moment in the Christian narrative. For medieval Jews, Holy Week was a time of fear and violence. In many parts of Germany, Jews were legally required to remain in their homes for the duration of the week, a time in which pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence often erupted in tandem

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  37

with Easter celebrations.63 Lenten veils often emphasized anti-Jewish themes of “correct” Christian sight and Jewish blindness, as in the lower register of one veil produced at Kloster Lüne, which contains both scenes of Jews as tormentors of Christ and the blindfolded figure of Synagoga64 (Figure 2.3). But in addition to the symbolic representation, we must consider that much of the rhetoric of medieval anti-Judaism was concerned with Jews being the people who were on the wrong side of the veil, who allegedly could not look beneath the surface of scripture (i.e., who did not assume the Christian posture of reading the Hebrew Bible as predictive of Christ).65 Christians looking at the veil occupied a place of privileged sight— understanding themselves to be “blinded” by the veil only temporarily, with their separation from the sacred resolving with the coming of Easter. It cannot be discounted, when considering the ritual and artistic significance of the Lenten veils, that this anticipation of sight, this permeability of the textile, was thought to exist only for Christians. The ritual reinforced the medieval Christian notion that Jews were permanently lacking in correct sight.

Conclusion The “fast of the vision” induced by the Lenten veil allowed the viewer to reflect on their separation from Christ: a separation incurred by the sin that they attempted to repent for during the penitential season of Lent, in preparation for both eventual Judgment and the more immediate reception of the Eucharist at Easter. But the veil did not only divide the sacred and the profane; it instructed viewers in the kinds of careful looking that made for good Christians. Some veils, like persons listening to the Gospel, demonstrate variable access to the Christian message. At times, when the images appear traced in black on the surface, the Christian narrative is revealed, while at other times the surface remains white and the story opaque.66 The viewer could peer through the drawnwork net of the veils at Luene and glimpse the shape of the altar; by drawing physically close to the veil, they could engage with the “luminous” space of the altar even while it was obscured to them.67 Yet other veils, constructed of linen and tempera, allowed medieval viewers to access the holy both through up-close contemplation of the story of salvation and through the trained deflection of the gaze from a cluttered, highly decorated surface, indicating a reverent but mediated approach to the role of images as tools of spiritual formation. The veils I have examined in this essay demonstrate that the function of the Fastentüch in the late Middle Ages was not limited to simple architectural augmentation, acting as a temporary barrier that blocked sight of the altar. Such interpretations acknowledge only the penitential aspects of Lent, obscuring the key role of anticipation. But the Lenten veils also served to remind congregants the coming of Easter, images of Christ on the cross and salient Biblical scenes reminding viewers of what exactly they were waiting in anticipation of. Artists decorated and augmented the surfaces of the veils to bring them beyond their simple divisive function: monumental and richly decorated veils served to emphasize themes of triumph, particularly in the dramatic Holy Week removal of the veil, which brought unity to previously divided space and emphasized the association between the death of Christ and access to the sacred. Veils also served, as in the examples from Lüne and Halberstadt, to renegotiate rather than to demarcate boundaries of sacred space, re-calibrating the lens through which viewers engaged with the space of the altar as they peered through and around these textiles. This peering also served as a form of preparation for Easter, one which emphasized the importance of clear sight. Lenten veils

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thus modified the interior of the churches for which they were made both to encourage penitence in the viewer and to aid in Paschal anticipation. Acting as temporary extensions of ecclesial architecture, they shaped the gaze and—it was hoped—posture of the soul of the viewer. Use of Lenten veils in German-speaking churches declined following the Reformation, but the last century has seen a revival of the use and makership of these giant textile architectural supplements. Varied in iconographic content, material, and style, these re-interpretations of a medieval tradition have been adopted by both modern Roman Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran congregations.68 Some, as at the Lutheran Church of St. Marien in Hannover, continue the tradition of white-and-gray German figure-less veils (see Figure 2.1 for a medieval example) while incorporating modern, abstract patterns.69 Other congregations, like the Catholic Church of St. Conrad in Wandlitz, have drawn upon the communal aspect of textile-making to incorporate laity more closely into the church.70 Still others, like the giant sweater-shaped purple veil produced in 2020 by Erwin Wurm for the Stephansdom in Vienna embrace the time-consuming craftsmanship and affection for elaborate allegory once characteristic of the artworks of the Middle Ages; the massive garment was intended by the artist to symbolize the “warming charity” of the community (Figure 2.7).71 The Vienna cathedral has displayed different modern interpretations of the Lenten veil yearly since 2015. The resumption of this medieval tradition, and its multifaceted artistic reinterpretations, has produced a number of textiles that bring to their architectural surrounds not a sense of strict division but of invitation; invitation to look, pray, join, and give.

FIGURE 2.7

Lenten veil. Erin Wurm, 2020. Stephansdom, Vienna, Austria. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  39

Notes 1 The object is also referred to as the voile de carême, parement de carême, Temple veil, Hungertuch, Fastenvelum, Palmtuch, Passiontuch, and velum templi. From Lotem Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” in From Collective Memories to Intercultural Exchanges, ed. Maria Wakounig (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 85–86. 2 Johannes Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” in Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte VII Ed. Otto Schmitt (München: Zentralinstitut Für Kunstgesichte, 1979), 826. 3 Joseph Braun, Die Liturgischen Paramente in Gegenwart und Vergangenheit: Ein Handbuch der Paramentik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1912), 233. 4 A text from the church of St. Gallen in Switzerland references a veil used to cover the altar cloth during Lent. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 826. 5 Emminghaus, “Fastentüch.” 6 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 111; Walter Howard Frere, The Use of Sarum: The Original Texts, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 139–40. 7 Otto Rainer, Dom zu Gurk: Fastentüch (Gurk: Domskustodie, 1984), 3. 8 Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 837; Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 86. Some 12th century veils survived through the 19th century but were subsequently destroyed in fires. 9 These categories are not binary but appear to represent distinctive forms of the Lenten veil. Examples of the first type (geometric/blank/checkerboard include the 1580 veil from the Church of St. Martin in Westfalen, and the 1300 veil from Halberstadt Cathedral (Inv. Nr. 276). Emminghaus suggests that blank and striped Lenten veils were most common in English courses, but none survive in veil form (it seems likely that blank or neutrally patterned veils may have been converted for use as other objects, i.e., as secular textiles or wrappings for relics). Kloster Lüne retains the best examples of embroidered Lenten veils with scenes of the Passion, though the cloth from Zehdenick (now at the St. Nikolaikirche in Berlin) incorporates elements of both hexagonal geometric patterning and embroidered scriptural scenes. The final evolution of this form in early modernity appears to be large-scale paintings of the Crucifixion performed on a textile surface, as at Freiburg. Modern Lenten veils may adapt these themes or utilize more abstract forms of decoration. Compilation of veils is via Emminghaus, “Fastentüch.” 10 Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2012), 61. See also Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 826–48. The Office of Penance, from a Book of Hours, c. 1492. British Library manuscript 25, 698, fol. 9r, clearly illustrates an altar swathed in white linen and marked with a red cross during the season of Lent. 11 Braun, Handbuch. 12 Braun (1912) and Emminghaus (1979). This is by no means a comprehensive overview of Lenten veil scholarship; merely an overview of two of the most significant and salient works concerning the objects. 13 The use of a plain-woven linen base embroidered in white linen thread qualifies the textile as an example of “opus teutonicum,” a form of whitework embroidery that developed in Lower Saxony, Westphalia, and Hesse in the Middle Ages, also found in Switzerland and parts of Scandinavia. Opus teutonicum is characterized by the use of thick white stitching (linen or, more rarely, white wool) atop a near-transparent plain weave linen ground, often using drawn-work techniques to create a net-like effect. Stitches used include chain stitch, gobelin stitch, satin stitch and stem stitch; Kloster Lüne is recognized as one of the primary producers of opus teutonicum from the 12th century. See: Pamela Claburn, The Needleworker’s Dictionary (London: Macmillan London Ltd, 1976), 191. 14 Stefanie Seeberg, “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters,” in Beziehungsreiche Gewebe: Textilien im Mittelalter ed. Kristin Böse and Silke Tammen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 248–67; also Christa-Maria Jeitner, Das Brandenburger Hungertuch (Dom zu Brandenburg: 2001). The Brandenburg embroidery was also likely made by female monastics, but unlike the other sites, the veil was not produced for use in the nuns’ chapel. 15 Harald Meller, Der heilige Schatz im Dom zu Halberstadt (Regensberg: Schnell & Steiner, 2008), 292. Horst Appuhn, Bildstickereien des Mittelalters im Kloster Lüne (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1983),

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16 17

18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

28; June Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture, and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, ed. Alison Beach, Constance Berman, and Lisa Bitel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 72. Powell, Depositions, 61–65. Pauline Johnstone, High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Church Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Maney Publishing, 2002), 7, 19, 23. See also Thomas Izbicki, “Linteamenta Altaria: The Care of Altar Linens in the Medieval Church,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles 12, edited by in Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brew Press, 2016), 41–60. William Durandus of Mende, Rational divinorum officiorum I, via Emminghaus, 826–48. The inventory at Magdeburg records the existence of a Lenten veil alongside a note that says that the “veil is hung in memory of our sorrow when we fell from the celestial fatherland like Adam” (Liber Ordinarius, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms theol. Lat. qu. 133, fol. 31); cited by Katerina Krause, “Material, Farbe, Bildprogram der Fastentücher: Verhüllung in Kirchenraumen des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters,” in Das ‘Goldene Wunder’ in der Dortmunder Petrikirche: Bildgebrauch und Bildproduktion im Mittelalter, ed. Barbara Welzel, Thomas Lentes and Heike Schlie (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2004), 165. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 826–48. Johnstone, High Fashion in the Church, 21–23. White was the primary color for Lenten veils, which might be embroidered in the opus teutonicum style or painted in grisaille in the manner of the Parement de Narbonne (Paris, 1356–1408). The connection between white and Lent is rooted in white as a color of “purification”—what one is supposed to do to one’s soul in anticipation of the death/resurrection—and was codified by Pope Innocent III at the end of the 12th c., when liturgical colors are formally established. Significantly earlier, Clement of Alexandria drew a connection between Jewish/Levitical robes and undyed Christian vestments, citing undyed linen as the only appropriate garb for those who are “unadulterated” at heart. Seeberg, “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters.” Seeberg, “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters.”; correspondence with Geertje Gerhold, textile conservator of the Brandenburg Cathedral treasury, in December 2019 suggests that the darker threads were likely dyed with locally sourced oak galls, a material that causes faster deterioration in thread than unbleached linen. Hence, the embroideries on the Brandenburg veil and similar textiles have decayed at varying rates, causing these valleys or channels. Appuhn, Bildstickereien des Mittelalters im Kloster Lüne, 28; Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions, 72; Renate Kroos, Niedersächsische Bildstickereien des Mittelalters (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1970), 39, 61. For a definition of drawnwork and examples, see Mae Mahaffy, The Priscilla Drawnwork Book: A Collection of Beautiful Designs (Boston, MA: The Priscilla Publishing Company, 1909), 3–8. Mahaffy, The Priscilla Drawnwork Book. This effect is most obvious in a photograph of Inv.-Nr. W.M. XXII 19 from the Museum August-Kestner in Hannover, Germany. This object—another of the 14th c. whitework Lenten veils from Kloster Luene—was photographed backlit for the 2005 catalog Fromme Bilderwelten: Mittelalterliche Textilien und Handschriften, with striking results (these can be seen on page 39 of the catalog). The textile shares many material and iconographic similarities with what I have referred to as the Luene ‘Crucifixion’ veil; it can be assumed that the reaction of this textile (Figure 2.3) to backlighting would be the same as the Kestner veil. Thorsten Henke, Fromme Bilderwelten Mittelalterliche Textilien und Handschriften im Kestner Museum (Hanover: Kestner-Museum, 2005). Seeberg, “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters,” 260–67. Seeberg emphasizes that this privileged sight also allowed nuns a manner of self-representation, particularly when initials or portraits of the nuns were included. Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions, 27–33. Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions; a similar level of viewership occurred at Altenberg, according to Seeberg, “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters,” 265–67. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 826–48; Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 86–87, Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 111. Luke 23:45, “And the

Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  41

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

sun’s light failed, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” Similar lines appear in Matthew 27: 51 and Mark 15: 37–28. Martin Sonnet, Caeremoniale parisiense (1662); trans. Zachary Thomas, “The Lenten Veil,” The Liturgical Arts Journal. (2018). A similar scene is recorded in Margaery Kempe’s record of her life; she describes how, following the Palm Sunday procession, a large painted veil (formerly hanging before the Rood) was withdrawn on pulleys, with the whole of the congregation kneeling and the clergy venerating the cross. The “Ave Rex Noster” was sung during this dramatic event, and the Mass was then begun. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 25. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, and Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 830. Sonnet, Caeremoniale parisiense. Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 87; Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 830. Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 89. Maria Ranacher, “Painted Lenten Veils and Wall Coverings in Austria: Technique and ­Conservation,” Studies in Conservation 25, no. 1 (1980): 142. Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 89. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 830. Pinchover, “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings,” 88; Rainer, Dom zu Gurk, 5–9. Friedhelm Mennekes, Die Zittauer Bibel: Bilder und Text zum Grossen Fastentüch von 1472 (Stuttgart: ­ Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1998); also Dudeck Damzog and Gunter Oettel, 525 Jahre großes Zittauer Fastentüch (Gorlitz and Zittau: Verlag Gunter Oettel, 2000), 37. Powell, Depositions, 60–61. Mennekes, Die Zittauer Bibel, 10; Damzog and Oettel, 525 Jahre großes Zittauer Fastentüch, 93 and 105. Mennekes, Die Zittauer Bibel. Powell, Depositions, 64–65. Powell, Depositions. Robin Jensen, “Ashes, Shadows, and Crosses: Visualizing Lent,” in Interpretation 64, no. 1. ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010). Powell, Depositions, 57–58. For an example of the grisaille painting style that resembles whitework embroidery and appears on the exterior wings of altarpieces, see the Master of St. Bartholomew Altarpiece, now at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne (1495–1501). For more about grisaille painting in the Middle Ages, see Brock, Charron, and Boudon-Machuel, Aux limites de la couleur: monochromie et polychromie dans les arts (1300–1650) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). Powell, Depositions, 59. Powell, Depositions, 59–61. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch.” Powell, Depositions, 61. Further instructions for the use of Lenten veils appear in Frere, The Use of Sarum, 138–41. For an extensive treatment of lay medieval engagement with the Eucharist, including Easter consumption, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); especially pages 35–49 and 98–108. Emminghaus, “Fastentüch,” 827; also Bond, 101–4. Jacqueline Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5. Jung, The Gothic Screen, 46. Jung, The Gothic Screen. Jacqueline Jung, “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (2000): 627. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 49–63. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 98. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 25. Many historians have explored the danger Jews faced in Western medieval cities throughout the liturgical year and especially during Holy Week; for a concise description of the lives of Jews in medieval cities, see Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 59–62, 66–72.

42  Clare Frances Kemmerer



Seeing through Medieval Lenten Veils  43

Izbicki, Thomas M. “Linteamenta Altaria: The Care of Altar Linens in the Medieval Church.” In Medieval Clothing and Textiles 12, edited by Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, 41–60. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brew Press, 2016. Jeitner, Christa-Maria. Das Brandenburger Hungertuch. Brandenburg: Dom Zu Brandenburg: 2001. Jensen, Robin. “Ashes, Shadows, and Crosses: Visualizing Lent.” Interpretation 64, no. 1: 30–42. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, 2010. Johnstone, Pauline. High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Church Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. London: Maney Publishing, 2002. Jung, Jacqueline E. “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches.” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (2000): 622–57. Jung, Jacqueline. The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kohwanger-Nikolai, Tanja. Per Manus Sororum: Niedersächsische Bildstickereien Im Klosterstich 1300– 1583. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Krause, Katerina. “Material, Farbe, Bildprogram der Fastentücher: Verhüllung in Kirchenraumen des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters.” In Das ‘Goldene Wunder’ in der Dortmunder Petrikirche: Bildgebrauch und Bildproduktion im Mittelalter, edited by Barbara Welzel, Thomas Lentes, and Heike Schlie. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2004. Kroos, Renate. Niedersächsische Bildstickereien des Mittelalters. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1970. Lipton, Sara. Dark Mirror: the Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2014. Mahaffy, Mae. The Priscilla Drawnwork Book: A Collection of Beautiful Designs. Boston, MA: The Priscilla Publishing Company, 1909. Mecham, June. Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture, and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany. Edited by Alison Beach, Constance Berman, and Lisa Bitel. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Meller, Harald. Der heilige Schatz im Dom zu Halberstadt. Regensberg: Schnell & Steiner, 2008. Mennekes, Friedhelm. Die Zittauer Bibel: Bilder und Text zum Grossen Fastentüch von 1472. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1998. Muller, Johanna. “Das Zehdenicker Fastentüch.” Marburger Jahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft 13 (1944): 103. Pinchover, Lotem. “The Gurk Lenten Veil as a Product of Its Immediate Surroundings.” In From Collective Memories to Intercultural Exchanges, edited by Maria Wakounig, 85–116. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012. Powell, Amy Knight. Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum. Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2012. Rainer, Otto. Dom zu Gurk: Fastentüch. Gurk: Domkustodie, 1984. Ranacher, Maria. “Painted Lenten Veils and Wall Coverings in Austria: Technique and Conservation.” Studies in Conservation 25, no. 1. (1980): 142–148. Rowe, Nina. The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rubin, Miri. “Imagining the Jew: The Late Medieval Eucharistic Discourse.” In In and out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia & Hartmut. Lehmann, 177–208. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Rubin, Miri. Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Schutte, Marie. Gestickte Bildteppiche und Decken des Mittelalters: Volume 1, Die Klöster Wienhausen und Lüne das Lüneburgische Museum. Leipzig: K.W. Hiersemann, 1927. Seeberg, Stefanie. “Women as Makers of Church Decoration: Illustrated Textiles at the Monasteries of Altenberg/Lahn, Rupertsberg, and Heiningen (13th – 14th c.).” In Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, edited by Therese Martin, 355–91. Boston: Brill, 2012a.

44  Clare Frances Kemmerer

Seeberg, Stefanie. “Zur Sichtbarcheit und Wahrnehmung gestickter Bilder und Inschriften auf Altardecken Mittelalters.” In Beziehungsreiche Gewebe: Textilien im Mittelalter, edited by Kristin Böse and Silke Tammen, 249–268. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012b. Sonnet, Martin. Caeremoniale parisiense. (1662); Translated by Thomas, Zachary. “The Lenten Veil.” The Liturgical Arts Journal. (2018). Weilandt, Gerhard. “Part of the Whole: Medieval Liturgical Textile Frontals in Their Liturgical Context.” In Riggisberger Berichte 18, edited by Evelin Wetter, 33–50. Riggisberg: AbbeggStiftung, 2010. Wheatley, Edward. “‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: The Metaphorics of Marginalization.” In Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.

3 ARCHITECTURAL SPACE AND TEXTILES Tying Samoan Society Together Anne E. Guernsey Allen

Introduction Since the earliest recorded times, the peoples of the Polynesian archipelago of Samoa have integrated architectural space and textiles to reflect individual and group status and create social connections. In their formative work on textiles, Schneider and Weiner wrote, Throughout history, cloth has furthered the organization of social and political life. In the form of clothing and adornment, or rolled or piled high for exchange and heirloom conservation, cloth helps social groups reproduce themselves and to achieve autonomy or advantage in interactions with others.1 Traditionally and today in Samoa, the decorating of structures with textiles utilizes longestablished aesthetic schema and the philosophical concept of vā, a pan-Polynesian theory of place and space. In individual structures, traditional textiles and their modern substitutes mark spatial boundaries and signify ceremonial activities. When presented as gifts in architecturally defined spaces through the crossing of vā, fabrics function to create or reinforce social and political ties.

Cloth Past Types To understand the significance of cloth and its relationship to architecture in Samoa, it is important to consider the different types of textiles created in the islands and their cultural significance. Today, in independent Samoa, several traditional textiles are still produced, although not as extensively as in the past: siapo (backcloth or tapa), ‘ie toga (glossed as fine mats), fala moe (sleeping mats), and decorative lashings used in architectural construction.2 Other forms are no longer created, having died out by the beginning of the twentieth century. These include the ‘ie tutu pupu’u, a kilt form used as ceremonial dance attire by young

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-5

46  Anne E. Guernsey Allen

men and women of high rank.3 Other garments, generally termed shaggy mats (‘ie fau and ‘ie sina,) were once worn by the village ceremonial maid (taupou) and women of elevated position.4 Of those textiles still produced today, siapo and ‘ie toga have primarily been supplanted by Western cloth, and sleeping mats are increasingly replaced by Chinese-made plastic carpets. Linnekin has argued that culture is “tailored and embellished in the process of transmission” 5 and subject to the fluidity of historical events. Yet, often we formulate our cultural identities through what we delineate as traditional. Thomas insists that “self-representation never takes place in isolation and that it is frequently oppositional or reactive.”6 In ancient times, the objectification (to use Thomas’ term) of culture and the use of iconic markers to construct Samoan identity occurred within a Polynesian milieu. With the coming of Europeans, social and political changes occurred within Samoa. However, the marking of buildings with textiles and their use in ceremonies associated with built space continues to form an important aspect of vā—space as related to Samoan interpersonal relationships.

‘Ie Toga The term “fine mats” (‘ie toga) references textiles plaited7 with narrow strips of pandanus and usually decorated with fringes and red feathers. Such mats were worn on ceremonial occasions by high-ranking individuals, as well as being ritually exchanged or kept as family heirlooms. According to Schoeffel “of all the treasured goods of the Samoans, fine mats alone have occupied a central place in their rites to the present day.”8 There are two general categories of these textiles. One form has a texture like silky linen. They were made from a fine grade of pandanus (lau ‘ie, bot. Freycinetia), dried, scraped, split into strips, baked, separated into layers, soaked in the sea, sun-dried, split into fine threads, and finally hand plaited into a cloth of about one by two metres, with a loose fringed border fastened with a row of red parakeet feathers (‘ula) obtained from Fiji.9 When finished, the ‘ie toga was bathed in sea water and rubbed with oil.10 Such objects were made by daughters of high chiefs and represent “respect, prestige, gratitude, deference, recognition and obligation.”11 The weaving process took months, sometimes years, to complete. A mother might start fashioning a fine mat once her daughter was born, in preparation for presentation at the girl’s wedding. At one time, a separate structure was set aside for the making of mats and the teaching of this art. This was the falelalaga. While lalaga means to weave or plait, lālaga denotes a new or only partially finished fine mat. Here convened “an assembly of expert women, mostly married, who met to plait fine mats on the invitation of a high chief who kept them in food and made appropriate presents.”12 The existence of a distinct weaving house to create ‘ie toga underscored the importance of this activity and the textile itself in the production of social and political relationships.13 Up until the mid-nineteenth century ‘ie toga moved through Samoa, Tonga, and parts of Fiji in ceremonial exchanges linked to aristocratic intermarriage. The London Missionary Society minister John Williams observed in 1830 that fine mats were “much sought after by the Tongatabooans who come from Tonga in their canoes to purchase them a distance of six or seven hundred miles as an article of dress for the Tonga Chiefs.”14 The ancestral

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together  47

­

­

FIGURE 3.1

Presentation of an Heirloom ‘Ie toga to the Queen of Tonga at the Funeral of Salamasina. Papauta Girls’ School. 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

48  Anne E. Guernsey Allen

FIGURE 3.2

Presentation of ‘Ie toga Honoring the District Senior Congregational Church Pastor. Fagamalo. 1990. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

In a yearlong stay in Samoa in 1990, I asked everyone I could what they thought were the most vital components of the fa’asamoa, the concept that underlies traditional Samoan life. I received a variety of answers: the guest fale (house), the family, pigs, and so on. Yet, almost every single person mentioned ‘ie toga. Weiner recounted that people told her that these textiles are “more important to us than your gold,”17 emphasizing the objects, value as a form of wealth and ceremonial exchange. Therefore, despite changes in production and quality, ‘ie toga remains a premier object in Samoan ceremonial activities.18 In 2001, with the help of the New Zealand Overseas Development Assistance program, the Women in Business Foundation worked with village women to help them revive the older ‘ie toga processes as a means of maintaining cultural traditions and to make money in the modern economy.19 In 2010, Manu Sailelagi interviewed fine mat makers, reporting that a handful of older women were still actively creating the cloth.20 In 2019, ‘ie toga was included on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity developed by UNESCO. According to the Samoa Observer, Today, an increasing number of young female weavers are involved, and even male weavers. Women and master weavers have established fine mat committees within their villages, allowing them to exchange ideas about best practice for weaving, and to boost opportunities for strengthening the transmission of the art form.21 In addition, each year, the Samoan Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development hosts an annual exhibition of ‘ie toga and siapo (tapa or barkcloth). In contrast to the transformation, decline, and possible revitalization of ‘ie toga, the historical evolution of siapo is somewhat different.

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together  49

Siapo The preparation of siapo (tapa) is essentially a felting process. The making of barkcloth was once widespread throughout the Pacific islands. Today, the art is most strongly practiced in the west Polynesian groups of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Samoan Siapo makers use the bark of the paper mulberry tree for the base fibers. The bark is peeled off in strips, the inner layer removed and scraped clean. These pieces are pounded until they become quite extensive, sometimes up to ten times the original width. The resulting sections are layered together with paste from the arrowroot plant. The final cloth is typically decorated in one of two ways. One technique of tapa decoration in Samoa is freehand, which produces siapo mamanu. The second method is taking rubbings off a relief pattern carved into a wood panel called a upeti. In the past, a mat made from pandanus with raised designs was used for this step, rather than wood. The unmarked cloth is placed on the board and sprinkled with pigment. The top surface is then rubbed to transfer the design. This process results in a siapo ‘elei, where the design may be reinforced with direct painting.22 The dyes used in Samoan tapa come from plants, including the bark of the Blood Tree, the seed pod of the Lipstick Tree, and the kernel of the Candlenut, and ochre. The visual result is a limited color palette of browns and black. The motifs used on siapo are typically basic geometric forms (Figure 3.3). The French explorer de Bougainville exchanged European cloth for siapo when he visited Samoa in 1768.23 John Williams noted in 1830 an “inferior kind of cloth which they stain all over with a black substance but they use it to sleep under.”24 Rev. George Turner, who was in the islands from 1840 to 1859, gave more details. At night they slept on a mat, using as a cover a mat of native cloth, and enclosed all around by a curtain of the same material to keep out musquitoes [sic]. In sickness, also, they wrapped themselves up in native cloth.25 Despite both practical and ceremonial uses, siapo was supplanted in time by Western manufactured textiles. Early explorers in the western Pacific found that Western textiles were highly valued trade items and in great demand. James Cook reported for Tonga “…old, jackets, shirts, pieces of cloth and even old rags were in more esteem with them than the best edge tool we could give them.”26 de Bougainville describes much the same situation in Samoa. “They did not choose to have any iron: they preferred little bits of red stuff to nails, knives and ear-rings which had so great a success at Tahiti.”27 In 1897, Augustin Krämer observed that “Barkcloth can still be seen quite frequently in the streets today, particularly worn by the old chiefs of Atua, Tutuila and Savai’i…Otherwise the European calico has conquered Samoa.”28 By 1911, Brigham described Samoa as “a group where the manufacture is still carried on, but merely for the supply of curiosity dealers and it may be supposed the work is not improving.”29 In spite of this contention, the textile continued to be made for ceremonial purposes, possibly influenced by the New Zealand prohibition on ‘ie toga following Samoa becoming a protectorate after World War I. During this time, siapo still figured prominently among the presents at weddings and in the sua ceremony for honored guests, was worn in the ta’alolo food presentation, and functioned as formal attire for high chiefs and orators.30

50  Anne E. Guernsey Allen

FIGURE 3.3

Siapo ‘elei. 19th or early 20th century. 5 ft. 10 in. x 50 1/2 in. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Gift of Mrs. Henry J. Bernheim. Accession Number 1958-140-8. Public Domain.

Starting in the early 1970s, siapo production in Samoa began a precipitous decline and foreign cloth began to be incorporated into ceremonial occasions. By the 1980s, commercial textiles, such as velveteen, satin, laces, or “Hawaiian print” cotton, had almost totally displaced tapa in independent Samoa. Exceptions were typically government events and important ceremonies hosted by elite families. These materials were sometimes presented as entire bolts, a practice purportedly introduced from Pago Pago, American Samoa. By 1990, the art of making siapo was seldom practiced in independent Samoa, corresponding to a decline in its use in ceremonial events. Yet, at the Pacific Arts Festival there in 1996, several tapa makers worked at the crafts village set up in the capital Apia. In 1999, three or four women on Savai’i were creating barkcloth as a means of financially supporting their families. Most of this income derived from shops in Apia that catered to tourists, as well as government commissions and purchases by pastors’ wives. Despite this upswing, tapa remained generally absent from public presentations within village settings. Siapo making workshops sponsored by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and various NGOs in the late 1990s had little effect. Most participants I interviewed stated that they would not continue making barkcloth when they returned home. It was just too much work. Yet a few tapa artists continue today. One of these teaches my students the techniques of fabrication and design when we travel there for my Art and Culture of Samoa course. 31 However,

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together  51

rather than creating siapo cloth for family use, as was the case until the 1930s, she is essentially a small business entrepreneur functioning within the contemporary monetary-based system.

VaWithin the structured architectural forms of a Samoan village, centralized space is established and becomes the stage for societal formation and reformation via cloth. Parties come together, establishing temporary or permanent relationships. Village centralized configuration and the design of individual buildings are essentially iconic reflections of a fundamental component of Samoan societal organization. The importance of centralized space in Samoan thought is revealed in the very name of the archipelago. Sā designates that which is forbidden, taboo, set apart, or sacred. Moa can mean a fowl or the end of a banana bunch. However, moa also indicates a center. As the fleshy part of the ali’i mollusk, it is the edible interior. As a top, moa is used to denote an object which revolves around a midpoint. In humans, the middle abdomen is the moa. Consequently, one translation of Samoa is “sacred center”. However, the center is not just a location, but a philosophical concept represented by the term vā. Vā is a unifying principle of place and space in Samoa and is a concept found throughout Polynesia. Vā may be defined, in part, as a physical distance, one that in a village setting is demarcated by the land held by an extended family and made manifest via architecture. Vā can also denote being divided or separated and, thereby, establishing opposition of place with an intervening distance. This same word in Samoan also incorporates socio-political relevance via another meaning: relationship. Each of these connotations comes into play in the conceptualization and utilization of vā in Samoan life, in architecture, and the manipulation of cloth in relation to the architectural setting. Within the structured built forms of a Samoan community, vā is established through the designation of place, allowing for societal formation and reformation to occur, a process that is intrinsically dynamic.32 Pierce and Martin note that places “are inherently, irreducibly hybrid. They are composed of disparate parts that are simultaneously discrete and combinatory; their borders and their internal segmentation are real but also provisional and unstable.”33 Further, Casey points out that, in “creating built places, we transform not only the local landscape but ourselves.”34 For this reason, any consideration of the role of Samoan architectural layout in socio-political formation is inherently also a discussion of vā, insofar as the built environment (the physical vā) establishes the stage where vā as relationship takes place. Thus, vā is both conceptual and perceptual. In architecture, the frame is created via physical forms that provide the open center where social action occurs, resulting in the creation of new relationships.

House as Structured Space The status hierarchy of Samoan society is reflected in the physical structure of villages, family compounds, and individual building types. In the Western world, we often think of buildings as spaces enclosed by walls and a roof, often divided by interior partitions. However, traditional Samoan architecture, or fale, have a single expanse and no walls. In Samoa, such built spaces are a means of expressing prestige. Even today, each extended family owns

52  Anne E. Guernsey Allen

at least one large open building where they interact with the larger society through the staging of public ceremonies, including the gifting of textiles. The open, un-walled spatial style of these guest fale with their open vā signifies family unity, traditional values, and long-established Samoan social and political forms.35 At the time of Western contact, two styles of architecture were used for guest fale: the round faletele36 and the more elongated faleafolau, both constructed by master builders using lashing techniques (Figure 3.4). Today, the more common form is the faleapa, rectangular buildings created with milled lumber and sheet metal, using non-indigenous construction methods. However, even these Westernized houses are spatially Samoan, being a single area with no walls. The guesthouses of each family traditionally faced the malae, or village green, defined by the architecture that marks its periphery.37 Fale form a socially important semiotic sign; they signify the prominence of their owning family, provide a physical manifestation of that prestige, and act as a mechanism through which status is obtained. Although there are few builders remaining who can construct the older forms, the open space of guesthouses of any style continues to function as a reflection of society and a means of social advancement. The importance of maintaining an unobstructed central space (a vā) is seen in the arrangement of any furniture or storage chests (pusa lavalava) within the spatially indigenous Samoan style fale. These objects are always placed around the perimeter of the house, giving visual evidence to the boundary that exists there. Whenever one enters a Samoan house, shoes are removed. This action emphasizes the dyad between the space that has been exited and that which has been entered. The arrangement at mealtimes, formal meetings, and even informal visits positions participants in a circular formation, a spatial strategy that extends back to pre-contact times. Families often sleep together on mats, and this necessitates an

FIGURE 3.4

Faletele. Fagamalo, 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together  53

unobstructed area. It is not that the space either dictates or is dictated by social activity. Rather, it is an interwoven system whose parts reinforce one another; space and border are shaped by the activities that take place there and, in turn, facilitate that behavior. The existence of an open vā is thus determined by the structure of the house itself and marked in many ways, including cloth.

House Decoration and Cloth In the early nineteenth century, missionaries and explorers noted that small pieces of white siapo (barkcloth) were attached just under the eaves of “god” houses to mark their importance. According to Williams, these textiles “were designed to intimate that a sacred ceremony was then being observed within, and that no person must enter the house upon pain of death”.38 Although Stair states that some gods (aitu) were honored with dwellings called faleaitu or malumalu-o-le-aitu, these structures were built in the ordinary way. There was nothing to distinguish them except that they were located away from other buildings in the village and rested on higher platforms.39 However, religion often centered on individual family or household gods. Consequently, there was a need to indicate the contextually unique nature of the living fale when sacred ceremonies were transpiring within. The pieces of textile and the actions taken if the border they marked was violated indicate the significant nature of the inside vs. outside dyad and the interior sacred space. Even today, embellishments are applied to individual fale, both inside and out. Several forms of ornament may be situated around the perimeter of individual fale, either as permanent additions or temporary decorations. In 1887, the British Council W. B. Churchward described such a house in Saluafata. In honour of our arrival it was prettily decorated with flowers and garlands entwined round the upright posts, or hanging in graceful festoons from the roof, whilst every kind of bush ornament that the forest could furnish, or native ingenuity devise, had its appropriate position, converting the brown house of ordinary days into a floral bower, rich with the brightest colours, almost startling to the eye, though toned down by the softness of the lovely green harmoniously blended forming a truly artistic coup d’ oeil.40 Today, cloth is often substituted for the laurels. This placement lends visual weight to the periphery of the space where the inside and the outside meet. In addition to their visual, aesthetic function, such decorations mark the house as a site of activities removed from the commonplace.41 The cloth serves to mark the periphery of the space, much like the lashing does in heritage architectural styles.

Lashing as Decoration The indigenous heritage techniques used to construct houses are based on lashing. However, these are more than just structural components. “The guest house in addition to material, size, and shape, was decorated with ornamental lashings in sennit braid [coconut husk twine]. They were built by skilled carpenters belonging to an ancient guild…”42 The plaiting style results in basic geometric forms, which stand out against the wood when

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dyed sennit is used. These motifs are similar to those found on siapo. Handy mentions that different building guilds had lashing designs that served to distinguish the fale they constructed. Some of the guilds also used a mark or technical detail in the woodwork.43 The Aiga sa Le Malama (Family of Le Malama) used a design that tradition indicates was personally conferred on them by the god Tangaloa. The trademark of Sao, said to be a star, was supposedly placed at the end of the house’s ridgepole. A builder using the lashing trademark of another society would be fined.44 These lashings, along with the interior superstructure of the roof, provide a complex visual field (Figure 3.5). Today, in houses built with Western technology, and in which the rafters are exposed, these components are often decorated with commercial cloth or decorative paper hung along the entire length of the rafters. In this way the textiles fill the space, reinforcing the divisions inherent in the structure and providing the decorative element lacking in nailed components. Colorful strips of cloth are also placed at the eaves, architectural components that themselves mark the boundary between the central vā and the outside (Figure 3.6). The high density of such elements within the interior roof expanse, in contrast to the more visually open area below, provides a sharp visual contrast. The two spaces are distinct in their accessibility, as well as their potential for further division. The lower section of the house is one through which people pass and, in doing so, create new spatial divisions. It is an active vā that readily enables manipulation, and thus becomes the stage for the presentation of cloth. However, individual houses are not the only venues where architecture and cloth intersect. The village malae functions as a vā for the presentation of textiles, activities that act as a means of social production and reproduction.

FIGURE 3.5

Interior of Faletele, Asau Village, 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together  55

FIGURE 3.6

Faleapa, Manase Village, 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

Village as Architectural Space La Perouse recorded for Tutuila, now part of American Samoa, a basic description of the Samoan village. “The houses were placed in a circle about three hundred yards in diameter, the center of which formed a beautiful green, while the trees, with which it was shaded kept it delightfully cool.”45 That green is the malae. Fifty years later, John Williams noted the same arrangement for an inland village on ‘Upolu in today’s independent Samoa.46 Modern Samoan villages are often much more variable in physical organization than these early descriptions by explorers and missionaries imply. Many exhibit linearity in their arrangement, rather than a strongly defined circular format. However, the ideal of a village malae, defined by the architectural forms around it, remains an important organizing principle.47 The relevance of the malae as essential village core is physically and visually marked in two ways. One is the open nature of the space. As in guest fale, visual accessibility points to indigenous political and social forms. The unobstructed vā of the malae is accessible and potentially subject to further division via creative human movement. The second designation of the malae as meaningful is found in the positioning of prestige architecture around its defining perimeter. The guest fale of important extended families are usually located here. According to Mageo, the malae and its assembly of structures is a “spatial icon of the relationship between ‘aiga [families] within the village.”48 Churches are also commonly built adjacent to the malae, as are other important community structures. The village cricket pad is also often located here (Figure 3.7). Shore has suggested that “a concrete cricket pitch placed seemingly irreverently just inside the malae attested to the occasional nature of … [the area’s] sanctity.”49 However, in social terms, I would argue that the use of the center area as a sports field actually reinforces its significance.

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FIGURE 3.7

Village Malae with Cricket Match. Safune Village, 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

Although the restricted nature of the malae is not always overtly in evidence, in some ways the locating of the cricket pad there supports the space as the arena for social interaction. When an intra-village cricket match occurs, people gather to watch. It is a time to get together with friends and informally strengthen social ties. The reproduction or reinforcement of social links is even more evident in more formal inter-village competitions, where different communities come together to compete. Here, the paradoxical nature of relations between unrelated groups can come to the fore. The tension between friendship and competition is given an arena. As the site for important religious and community activities, the malae provides the social and political nucleus for the village. When in use for religious or political interaction, it becomes controlled space, where behavior and entrance are restricted. The malae with its border of guest fale in the context of societal negotiation acts as a ritual vā or stage where the presentation of cloth and other goods take place.

Presentations The conferral of textiles and other gifts in architecturally defined spaces is a major component of Samoan ritual activity. A … domain in which cloth acquires social and political significance is that of bestowal and exchange. Participants in life-cycle celebrations … frequently make of cloth a continuous thread, a binding tie between two kinship groups, or three and more generations. The cloth-givers on such occasions generate political power as well, committing recipients to loyalty and obligation in the future.50

Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together 57

The Keesings note that in Samoa the rights and obligations generated through property exchanges could be used to cement alliances or to redress a balance in case of feuding or war.... Even under modern conditions of peace, they are likely to be called upon to repair breaches in social relationships.51 Almost invariably included in such exchanges are textiles. Whether on the malae or within the guest fale, the groups involved in presentations sit across from one another, separated by the center space, the vā. The orator chief representing the family or village loudly proclaims each gift. As the textiles or other goods are brought forth, they are carried across to the recipients. “The material gift is a means of expressing sentiment in order to fulfill a social end, rather than the gift being an end in itself.”52 The movement of bestowal creates a link between the spatial locations of the participants, with the gifts acting as agents of socio-political communication. As Schneider and Weiner have noted, an aspect of cloth that “enhances its social and political roles, is how readily its appearance and that of its constituent fibers can evoke ideas of connectedness or tying.”53 The most important textiles used in presentations in Samoa are ‘ie toga. The mats are presented fully open, revealing their size, decoration, and quality of weave. Their movement across the architecturally defined vā of guesthouse or malae suggests a physical link between the spaces of the giving and the receiving parties, one that is embodied in the material objects themselves. The reciprocal nature of the transfer socially and economically ties the groups together. In addition, the previous spatial divisions are modified as the open, central space is entered, crossed, and essentially nullified. The abrogation of the separation is implemented through the actual transfer, but the spatial modifications are intimated through movement rather than a physical rearrangement of place. A more overly physical signification of the production of social and political ties is evident at the presentation of lengths of barkcloth or cotton material. Formerly, the presentation of siapo, or barkcloth, was as prestigious a gift as ʻie tōga. At the time of Western contact, a siapo pathway from the guesthouse of a high-ranking bride to that of the groom was stretched across the open malae as part of the wedding. The movement of those carrying gifts across this bridge suggests a physical link between the architecture that itself was a symbol of status and signified the standing of those giving and those receiving. A traveling party, or malaga, would have made a formal gift of siapo following dances presented by their hosts in the guest fale. The barkcloth pieces, typically six to eight feet in length, were flung out and then carried across the house. The extension of the barkcloth provided visual and physical links that reflected the coming together of the hosting family and guests and the resulting social re-alignment. Another presentation where the giving of siapo was an important component is the sua. The ceremony is intended to honor important guests. Depending upon the participants and the status of those receiving, the ritual can occur in a guest fale or on the malae. In this ceremony, the presenter originally carried a drinking coconut aloft, with a piece of siapo tied at their waist. As they neared the honored recipient, the drink was presented and the barkcloth removed and conferred. In the past, the only textile suitable for use in the sua was siapo. Today, commercial cloths have been substituted. An example is the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Papauta

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FIGURE 3.8

Alumni Making a Sua Presentation to Salamasina. 100th Anniversary of the Papauta Girls’ School, 1991. Photo: Anne E. Guernsey Allen.

Girls School in 1991, honoring its director Princess Salamasina. The events took place on the school’s malae. Salamasina sat under a large tree flanked by the school administration building. Positioned across from her was the school chapel in front of which were those who had come to honor her. On both sides of the malae were spectators. Figuring prominently among the gifts were entire bolts of commercial print cloth. Alumni of the school unrolled the textiles to their full length, running forward to carry the material and pile it before the princess (Figure 3.8). The women’s actions created a physical ribbon of cloth between themselves and Salamasina. The extended lengths provided, not just a conceptual link, but a visual and concretized joining of donor and recipient. As in the presentation of ‘ie toga or siapo, the open architecturally defined space was crossed and the separation nullified. Cloth’s active transfer across the open vā creates a statement of existing relationships while providing a dynamic mechanism to establish new social or political ties. The importance of expressing such relationships is also found at funerals, where cloth and architectural space again intersect. Instead of using siapo as a burial shroud, as in the past, today lengths of lace and other fancy fabrics envelop the deceased. Family and community mourners bring these textiles as a sign of respect. At the funeral of Salamasina, a vast number of cloth gifts were presented during the lying-in-state. Although the ceremonies were not in an open fale, the Papauta Girls School auditorium was spatially organized in the traditional way: the coffin at one end; the Malietoa and Royal Tongan families on one side; the wives of Congregational pastors on the other. Mourners entered opposite the coffin, passing through the open central vā to present their gifts of textiles. Salamasina, the highest-ranking person in Samoa, was much beloved and people came from throughout the islands and overseas to place cloth upon her open coffin and publicly display their emotional and societal ties to her.

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The ceremonies for Salamasina were international and on a grand scale as befitting her status. However, the actions that made up her funeral are repeated daily somewhere in Samoa on a much smaller scale. My Samoan Mum died just before I took students to the islands in 2014. We brought with us a bolt of cloth on our flight. At the funeral, we carried the extended textile across the guest fale to wrap the coffin. The actions acknowledged my social link and debt to the Aloaina family, but also established new connections between the students and those who had gathered to honor this cherished woman.

Conclusion The use of cloth as a metaphor for society is common in many cultures, including Samoa. However, as Schneider and Weiner note “to seek the symbolic potentialities of cloth in its material properties … is but a preliminary step, and only partially compelling. Equally important are the human actions that make cloth politically and socially salient.”54 In Samoa, cloth becomes more than just a signification of the complex relationships that make up society when used to transform architecture through decoration and movement. The physical organizing of place in the guest fale and in the village malae results in an active centralized space. However, this is not static positioning, but rather a framework for action. The movement of cloth across the interior activates architectural space, the physical vā, while the built environment provides the stage and structure for the giving of textiles in socially meaningful ways, thus creating and recreating vā as relationship. In this way, the use of textiles within the architectural setting provides a compelling means to express and establish socio-political ties. The result is a synergy where architecture and cloth reinforce one another as both semiotic icons and active mechanisms.

Notes 1 Jane Schneider and Annette Weiner, Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, DC, London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 1. 2 One definition of textile is any material made of interlacing fibers. In this regard, I would argue that lashing, when used as more that a construction mechanism, qualifies as a textile. 3 Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter H. Buck), Samoan Material Culture (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Bulletin No. 75, 1930), 261. 4 Hiroa, Samoan Material, 272. 5 Jocelyn Linnekin, “The Politics of Culture in the Pacific,” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, ed. Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), 161. 6 Nicholas Thomas, “The Inversion of Tradition,” American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 213. 7 Although ‘ie toga are technically plaited, often the literature utilizes the term woven. 8 Penelope Schoeffel, “Samoan Exchange and ‘Fine Mats’: An Historical Reconsideration,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 108, no. 2 (1999): 118. 9 Schoeffel, “Samoan Exchange,” 118. 10 Hiroa, Samoan Material, 275. 11 Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1987), 52. 12 Hiroa, Samoan Material, 320. 13 Floor mats for a guest house were sometimes made by a group of unmarried women who gathered in a house that, for the time they were working, was labeled a fale lalanga. Hiroa, Samoan Material, 248. 14 Quoted in Richard Moyle ed., The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832 (Canberra: Australian University Press, 1984), 82.

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42 Hiroa, Samoan Material, 20. 43 Edward Smith Craighill Handy and Willowdean Chatterson Handy, Samoan House Building, Cooking and Tatooing. 1924 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Reprinted in New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971), 17. 44 Hiroa, Samoan Material, 87. 45 Jean Francois de La Perouse, A Voyage Round the World Performed in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788 by the Boussole and Astrolabe, vol. I and II. (London: A. Hamilton, 1799). Reprinted in New York: De Capo Press, 1968), 130. 46 Williams, Samoan Journals, 461. 47 Allen, Architecture. 48 Jeannette Mageo, “‘Ferocious Is the Centipede’: A Study of the Significance of Eating and Speaking in Samoa,” Ethos 17 no. 4 (1989): 404 and 421. 49 Bradd Shore, Sala’ilua: A Samoan Mystery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 8. 50 Schneider and Weiner, Cloth, 3. 51 Felix Keesing, and Marie Keesing, Elite Communication in Samoa: A Study of Leadership, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 77. 52 Timothy O’Meara, Samoan Planters: Tradition and Economic Development in Western Samoa, (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990), 195. 53 Schneider and Weiner, Cloth, 2. 54 Ibid.

Bibliography Allen, Anne. The Tapa of Tonga and Samoa: A Study in Continuity and Change. Master’s Thesis San Diego State University, 1985. Allen, Anne. Space as Social Construct: The Vernacular Architecture of Rural Samoa. PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1993. Allen, Anne. “Architecture as Social Expression in Western Samoa: Axioms and Models.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 5 no. 1 (1993): 33–45. Allen, Anne. “The Tie that Binds: Siapo, Western Cloth, and Samoan Social Space.” In Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth, Special Issue, Pacific Arts, edited by H. Young-Leslie and P. A. Addo NS, 3–5 (2007): 94–103. Allen, Anne. “Vā and Its Relationship to the Samoan Built Environment.” In Pacific Spaces: Translations and Transmutations, edited by Anna-Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul, Albert Refiti, and Lana Lopesi, 54–74. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Bougainville, Louis-Antoine, de. A Voyage Round the World. Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769. Translated by J. R. Forster. London: J. Nourse and T. Davies, 1772. Brigham, William. Ka Hana Kapa. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Memoirs No. 3. 1911. Casey, Edward. Getting Back into Place, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Churchward, William B. My Consulate in Samoa. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887. Cook, James. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. 4 vols. Edited by John Cawte Beaglehole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955–1967. Handy, Edward Smith Craighill, and Willowdean Chatterson Handy. Samoan House Building, Cooking and Tatooing. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1924. Hiroa, Te Rangi (Peter H. Buck). Samoan Material Culture. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Bulletin No. 75, 1930. Keesing, Felix, and Marie Keesing. Elite Communication in Samoa: A Study of Leadership. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1956. Krämer, Augustin. 1902–1903 Die Samoa-lnseln. 2 vols. Stuttgart: E. Naegele, 1902–1903. La Perouse, Jean Francois de. A Voyage Round the World Performed in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788 by the Boussole and Astrolabe, vol. I and II. London: A. Hamilton, 1799. Reprinted in New York: De Capo Press, 1968.

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Linnekin, Jocelyn. “The Politics of Culture in the Pacific.” In Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer, 149–174. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990. Mageo, Jeannette. “‘Ferocious Is the Centipede’: A Study of the Significance of Eating and Speaking in Samoa.” Ethos 17, no. 4 (1989): 387–427. Meleisea, Malama. The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1987. Moyle, Richard, ed. The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. Canberra: Australian University Press, 1984. O’Meara, Timothy. Samoan Planters: Tradition and Economic Development in Western Samoa. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. Pierce, Joseph, and Deborah Martin. “Placing Lefebvre.” Antipode 47, no. 5 (2015): 1279–99. Sailelagi, Manu. “The Ie Toga (Fine Mats) of Samoa.” 2010. Accessed April 24, 2022. https://macimise.prel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Manu-Sailelagi-Ie-Toga-fine-mats-of-Samoa.pdf Schneider, Jane, and Annette Weiner. “Chapter One.” In Cloth and Human Experience, edited by Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider, 1–29. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Schoeffel, Penelope. “Samoan Exchange and ‘Fine Mats’: An Historical Reconsideration.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 108, no. 2 (1999): 117–47. Shore, Bradd. Sala’ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Stair, John B. “Jottings of the Mythology and Spirit-Lore of Old Samoa.” Journal of The Polynesian Society 5 (1896): 33–57. Thomas, Nicholas. “The Inversion of Tradition.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 213–32. Turner, George. Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before. 1884. Reprinted in Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. 1984. von Reiche, Nina Netzler. “The Revival of ‘Ie Tōga Weaving in Samoa.” Pacific Arts 23/24 (2001): 113–16. Williams, John. A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands. London: J. Snow, 1838. Wilson, Soli. “Ie Toga Recognised as International Icon.” Samoa Observer. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category/samoa/54990?f bclid=IwAR13KFAZ3r3-q1SVylJ1T1u6hv0ewGGHUDspJniA6YBanFgBP_KBVAYchbU

PART II

Public and Private Interiors Basile Baudez

This part focuses on the use of textile elements in shaping and perceiving spaces. Textile is here more defined by its function and a set of specific characteristics than by its range of materiality. The three following chapters address more specifically qualities that set or blur boundaries between private and public spaces. Textile helps to spatialize privacy, a notion which has traditionally been understood by two main fields: in political history, articulated around the concept of public sphere defined by Jürgen Habermas or the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann; in literature or material culture history, be it in histories of private spheres or consumption habits. The chapters in this section adopt each a different methodology to analyze the use of textile elements in the private sphere and its articulation with public domains, both political and economic. Defining a space seems to be one of the first functions assigned to textile as Mei Mei Rado shows in the bed fabrics that help to establish a space of intimacy in the bedroom or in the boudoir. These two rooms have become spaces of retreat in eighteenth-century French elite interiors in contrast to the public and performative space emblazoned by the parade bedroom. Providing privacy is a role assigned regularly to textile elements, be it in aristocratic Paris, in late colonial India studied by Abigail McGowan, or in modernist London analyzed by Emily Orr. Textiles however, if they provide sight privacy, do not extend this quality to other senses, like smell or sound. The topic of the articulation of textile and acoustics, present in these papers, is still to be fully researched. Fabrics muffle and distort sounds; they offer a promise of privacy but fail to provide it. The liminal ambiguity that characterizes them allows degrees of everything, something that other materials do not provide. Their mobility and flexibility both sets and undermines boundaries, especially between private and public spaces to the point that a British woman quoted by McGowan could describe her colonial Indian bedroom as “a section of a street with a bed in it.” Not only spatial, but also temporal boundaries are blurred by textile elements. The three chapters demonstrate that textiles play a mediator role between past and present. Their materiality and set of colors link outdated but prestigious pieces of furniture with contemporary fashionable objects in late Parisian eighteenth-century interiors, while chicks or punkhas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-6

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inherited from the Mughal period form an essential part of colonial Anglo-Indian bungalows and medium-rise buildings, and modernist carpets and tapestries unify the disparate styles of London interiors. Textiles pull together objects that are not connected either by their function or by their material. This includes the dresses of people inhabiting those spaces. One of textiles’ main qualities is indeed their adaptability, making them the perfect types of items for interior decoration. Not only are they easily replaceable, but they can follow the change of taste at a relatively quick pace. That leads us to the important role of fashion. Mei Mei Rado shows us the close material and formal relationship between upholstery and dresses, a phenomenon that we encounter in the modern movement studied here by Emily Orr. It can acquire a political dimension: the cotton that is used for the punkhas in colonial bungalows is woven in Great Britain and constitutes therefore one of the most salient forms of exploitation fought against by the independence movement to the point of becoming the symbol of modern India. In the three cases, fabrics help to unveil the consequences of public decisions on private spaces. Royal support for the French silk industry and imitation of Chinese textiles introduced them in aristocratic interiors, centuries-old cooling techniques became indispensable in the new type of houses introduced by the British colonial power in India, and one sees the consequence for the British modern home of the public exhibitions organized by government-sponsored societies or by the Council for Art and Industry founded in 1932. In all those cases, fabrics help to blur the limits between private and public spaces, literally and metaphorically.

Bibliography Aynsley, Jeremy, Charlotte Grant, and Arts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain), eds. Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance. London, New York: V & A Publications, 2006. Berry, Jess. House of Fashion: Haute Couture and the Modern Interior. London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Calanca, Daniela. Storia sociale della moda. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2002. Fisher, Fiona, Trevor Keeble, and Patricia Lara-Betancourt. Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Jolly, Anna, ed. Furnishing Textiles: Studies on Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Interior Decoration. Riggisberger Berichte 17. Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2009. Shoeman, Ferdinand David ed. Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Weintraub, Jeff. “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction.” In Public and Private in Thought and Practice, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, 1–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Wigley, Mark. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Winkler, Gail Caskey. Capricious Fancy: Draping and Curtaining the Historic Interior, 1800–1930. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

4 LE RIDEAU TIRÉ Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France Mei Mei Rado

Interiors of eighteenth-century elite French houses featured a rich array of textiles, such as large tapestries, decorative silk panels fitted to the wall, fabric screens, and upholstery for beds, chairs, and sofas. During this century, curtains developed unprecedented varieties and sophistication.1 Window drapes, portières (door curtains), bed hangings, bathtub shields, and so forth occupied large surfaces in an interior, produced visually imposing curves and folds, marked or masked architectural junctions, while creating layers, barriers, frames, and spaces within spaces that transformed an architectural interior. The blossoming of domestic curtains in private apartments (as distinguished from formal, public settings) went hand in hand with new principles and interests of French architectural theories, which increasingly emphasized comfort, privacy, and emotional expressions of décors.2 The choices and arrangements of curtains figured centrally in the discourses on commodité (convenience), caractère (character), sensation, and volupté (voluptuousness)—the last notion in particular associated with the new intimate space known as the boudoir.3 Domestic curtains were also a recurrent motif in French libertine literature, tableaux de mode (images of polite society in fashionable dress and settings), and prints depicting the mœurs (social mores), often functioning as a subtly or explicitly eroticized device. Although virtually no curtain from this period has survived in situ,4 architectural treatises, images, and fictions offer rich information on how draperies shaped dwellers’ relationship to space, mediated social interactions, and provoked or sublimated desire. Drawing on these sources, this chapter probes on the sensory experience and cultural imagination of interior draperies in eighteenth-century France. If we divide eighteenth-century French interior decorations into two general categories— relatively fixed and movable—draperies belonged to the second. Curtains were habitually rotated by season, routinely opened, closed, rolled, stretched, lifted, or dropped, and they always touched, flanked, hid, or revealed something. Constantly in movements and in shifting relations with other objects, these textiles reconfigured interior space and produced micro domains for divergent occasions, each charged with atmospheric and sentimental overtones. With their motions and interactions, draperies in the eighteenth-century French interior introduced complex visions of space, shaped sensory experience, participated in social performance, and inspired reveries. The material quality of the textile itself DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-7

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also possessed a sensuous dimension. In exploring these aspects,5 this essay highlights “the poetics” of drapery in the sense French philosopher Gaston Bachelard evokes in The Poetics of Space. On subjective experiences of domestic space, Bachelard states that one experiences the house “in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams,” and that “imagination augments the value of reality.”6 Draperies formed imaginary scaffolding imbedded with sensibilities and ideas, which was superimposed onto the real architectural space. Interior draperies, undoubtedly, had long shaped the perceptions and imagination of space, life, and world throughout centuries, but how they were engaged in producing meanings and what they conjured varied across time and place. What was unique to eighteenth-century France lies in that interior draperies played a key role in a sophisticated culture of seduction and eroticism. “Séduire” in the eighteenth-century contexts meant both to deceive and to please.7 Seduction figured as a prevalent mode in the activities of elite French society both as a vehicle for the instantiation of sociability and as an enticement to amorous play, practices that became closely intertwined. The central goal of cultivated sociability was to please others through well-calculated, aesthetically, and socially gratifying performance. Mimi Hellman convincingly demonstrates how interior decorations in eighteenth-century France functioned as animated social actors, participating in elite self-presentations and interactions.8 In addition to social seduction, over the course of the century, eroticism had been increasingly associated with delightful, luxury architecture and décors. In libertine literature, voluptuous interiors became mainstay, not only serving as the sites for amorous encounters, but also turning into the very embodiment of sensuality and sexuality. As versatile space indicator and as acute mediator of sensation and sociability, pliable and voluptuous draperies figured prominently in the game of seduction and erotic imagination, their surfaces saturated with desires and fantasies.

Material, Space, and Sensation A brief overview of the material facts of eighteenth-century French curtains facilitates the understanding of how their visual and material conditions lent to physical and mental experience. Window curtains had not been an intentional decorative element until the 1670s. Around the 1690s, new forms started to make appearance, and by the 1720s, they had constituted a part of most rooms in a wealthy household.9 The ordinary straight type evolved from opening to one side to both sides, allowing a symmetrical arrangement.10 A new variation of the simple style à tête flamande (with Flemish head), of which the top was pleated, appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century.11 Looped types developed more varieties. A pulled-up style, which could be lifted to the window head by means of cords and so organized as to hang in festoons, was invented by the turn of the eighteenth century.12 An elaborate rideau à l’italienne came in vogue, composed of a pelmet and two sections of fabrics arranged as a cluster of fanciful curves (Figure 4.1).13 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the arrangement of volumes and loops became more imaginative still, drawing inspirations from bed curtains.14 New styles acquired fashionable nicknames, such as à la reine (the Queen’s style), jarretières (garters), à la grecque.15 In addition, half curtains and blinds flourished, permitting more delicate controls of light and gaze.16 Portières, which had been increasingly used since the second half of the seventeenth century, became an essential component of interior draperies in the eighteenth century.17 They hung straight and opened to one side, with slightly longer length than window curtains to brush on the floor.18

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The most significant changes occurred in beds. The dominant type in the seventeenth century was a box-shaped bed, consisting of four columns, a rooftop, and suspended textiles.19 Poster-beds, or the lit à colonne, continued to be used during the eighteenth century. A novelty, the lit à la duchesse, with a “flying” headboard attached to wall rather than resting on posters, first appeared towards the late seventeenth century and often served as the state bed in the appartement de parade (ceremonial chamber for formal reception) in royal or aristocratic homes.20 An assortment of novel styles emerged as the century progressed. The lit à la romaine and lit à la polonaise with sinuous draperies supported by curved iron rods introduced new opulence. Lavishly draped or lined daybeds lit à la turque and lit en niche stood as the focal piece in a boudoir (Figure 4.2). This revolution in bed designs concurred with the new conception of the bedroom as an intimate space for sleeping and the boudoir as a domain for sensual pleasure, while the importance of the parade bed and public bedroom had faded by the 1730s.21 The forms and materials of bed hangings often resonated with those of window curtains. These draperies found further reprises in bathtub curtains, hangings above sofas, and in reduced scale as toilette mirror hangings. It should be noted that tapestries, although still reserved for staterooms, had largely receded from the interior compared to the previous centuries. They were replaced by boiseries and framed wall upholstery, thus giving way to draperies as the primary wall textile decoration. Wall upholstery frequently matched draped fabrics. As the image of the formal

FIGURE 4.1

“Rideau ordinaire” and “Rideaux de croisée retroussés à l’italienne.” L’Encyclopédie, Tapissier, Planche XIII, 26:12:2.

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FIGURE 4.2

“ lit à colonne,” “lit à duchesse,” “lit à la romaine,” “lit à la polonnaise,” “lit à la turque,” and “lit en niche ou alcove” L’Encyclopédie, Tapissier, Planches VI and V, 26:12:1.

bedchamber of the Hôtel de Choiseul with its winter furnishing shows, textiles en suite (in coordination and harmony) in a room formed a unified background for dispersed objects, filled in the architectural and furniture skeletons, and created a coherent rhythm onto an interior.22 In Principes de l’art du tapissier (Principles of the Art of the Upholster), a guidebook published in Paris in 1770 for professional upholsters, Jean-François Bimont discussed a range of textiles suitable for such curtains, from taffeta, damask, cut and ciselé velvet, satin, gauze, linen, muslin, to painted or printed cotton. According to Bimont, damask was most used, agreeable for beds, wall coverings, seating furniture, portières, and window curtains alike.23 The list also featured fabrics of Eastern origins with exotic evocations, notably siamoise and pékin.24 The former, a lightweight striped fabric, emerged after the visit of the Siamese Embassy to Versailles in 1686 and gained lasting popularity.25 Bimont’s texts mentioned a typical “Siamoise de Rouen” made of linen and cotton, among others. Pékin referred to Chinese export silk with painted flowers, but similar textiles were also imitated in France, notably in Valence.26 Textiles for interior draperies most commonly came in plain colors, stripes, and floral designs. As seen in the merchandise table in Bimont’s manual, colors for taffeta, damask, and velvet included crimson, blue, yellow, and green—the same shades also appeared frequently in furnishing inventories of the period.27 Together, the material

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textures, colors, and patterns of various curtains defined the visual character of a room. As art historian Pierre Verlet asserts, “the color scheme of a room was emphasized if not dictated by the large curtains which draped the windows, and which, when closed in the evening, covered almost completely the whole of one wall.”28 Various draped textiles in an eighteenth-century French elite house produced a series of echoing curves and pleats in an interior space. Draperies, together with their resonated extensions in wall and furniture upholstery, formed a visually and mentally connected web. Architectural structures of this period were dominated by an overall linear quality, articulated by chimney columns, boiserie borders, cornices, and door and window frames. By contrast, curtains created bolder silhouettes with their steep slopes, undulating folds, large loops, and inflated volumes. Prints and paintings representing domestic scenes reveal contemporary cultural visions of textiles. They frequently depict imposing window curtains, casually swathed and rolled, and pouring onto a chair or a canapé. Their wild crawling obscured the spatial clarity and rationality. Draperies transformed the interior of a house into a malleable surface that could be folded, wrapped, and twisted—a subterranean domain escaping from the architectural logic and fostering fantasies. Draperies indicated space. Curtains intimated concealed inner spaces that were perceived and imagined as ulterior. Deep recesses usually accompanied curtained windows;29 a niche in a boudoir framed by drapes retreated into a most private zone; and doors and windows led to another place. Hung at these nexuses, draperies denoted crucial thresholds in an interior but with great ambiguity, rendering these openings more visible and at the same time concealing them. Bed or window curtains functioned as a partition but never divided a space completely, and their every motion threatened to dissolve the boundaries. The liminality of the architecture or furniture elements was in a sense transferred into and articulated by their textiles. These draperies embodied a status mixing promise, obstruction, and suspension. Draperies also created space. A bed with curtains fully drawn became a self-contained unit independent from its surroundings. Open, parted curtains also delineated a space, often with the aid of folding screens and fire screens. Even the brief, circumstantial movement of draperies could generate interstitial zones. Various ephemeral, miniature spaces provided ideal sites for secrets and fantasies. In addition, draperies carried a temporal dimension. First, in eighteenth-century France, fabrics for curtains and upholstery were customarily rotated when the season changed, usually for summer and winter.30 In his Cours d’architecture (Lessons in Architecture 1771–1777), Jacques-François Blondel specified that the color scheme of textile for the “meuble d’hiver” (winter furnishing) should be dark, while for the “meuble d’été” (summer furnishing), it should be light.31 In his Principes de l’art du tapissier, Bimont suggested that for winter, damask was the proper material, while for summer, “taffetas à fleurs ou chiné” (taffetas with floral patterns or with printed warp designs) were preferable, as was pékin.32 Second, the changing positions of curtains in a day connoted the passage of time. In the eighteenth century, natural light was still the most important lighting source during the daytime. Window curtains modified how much light could penetrate a room, serving as an essential mechanism to convey the impression of time. For instance, in Le Génie de l’architecture (The Genius of Architecture, 1780), Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières maintained that for the chambre à coucher (sleeping bedroom), gauze curtains should be “drawn across the windows at two-thirds of their height,” which “will admit only so much light as is appropriate to the place,” as the daylight let in the room “is to be dim and faint, as it is painted at the moment

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of the waking of Venus, when the Graces inform her of the coming of dawn.”33 Here the position of curtains created a poetic illusion of a specific moment through atmospheric light, which lent the bedchamber its character “that inspires repose and proclaims tranquility.”34 Another temporal dimension of draperies lies in that, like dress, they were essentially ephemeral. The fabrics used for curtains were subject to the caprice of fashion, although they were not updated at the same fast pace as dress textiles.35 While the fashion cycle for patterns of furnishing silk damasks may last as long as twenty-five years,36 other materials used for window and bed curtains mentioned in Bimont’s 1770 treatise reflected the latest vogue. For example, camelot, a type of woolen fabric, demonstrated the influence of English materials and the fashionable taste known as anglomanie.37 The chiné-patterned silk taffeta recommended by Bimont for summer furnishing was an exotic textile resembling Asian ikat and made popular by Madame de Pompadour. It was also a trendy dress fabric around the 1760s and 1770s.38 As we have already seen, the practical functions of draperies mainly concerned environmental elements—to adjust light, ward off draughts and insects, gather heat, or muffle noise. In these roles, curtain contributed to the overarching principle of commodité, which increasingly guided French architectural planning and interior decoration for residences during the eighteenth century.39 Typically translated as convenience or comfort, commodité signified a distinct French art of living that was at ease, sophisticated, and aesthetically pleasing, emphasizing quotidian lived experience engaging space, furnishing, and objects, instead of public display in a grand manner. A mediator of natural phenomena, draperies helped create a more pleasant, comfortable living condition, while standing as a dense matrix where multiple physical sensations converged, serving as an immediate interface through which one experienced and negotiated with the surroundings. For example, the engraving Le carquois épuisé (The Empty Quiver, 1775) shows how bed curtains structure light and heat and shape the mood (Figure 4.3). Aided by a fire screen, the curved heavy drapes create a zone of intimacy and delicate tension. Sensations beyond the physical aspects—the capacity of interiors for sensual and emotional expressions and for eliciting visceral responses in dwellers—figured as another key point in eighteenth-century French architectural theories. In Le Génie de l’architecture, Le Camus stressed that each detail in an interior should be carefully thought out to arouse pleasing sensations. Particularly, “Light and shade artfully disposed in an architectural composition reinforce the desired impression and determine the effect.”40 He called the boudoir—the domain where the art of pleasing culminated and sensual enjoyments abounded—“le séjour de volupté” (abode of voluptuousness) reigned by “le luxe, la mollesse et le goût” (luxury, softness, and taste).41 It is not surprising that sensible deployments of curtains became all the more important in creating this “air of delicate gallantry” in a boudoir, for which, “a dim, mysterious light will be obtained by the use of gauze artfully disposed over part of the windows.”42 Eighteenth-century French libertine literature repeatedly evoked the same character of volupté in the descriptions of interior settings—often a boudoir—where sexual seductions took place. Inextricably linked to architectural discourse on décors, these fictional scenes frequently featured curtains in interplay with candles and mirrors to stage an amorous, evocative ambience. In the libertine novella La petite maison (The Little House, 1758) co-written by polygraph Jean-François de Bastide and architectural theorist Jacques-François Blondel, Mélite gradually surrenders to the marquis de Trémicour when seduced with décors in each room of his little house. There is a magical optical effect in the boudoir, whose walls are

Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in 18th-Century France  71

FIGURE 4.3

Nicolas de Launay (1739–1792) after Pierre Antoine Baudouin (1723–1769), Le carquois épuisé (The Empty Quiver), etching, 1775. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1954, 54.533.23.

covered with mirrors: “the light from their many candles receded into the opposite mirrors, which had been purposely veiled with hanging gauze.”43 At once disclosing and blurring, diaphanous gauze softened the rigid surface and clear contour of an interior, rendering the space imprecise and unrealistic. Imprecision, in the libertine context, elicited an arresting sensation, as literature scholar Michel Delon puts it, “imprecision imposes itself like gentle violence.”44 In Angola, histoire indienne (1746) by Jacques Rochette de La Morlière, curtains that filter the light has a power to inspire love. In the seductress’ cabinet, candles are placed behind “green taffeta curtains.” These drapes “seem to be made to break the too intense light, and which left only that half-light… invented to illuminate the enterprise of love, or to conceal the defeat of virtue.”45

Motion, Sociability, and Seduction In eighteenth-century French paintings and prints representing the social mores of the polite society set in fashionable interiors, curtains rarely stay static or confined. Instead, they engage in ceaseless interplays with their surroundings: swirling onto a piece of furniture in use, such as a chair, a sofa, tea stand, or a screen, or brushing against a person. Visual imagination brought to the fore draperies’ capacity to both generate and structure affective relations. Curtains functioned as a liminal space where body merged into place. By visually and physically linking a person to the architectural and human environment, curtains also built his or her mental connection to other objects and people. These genre scenes reveal contemporary visions of how the motions and placements of interior draperies subtly constructed and mediated social interactions. Curtains delineated proximity. Their positioning produced varying degrees of accessibility or exclusiveness, privacy or formality, encouragement, or obstruction. The mental distance shaped by curtains surpassed the actual physical space between the subjects. A 1771

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FIGURE 4.4

Nicolas Ponce (1746–1831) after Pierre Antoine Baudouin (1723–1769), La toilette, engraving, 1771. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1954, 54.533.12.

engraving La Toilette illustrates how artists could employ curtains to visually define the mental proximity (Figure 4.4). In this image, the lady assumes an aloof posture suggesting resistance, standing tall and looking down at the seated gentleman who is admiring her toilette, but the intertwined portière and window curtains behind them provide a channel for emotive communication, standing in for his embracing and caress. Conversely, another painting entitled La jolie visiteuse (The Pretty Visitor) by Jean-Baptiste Mallet gives a clue on how an image of a drapery could construct an emotional rhythm to isolate a person physically adjacent to others.46 The large curtain invading onto the screen and the canapé prescribes a privy domain mentally encasing the reclining woman below it, who is lost in her own reverie and completely indifferent to her social surroundings. In an engraving after the painting Le baiser à la dérobé (The Stolen Kiss, late 1780s) of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard, draperies dramatize the precarious condition and the emotional dilemma of the two figures in a brief amorous encounter (Figure 4.5). The scene in which a boy is attempting a kiss from a young girl takes place in a corner between two open doors. The curtains framing them—two short door hangings and a long portière—at once provide a temporary safe zone and direct the couple towards danger and risk. The girl is torn between the curtains behind which the boy emerges—a world of unknown pleasure—and the portière that leads to a group of older women representing social order and staid morality. Her dress looped up onto a chair and her rippling gauzy

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FIGURE 4.5

Nicolas François Regnault (1746-1810) after Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), La baiser à la dérobée (The Stolen Kiss), stipple etching, 1788. National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection, 1942.9.2123.

scarf add to this meandering path of draperies, in which every fold trembles with fear and desire. Bundling, swaying draperies helped realize the look of beau désordre—an interior in seductive chaos that pleased the eyes and stimulated erotic imaginations. As art historian Mary Sheriff points out, this “beautiful disarray” was “a calculation of art.” “A room was represented as if chance events had left it in a pleasing visual pattern.”47 Draperies, more than any other objects and décors, had a potential to create an impression of casually formed chaos. François Boucher’s painting La Toilette (1742) illustrates such a disorder as an erotically charged setting fraught with textiles.48 As the diminutive form of toile (cotton or linen cloth), the word toilette is fabric related. Around 1600, it had designated the fine textile draped over a table for mirror and cosmetic items, and later it became the metonymy for such practice of grooming.49 In Boucher’s painting, the portière blown by the wind contributes to the air of légèreté and facilité. Beau désordre expresses an interior in a state of déshabillé and undressing. Cultural historian Philip Steward draws an analogue between the interior beau désordre and the erotic négligence where a suggestive but delicate indecency of pose or dress disguises itself as inattention.50 Indeed, woman’s négligée outfit for the toilette—robe de chambre with pleated hems plus loose, protecting wrap around the shoulders—greatly resembled the interior draperies. Just as in négligence the erotic nature of flesh was conveyed through a calculated game of clothing to reveal and to conceal, in beau désordre, draped textiles flirted with the viewer with evocative intimacy and elusive caprice.

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The 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined rideau (curtain) as “a piece of fabric [as silk, wool, or woven with gold or silver threads], cloth [as cotton or line], etc., which one uses to hide, cover, surround, or preserve something.”51 Curtains were principally understood for their actions. Their performative relationships with other things, such as to enclose or to embrace, qualified these things while endowing draperies themselves with meanings. The impulses of curtains—to conceal, to reveal, to encircle, to open, or to close—produced different tensions in the games of seduction, triggering a host of fantasies. Simply put, draperies assumed two architectonic roles in relating the subject to an object of desire—either standing between them or enclosing them. A curtain in-between posed as an obstacle and a source of frustration, which in the logic of eighteenth-century libertinage only rendered the hidden object more desirable and the process of uncovering more delicious. The threshold articulated by the fabric suspended carnal encounter, perpetuating desire into a longer savoring of the pleasurable oscillation between expectation escalated and resistance confronted. Draperies separated but did not block comprehensively. Curtains in between people or spaces served as an essential prop for voyeurism or eavesdropping. As literature scholar Henri Lafon elucidates, “see but not being seen” or “heard but not being heard” is a fascinating state in eighteenth-century libertine texts, often revealing a surprise more or less related to erotic activities.52 In Le rideau levé, ou l’éducation de Laure (The Raised Curtain, or the Education of Laure, 1786) by Mirabeau, the plots unfold as the eponymous young girl gains sexual education behind the curtain in her father’s room and observing his engagement with his lover.53 Curtains, like screens and doors, allowed a person to remain unseen while watching or listening attentively. As Lafon argues, the décors that facilitate discrete surveillances not only serve as “the frame of gaze (le regard)” but also “the gaze itself materialized in the double component of pleasure and prohibition, obstacle.”54 Curtains are also left half-open, accidently (au hasard) or deliberately. A recurrent scene in literature and in art is a sleeping beauty framed by her half-drawn bed hangings, igniting the desire and love of a man who caught a sight of her by chance.55 Draperies at once unfolded possibility and imposed a limit, channeled and restricted desire. Curtains enclosing a couple implied certainty with promise for the progress of love. In the play La nuit et le moment (The Night and the Moment, 1755) by Crébillon fils, Clitandre recalls visiting his old lover in a hot summer day, finding her alone in the cabinet in which “all the window blinds were closed, large curtains, drawn from above, further enfeebled the light.” In this closeness assured by closed curtains, he found her much more alluring and was encouraged to declare love.56 Curtains’ social and erotic seductions, their double spatial significances as threshold, and enclosure converged in Boucher’s painting La toilette de Vénus (The Toilet of Venus, 1751), originally displayed in the bathing chamber (appartement des bains) of Madame de Pompadour at the château de Bellevue (Figure 4.6). The bathing room had two doors, one facing the cabinet de commodité, the other facing the bathtub. La Toilette and its pendant Le bain de Vénus (The Bath of Venus) were hung over each door, their narratives matching the functions of the spaces respectively.57 As Mimi Hellman points out, elite bathing in eighteenth-century France was frequently a social activity conducted in the presence of visitors (bathers wore chemises), and many bathing rooms were decorated like small salons. The bath provided a stage for the spectacle of bodily elegance and the performance of leisure consistent with ideals of elite sociability.58 By then, Pompadour had been suffering from

Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in 18th-Century France  75

FIGURE 4.6

François Boucher (1703–1770), The Toilette of Venus, oil on canvas, 1751. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920, 20.155.9.

poor health condition and her physical beauty faded.59 The painting La Toilette invoked an illusion of her sexual allure with the perfect body of Venus. The draperies with tasseled strings flanking Venus appear not so much as rhetorical hangings than as interior curtains. The canapé in the painting also recalls contemporary furniture.60 Even the choice of the curtain’s color—greenish blue—echoed contemporary preference for bathing room draperies,

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as Le Camus commented later, blue was preferable to set off the skin tone of the bathing beauty.61 The painted curtains, half-open, demarcated a threshold and implied theatricality. At the same time, situated behind Venus and foregrounding the goddess, they seem to surround her and the viewer together, fusing them into a delectable intimacy.

Body, Desire, and Eroticism In eighteenth-century French imagination, interior draperies also served as a mimetic, tactile double of the body itself. A parallel can be drawn between French women’s fashion of the eighteenth century and the interior draperies. Many types of fabrics could be used both for dresses and household hangings alike, ranging from satin, taffeta, damask, velvet, to gauze and muslin, notably the fashionable types such as chiné, pékin, and painted toile (called indienne). Although the patterns for dressing and furnishing fabrics would be quite different, women’s clothing and interior drapes displayed similar textures and evoked interchangeable tactility. Moreover, window curtains, furniture drapes, and women’s dress bore strong resemblance in terms of shapes. For example, the robe à la française featured long fluid pleats on the back, not unlike the straight folds of a window curtain. The robe à la française and many of the tightfitting robe à l’anglaise were open gowns. Their parted front skirt that revealed the petticoat beneath resembled the open curtains pulled to both sides. The conflation of furnishing draperies and feminine fashion became even more striking in the last quarter of the century, when curtains and dress both developed more fanciful shapes and a more intricate mechanism. For practical and aesthetic reasons, women had now looped up the outer robe of their dresses in truly imaginary ways by tucking the skirt panels into the pocket holes or by pulling them up with cords. The robe retroussée dans les poche was often worn by busy women. The robe à la polonaise first appeared in around 1775 and soon became a popular style. It consisted of a system of cords, which could raise the dress panels into three curved parts. Other types of gowns could also be reconstructed with the aid of cords. For example, a 1784 fashion plate in Galerie des modes et costumes français illustrates how the skirt panel of a robe à l’anglaise is bunched up (retroussé) with strings and draped with spiral ends.62 The cord-pulley system was exactly the mechanism employed for operating curtains, as the Encyclopédie and upholstery manuals instructed.63 The clustered loops, whimsical curves, and inflated silhouettes rendered the feminine dresses highly similar to contemporary window curtains and bed draperies. The shared ornamental vocabulary between dress and interior drapes further reveals their analogy. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the garnishing of curtains had become increasingly elaborate. For instance, at the peak of the turquerie taste around 1770s, chains of festoons punctuated by tassels that evoked the tents of sultans became a favored decorative element, appearing in fashion, window curtains, bed hangings, and niche drapes alike. In 1777, François-Joseph Bélanger redressed a set of chairs for a Turkish cabinet at Bagatelle for the comte d’Artois, brother of the king, by draping the festoons between the legs.64 This decoration had no functioning purpose and was purely for conjuring an exotic atmosphere. The fascination with excessive, sensual drapes eclipsed the boundaries between body, furniture, and architecture. In a 1782 fashion plate “Grande robe à la Sultane,” the opulent skirt and petticoat could be easily mistaken for a swathed interior (Figure 4.7). In one of the hand-colored copies, the panel of the green outer robe is lifted and fastened at both sides, opening to the crimson petticoat draped with gauzy white festoons around the lower edge, in a manner quite similar to the comte d’Artois’ turquerie fauteuils. 65 Green and red were

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FIGURE 4.7

Pierre Thomas Leclerc (c. 1740 – after 1799), Grande robe à la Sultane, ink on paper, 1782. Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, K1446.

also the two major colors for curtains.66 The overall effect of the dress emits an amusing theatricality and misleading enticement, inviting a viewer to enter or to sit on the lady’s skirt. Suffices it to say that in eighteenth-century France, interior drapery and feminine dress participated in shared visual spectacles and induced similar tactile allure. Dress mediated the imagination and desire of the naked body inside. It is tempting to suggest that in eighteenthcentury France, the attraction of (and to) a clothed body filtered through dress was to an extent dispersed and transferred to the surrounding draperies in the interior. In contemporary writings, the actions associated with dress and curtain were often undistinguished. For example, both could be levé (lifted), retroussé (rolled up) or fait tomber (let fall)—common phrases found in fictions, architectural treatises, upholstery manuals, and descriptions of fashion. In the libertine contexts, the manipulations of curtains were not without a carnal implication invoking the erotic acts of dress and undress. In wilder erotic imagination in eighteenth-century France, interior draperies were fantasized as the exposed body itself. The print Le Boudoir (1771) engraved by Antoine-Louis Romanet after Freudenberger illustrates the unabashed corporeality of curtains (Figure 4.8). In this image, a young woman falls asleep on her daybed, with a book in hand.67 At the door where the curtains are blown open by the wind, an interlacing couple is peeping inside. The scene is full of visual innuendos that an eighteenth-century audience would have recognized as sexually charged: her legs wide apart, the book (a romantic fiction?) resting on the crucial spot of her body, and the bagpipe—a symbol for male sex—pointing to the dark triangle between her legs. But nothing is more suggestive than the draperies. The half curtain that penetrates the interior space forms a gigantic labial fold with vivid corporeality—euphemism for her body part aroused by the dangerous novel. The parted curtain also echoes the position of her legs, and the couple in between—rendered in such

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FIGURE 4.8

Pierre Maleuvre (1740–1803) after Sigmund Freudenberger (1745–1801), Le ­Boudoir, etching and engraving, 1774. National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.4372.

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faint lines as if they were ghost presence—could be read as representing a dream sequence invoked in her abandoned fantasy. The curtains’ voluptuous drapes and dynamic folds convey the erotic impulse, embedding desire within tangible material forms. The visual sublimation of eroticized body and materialization of desire also found their resonance in eighteenth-century French architectural treatises and literature. For example, Le Camus maintained that the boudoir should embody the physical quality of a “beautiful woman”: “Her outlines are gentle and well rounded; the muscles not pronounced; the whole is governed by a simple, natural sweetness.”68 The quality of volupté he attributed to the boudoir was also a gendered concept, and in the Enlightenment discourses, it was associated with women’s immoderate taste and uncontrolled pursuits for pleasure.69 Mellow, voluptuous curtains undoubtedly evoked exposed feminine bodies. In fact, one manner to arrange the curtain by tying it intermittently in the vertical discretion to form a chain of slim bouffant shapes acquired the name jarretières (garters), which unabashedly directing the imagination to exposed feminine legs. In libertine texts, as Lafon observes, the physical body was rarely rendered in precision. The writers depicted the space instead as they could not describe the body directly.70 In other words, the desired body was often dissolved into its surrounding interior, fragmented and coded in an array of decorations. Furniture, textiles, and objects came to possess a carnal dimension. In Point de lendemain (No Tomorrow, 1777) by Vivant Denon, the narrator confesses that he desires the cabinet of Mme de T... instead of her.71 In this mysterious, seductive cabinet—“ce lieu de délice”—the climax of the décors reveals itself as “a baldaquin supported by putti,” 72 which is unsurprising given draperies’ association with the female sex. Interestingly, the whole sequence is brimming with an ambivalent tone. After the desire for carnal possession has all been exteriorized into the décors, the actual physical act had become insipid and meaningless. The baldachin, the drapery, is the object of desire in its completeness, assuming a power and agency all of its own.

Notes 1 For a general overview of curtains, see Pierre Verlet, The Eighteenth Century in France: Society, Decoration, Furniture, trans. George Savage (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967), 85–87; Peter Thornton, Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (New York: The Viking Press, 1984), 56–60, 100–3, 154–57. 2 For an overview on the discourses on interiors in eighteenth-century French architectural treatises, see Meredith Martin, “The Ascendancy of the Interior in Eighteenth-Century French Architectural Theory,” in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, ed. Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 15–34 and Claire Ollagnier, “L’appartement au XVIIIe siècle: un espace diversifié au service d’une convivialité nouvelle,” in Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des Lumières, ed. Anne Perrin Khelissa (Bruxelle: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelle, 2015), 63–79. 3 For a survey on boudoir, see Michel Delon, L’invention du boudoir (Paris: Zulma, 1999) and Christopher Martin, Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2004). 4 Verlet, The Eighteenth Century in France, 85. 5 This essay excludes discussions of painted or sculpted draperies in the classical modes as rhetorical hangings. 6 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 3, 5. 7 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed., 1762. ARTFL database. 8 Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999), 415–45. 9 Thornton, Authentic Décor, 57, 100.

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Delon, Michel. L’invention du boudoir. Paris: Zulma, 1999. Denon, Dominique Vivant, and Jean François de Bastide. Point de lendemain, suivi de La petite maison Point de lendemain, suivi de La petite maison. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Goodman-Soellner, Elise. “Boucher’s ‘Madame de Pompadour at her Toilette.’” Simiolus 17 (1987): 41–58. Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth. ed. Les étoffes : dictionnaire historique. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 1994. Havard, Henry. Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Maison Quantin, 1887–1890. Hellman, Mimi. “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415–45. Hellman, Mimi. “Staging Retreat: Designs for Bathing in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Interiors and Interiority, edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen, 49–72. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Jolly, Anna. “‘En suite’ – Erscheinungsformen eines textile Gestaltungskonzepts.” In Textile Räume: Seide im höfischen Interieur des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg and Sandstein Kommunikation GmbH, 12–21. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2016. Koda, Harold et.al. Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Lafon, Henri. “Voir sans être vu : un cliché, un fantasme.” Poétique 29 (1977a): 50–60. Lafon, Henri. Espace Romanesque du XVIIIe Siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997b. Lafon, Henri. Les Décors et les choses dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle de Prévost à Sade. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1992. La Morlière Jacques Rochette. Angola, histoire indienne ouvrage sans vraisemblance. Paris: Agra, 1747. Laneyrie-Dagen, Nadeije, and Georges Vigarello. La toilette : naissance de l’intime. Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet, Editions Hazan, 2015. Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas. Le génie de l’architecture. Paris: Chez L’Auteur, Chez Benoît Morin, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1787. Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas. The Genius of Architecture, or, the Analogy of Art with Our Sensation. Translated by David Britt. Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1992. Martin, Christopher. Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2004. Martin, Meredith. “The Ascendancy of the Interior in Eighteenth-Century French Architectural Theory.” In Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, edited by Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin, 15–34. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. Milam, Jennifer. “Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté.” Art Bulletin 97, no. 2 ( June 2015): 192–209. Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, Comte de, Le rideau levé, ou l’éducation de Laure. Cythère, 1796/1797. Ollagnier, Claire. “L’appartement au XVIIIe siècle: un espace diversifié au service d’une convivialité nouvelle.” In Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des lumière, edited by Anne Perrin Khelissa, 63–79. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015. Salmon, Xavier et al. Madame de Pompadour et les arts. Paris : Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002. Sheriff, Mary D. Fragonard: Art and Eroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Steward, Philip. Le masque et la parole. Paris: José Conti, 1973. Thépaut-Cabasset, Corrine. “Fashion Encounters: The ‘Siamoise’, or the Impact of the Great Embassy on Textile Design in Paris in 1687.” In Global Textile Encounters, edited by Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng and Lotika Varadarajan, 165–70. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015. Thornton, Peter. Baroque and Rococo Silks. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. Thornton, Peter. Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France, and Holland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Thornton, Peter. Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920. New York: The Viking Press, 1984. Verlet, Pierre. The Eighteenth Century in France: Society, Decoration, Furniture. Translated by George Savage. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967. Watson, F.J.B. The Choiseul Box. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Whitehead, John. French Interior of the Eighteenth Century. London: Laurence King, 2009 [1992].

5 THE FABRIC OF THE NEW Mediating Architectural Change in Late Colonial India* Abigail McGowan

The architecture of South Asia is justly famous, with its monumental temples, mosques, and tombs, imposing forts and palaces, and varied vernacular house forms. India’s textiles are similarly celebrated, both for their intricacy of construction and for their fine patterns and colorings, whether on woven, embroidered, dyed, or printed fabrics in cotton, silk, or wool. For all the attention paid by scholars to the architecture or textiles of South Asia, however, the two are rarely brought into conversation with one another. Discussions of domestic architecture focus on form and mass, symbolism and meaning, decorative detailing and room alignment, functional layout and social ideals, construction materials and methods.1 Discussions of textiles in India, meanwhile, have tended to focus on clothing and adornment: saris and dhotis, shawls and scarves, turbans and veils.2 Even with the one woven material most commonly associated with architectural space—carpets—scholarship has tended to focus on objects unmoored from the spaces in which they would have been used.3 In practice, of course, architecture and textiles have a history of deep and rich intersections in the subcontinent. This is nowhere more true than in residential spaces, where textiles have always been used to adorn and enliven. In a popular 1929 textbook Domestic Science for High Schools in India, Mabel Needham and Ann Strong noted that modern Indian homes demanded a wide array of fabrics: carpets, durries, upholstery material for chairs, cushion covers, curtains, tablecloths, towels, mattresses and mattress covers, pillows, and bedclothes.4 These textiles provided comfort, utility, and beauty alike. They also demarcated spaces from one another, with particular kinds of fabrics, used in decorative combinations, helping to mark off areas for private life. Describing her sprawling, “beautifully decorated” childhood home in Bombay in the 1910s and 1920s, actress Durga Khote recalled lots of settees and chairs that her mother “used to arrange and re-arrange … in attractive different ways, with colourful cushions and bolsters. Her curtains were soft and sheer, her lamp-stands and lampshades of modern design.”5 Textiles have never been purely decorative, though. Instead, textiles have helped to negotiate climate as well as privacy, supplementing or remedying architectural strategies aimed at addressing those issues, offering temporally flexible responses within the fixities of space.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-8

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Changing temperatures or conditions throughout a day or across seasons could be navigated by moving or switching out fabrics: opening curtains to let in morning air, closing them to shut out midday sun, laying down carpets for warmth in cold weather, and removing them in the heat of the summer. Privacy could be enhanced with curtains hung across a door kept open for air, blocking a window opening into a neighbor’s space, or shielding a part of a room used as an illegal sub-tenancy. Although textiles have always mediated architectural space, their role in doing so increased dramatically in nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, in the face of two key innovations in domestic architecture. The first was the bungalow, which emerged as a British form over the nineteenth century, but which passed by the start of the twentieth century into widespread, popular use across the Indian middle and upper classes. The second was the multi-unit urban building, which brought together multiple families into intimate proximity in a shared structure, often built cheek-by-jowl with neighboring buildings in increasingly crowded city centers. Both these innovations demanded new solutions to the problems of climate and privacy than had been used in traditional styles of domestic architecture. With interior courtyards curtailed in size, shared with strangers, or eliminated altogether, new strategies were needed to cool interior rooms, provide shelter from the sun, and shield interior movements from public view. Three kinds of textiles helped to mediate the privacy and climatic challenges posed by the bungalow and multi-unit building, particularly in the hottest areas of the subcontinent6: punkahs (cloth-covered frames worked by ropes, forming a ceiling fan), chiks or tatties (woven grass or reed mats hung in windows or doorways; when sprayed with water these helped to cool interior spaces), and curtains (hung over both doors and windows). All three are familiar from British writings of the era, closely linked to the colonial bungalow and its racial hierarchies. But for all the associations with high imperialism, all three had wider uses and growing interest among local populations across the subcontinent in the late colonial period, used to create comfort, carve out privacy, claim status, and add beauty. Punkahs were to be found in wealthy Indian homes, just as in British ones, curtains blocked off doorways not just in palatial bungalows but in the most crowded slums, and chiks shielded both the verandahs of elite institutions and the entrances of one-room tenements. As such, textiles helped to mediate new architectural forms and new domestic ideals across classes in late colonial India. Flimsy, flexible, removable, and vulnerable to wear, textiles offered cheap but impermanent responses to spatial needs. Drawing on domestic advice literature, architectural pattern books, memoirs of home life, advertisements, and more, I explore how textiles domesticated architectural innovations, situating architecture changes within the larger landscape of changing material practices.

The Shift to the New: Structural Challenges Posed by Architectural Innovation A common traditional house form in hot regions of South Asia is the courtyard house, which groups living spaces around a central open space to maximize air ventilation while maintaining privacy.7 External walls tended to emphasize exclusion and protection over visual or physical access, with few doors and limited openings to the street or surrounding land. Within a structure, most rooms opened directly onto the courtyard, which might then be ringed with verandahs to better mediate the entry of light into interior spaces. Structural

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screens or walls negotiated sightlines and kept certain areas and female household members out of view. Wealthier homes featured multiple courtyards or additional upper floors, offering more ways to ensure privacy, access cooling breezes, and permit more use of rooftops— including as sleeping areas in the hot season. With the rise of British power, the spread of new architectural idioms, and growing urban housing densities over the nineteenth century, the traditional courtyard house came under pressure from multiple directions. One of the most novel of the resulting innovations was the bungalow.8 An international form, developed in South Asia and other colonial centers, the bungalow represented both the opposite of and an innovation on the courtyard house. The classic nineteenth century colonial bungalow was a rectangular structure surrounded by covered verandahs. A pitched roof covered a large central hall which was generally the main social space in the building, used as a dining room or drawing room/reception area. From the central hall, doors opened out in every direction into rooms running around the exterior of the building, each of which then had doors onto the verandah. Rather than rely on imposing exterior walls for security and keeping interior spaces open, the bungalow was open to its surroundings, with multiple entry points from the grounds, while central spaces were covered. Protection from the outside world was moved to perimeter walls around the property boundary, rather than being a feature of the house itself.9 By the early twentieth century, the bungalow form had moved beyond the purview of colonial officialdom and into widespread vernacular practice.10 In South Asia’s expanding urban centers, suburban areas sprang up with bungalows adapted to a range of middle-class budgets and ideas about spatial configuration. Honoring the original form even while operating on a more modest scale, this new generation of bungalows usually featured small verandahs on the front and back and sat as free-standing structures in independent plots surrounded by external boundary walls. The popularization of the form also brought many adaptations, however. Some were practical responses to budgets and building materials; bungalows and plots shrank in size from earlier official examples, and the rise of comparatively inexpensive reinforced cement concrete meant a shift from pitched to flat roofs. But other changes responded to new expectations for domestic spaces, including shifting exterior openings from doors to windows to allow more privacy and security.11 The second architectural innovation of this era was the multi-family urban residential building. At the highest end, this meant luxury flats for an emerging professional class, with spacious living/dining rooms, multiple bedrooms, and separate servants quarters, all carefully arranged to manage the movement of servants, isolate out drawing rooms from the noise of kitchens or the smell of bathrooms, and ensure the flow of air throughout.12 More modestly, the middle classes moved into two- or three-room units grouped around common stairwells, with outdoor space confined to a single private balcony or shared within a building’s compound walls. Still lower down the class hierarchy, in large cities like Bombay, purpose-built tenement buildings called chawls proliferated, offering working class housing in single-room units strung along an interior hallway or exterior verandah, with shared, always-inadequate bathing and bathroom facilities on every floor.13 Operating across classes, earlier structures were partitioned up into separate units, turning individual residences into multi-family buildings, sometimes with a courtyard at the center, but just as often not. These novel forms of domestic architecture wrestled—as had earlier forms—with the challenges of climate and privacy: how to ensure ventilation and alleviate the heat, while mediating sightlines and movement. And, again like earlier forms, both bungalows and

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multi-family buildings regularly failed to achieve those objectives. British writers complained endlessly about nineteenth century bungalows as drafty in cool weather, airless in hot weather, and endlessly open to the prying eyes and attentive ears of servants. Describing Government House in Bombay, which she visited in the cool season of 1884, Vicereine of India Marchioness Dufferin complained about sleeping in a bedroom with “four very large windows and three doors, all wide open at once,” and eating in a chilly dining room open to the night air “which seems to have no side-wall at all.”14 Those same buildings, however, failed to solve the problem of heat in the summer months, particularly with interior central halls which made air movement difficult. Rudyard Kipling, who was born in India and returned there in his early twenties, living in Lahore where his father was director of the local art school, wrote endlessly about the enervating, brutal heat of summer, where his bungalow was a furnace box, stuffy and oppressive, offering no respite from the weather. Just as frustrating to British bungalow residents was their inability to secure any privacy in their homes. With doors and windows necessarily left open to capture air, white residents lived with servants constantly just out of sight, but always within hearing range. One woman, noting the range of servants who came through her bedroom, characterized the space as “a section of a street with a bed in it,” while another complained that “a chintz purdah [curtain] is all that divides you from the punkah coolies in the verandah and the world at large.”15 As the bungalow moved into wider, Indian use, some of the problems mentioned above disappeared, but new ones emerged. Privacy from servants was less of a problem in middle class Indian homes, since rising labor costs, larger extended families, more modest budgets, and the spread of electricity and running water reduced the amount of hired help living in the home.16 At the same time, new floor layouts enabled more privacy, as large central halls ringed with doorways were replaced with compact rooms offering limited access points to other spaces. While these trends offered more privacy within a house, external factors offered new challenges. In many suburbs, plots were increasingly modest in size, placing structures closer to each other and to roads and footpaths, opening up private life to public view. Rising construction costs also encouraged compact designs which failed to offer the same mediation for climate and privacy; smaller rooms and lower ceilings impeded the movement of air, while shrinking ground level verandahs opened interior spaces to public gaze. Multi-unit buildings posed their own problems. Modest middle-class housing often sacrificed comforts to maximize efficiency, limiting window openings, lowering ceilings, and squeezing tiny rooms into units. Housing for the poor generally ignored climatic or privacy needs entirely in favor of a brutal minimalism. In Bombay, the typical chawl design of backto-back, single-room units opening onto exterior verandahs meant that the only way to get air was by leaving the door or single window open, rendering not just privacy but also security a continual challenge. Whatever the arrangements for interior privacy and ventilation, external developments on surrounding plots posed added complications. When landowners built up to the edge of their property lines, neighboring buildings ended up facing off over small lanes, blocking light and air to rooms on lower levels, and leaving windows or balconies from one building opening directly into those of the other.17 When internal arrangements for light, air, and privacy were decent, these might be persistent inconveniences. When internal arrangements were already terrible, densely packed buildings made conditions dramatically worse.

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Responding to Architectural Challenges: Punkahs, Chiks, and Curtains The challenges new architectural styles posed for privacy and climate control were widely discussed at the time, among designers, planners, builders, and ordinary residents, prompting a range of responses. As might be expected, some of these took structural form. The classical nineteenth-century bungalow featured roof-top ventilator openings over central halls, allowing hot air to escape, while its deep verandahs offered shade and access to any breezes that might be available. Twentieth century suburban bungalows and multi-family buildings incorporated additional window openings high in exterior walls, allowing privacy to interior spaces while enabling the free flow of air.18 But alongside those structural responses, many deployed textiles to solve the challenges of privacy and climate control. Textile solutions enabled greater temporal flexibility, permitting residents to respond to different climatic conditions throughout a day or across the span of seasons. Textiles enacted careful gradations of social hierarchies, offering certain bodies greater climatic adjustments or privacy than might otherwise be available within standardized architectural space. Textiles offered relatively inexpensive ways to adjust to climate or privacy—certainly less expensive than structural changes to a building. And finally, textiles allowed residents some measure of control over climate and privacy in what was so often rented space, where occupants did not have the power to make structural adjustments themselves. Perhaps the most iconic textile associated with British attempts to mediate climate was the punkah.19 A long piece of fabric tacked onto a wooden frame, with a pleated fringe hanging below, the punkah hung from the ceiling.20 When pulled back and forth by a servant working the ropes, it produced a breeze for those beneath it, offering in the words of an 1870 Punjab Times article “relief from intolerable heat, mosquitoes, and ennui.”21 This was a technology with long roots in the subcontinent, dating back to the Mughal era and earlier. The British adopted the punkah with gusto, grasping for a solution to the oppressive temperatures of South Asia—conditions which were thought to be particularly debilitating to white bodies unaccustomed to tropical climates.22 Punkahs were regularly deployed in court rooms, magistrates’ offices, churches and private clubs, usually positioned over the most important European bodies to provide a cooling breeze.23 But punkahs were just as regularly deployed in homes, suspended over dining tables, in drawing rooms, and in the bedrooms of key members of the household (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Punkahs served different functions for men and women. For women, they facilitated social gatherings and daytime retirement, calming nerves inflamed by the heat, and cooling bodies immobilized in torpor, generally associated with the lassitude of the hot season. For men, punkahs made work possible, whether cooling authoritative bodies in offices and courts, or enabling the sleep at night which prepared bodies for work the following day. Wherever they were hung, punkahs required regular upkeep, with new fabric applied when punkahs were hung up in April or so to replace textiles that had gotten dirty, frayed, or torn. At the same time, punkahs were seen as an affordable element in decorating strategies. As a very popular nineteenth-century housekeeping manual advised, punkah frames should be covered “with cotton dyed to match your room. The frill can be made pretty in a thousand ways. It will not cost much.”24 An interwar textbook teaching housekeeping principles to Indian girls agreed, noting that punkah fabrics should be harmonized with curtains, floor coverings, and cushion covers.25 In the 1825 image given in Figure 5.1, for instance, the punkah border matches the fabric on both the sofa and the swinging doors into

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FIGURE 5.1

“English Interior in India,” ca. 1825. Anonymous. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 51609.

FIGURE 5.2

“Mrs. Gladstone Lingham’s drawing room at her residence in Berhampore, 1863.” © British Library Board (Shelfmark WD 2904). Note both the frilled punkah over the table and the curtain across the doorway.

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the room, bringing unity to the room. In the 1863 image given in Figure 5.2, punkah and curtains match, offering a simple white complement to the blue-on-white flowered pattern on the furniture. Attached to fixed hooks in the ceiling, punkahs imposed particular spatial requirements. Most basically, they demanded adequate space. This meant ceilings high enough for the frame to swing without hitting occupants. It also meant space large enough to accommodate the ropes and servants to work them. In the image of Mrs. Lingham’s drawing room, the rope leading off to the left likely ended with a servant positioned in the same room. More commonly, servants would operate in an adjoining room or verandah, working the punkah through ropes run through an opening in the wall. Punkahs also determined the distribution of furniture in hot weather, with the most important objects positioned directly underneath the frame for maximum cooling. In the 1825 image, the punkah is positioned above a grouping of chairs and sofa; in the 1863 image, the drawing room table is centered under the fan. Through that relationship to furniture, punkahs dictated the social use of space, with the highest status individuals stationed so as to get the benefit of cool breezes, while others were denied access. Invisible in these images is the labor needed to make a punkah work. While Mrs. Lingham’s punkah puller is out of sight, the punkah in the 1825 image is not attached to a pulling string at all, making labor needs more invisible still. Invisible or not, work it was. Swinging a heavy, fabric-covered wooden frame required steady, monotonous, demanding effort, usually performed by low-caste and definitely low-paid servants.26 British writers complained endlessly about the perfidious nature of these servants, who failed to keep the punkah in motion, threatening the cool of their masters. As one British author put it, at some point in the night “the pullers will fall asleep sometimes, and leave the sleeping victim inside sweltering in a vapour bath, until some mosquito more vicious or more venomous than his neighbors, taps a sensitive part and wakes him up.” The response? Bodily violence inflicted on the servant by the outraged master, ranging from curses and shoes thrown, to “rising six times in the night to kick his punkah-bearer awake,” to “homicidal mania.” The latter was not mere hyperbole. Between 1876 and 1906, there were at least twenty-one cases reported from the army alone of punkah coolies dying from violence inflicted by European masters.27 Hiring servants to pull punkahs was an expensive proposition, requiring constant labor, worked in shifts. As such, access to the breezes of a punkah offered a key enactment of hierarchies of race and class, both within a household, and between households. As of 1848, the colonial state agreed to cover the costs of punkah pulling in barracks, mess halls or elsewhere, twenty-four hours a day, for European soldiers—seen to be in medical need of cooling. Indian soldiers, meanwhile, had no such entitlement. In the civil service by 1848, the colonial state had similarly agreed to pay for punkah-pulling in the offices as well as homes of top officials.28 Not surprisingly, Indian clerks soon began demanding access to punkah-pullers at the office, while Indian officials demanded access to the services at home and office alike. A second textile used to mediate climate and privacy was the chik, a rollable woven screen made of khus-khus grass, that could be lowered to block out the sun and provide a measure of privacy to interior spaces, covering windows and doorways as in the third and fourth floor flats in Figure 5.3 or hanging between verandah pillars as in the bungalow in Figure 5.4. When the absorbent khus-khus was wetted down, chiks offered a crucial cooling technology in arid regions of the subcontinent. As dry air passed through the screen, the water absorbed heat as it evaporated, thereby providing cooler air to the interior—in

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some tests over 15 degrees cooler than exterior temperatures.29 As one British writer put it, “while tatties are in working order, all other cooling appliances are unnecessary.”30 Widely used, chiks earned official sanction as of 1869, when the Government of India directed their use in barracks, hospitals, and other spaces in dry climates, whenever temperatures exceeded 95 degrees at 9 pm.31 When used for privacy or just to block out the sun, chiks represented a modest if regular investment in materials and labor. Made from cheap grasses and woven by low-caste labor, the screens were relatively inexpensive, but also highly degradable, requiring regular replacement as materials decayed. Used in their simplest form in dwellings of the poor as in the tenements pictured in Figure 5.5, they also shielded the imposing verandahs of elite clubs and wealthy mansions, replaced annually at the start of the hot season. When kept wet for cooling, however, chiks required some serious work. In particularly dry areas, at particularly hot times, servants might pour water over screens every half an hour to provide maximum cooling.32 Wealthy families not willing to rely on natural winds employed mechanical means to move air through the screens. In the nineteenth century, this usually meant a thermantidote, described by one observer as a “sort of hand windmill”—essentially a large box with a revolving fan inside, worked by treadle or hand crank, which pulled air through khus-khus screens into the interior.33 These were both large and expensive. One 1830s version at use in Allahabad measured nine or ten feet long and seven feet tall,

FIGURE 5.3

“Habib Court,” Colaba, Bombay, with chiks pulled down on the upper verandah on the left of the building. From The Modern House in India, first edition (1939?), 11.

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requiring two men to turn the mechanism effectively.34 By the 1870s, the size had shrunk to enable operation by a single man, but cost remained high. Dismissing a request to employ thermantidotes in army barracks, the Government of India Sanitary Commission pleaded financial burden; according to their estimates a single unit cost 60 rupees and required three servants to work around the clock.35

FIGURE 5.4

“Mr. Birla’s Bungalow, Juhu,” with chiks on the verandah. From The Modern House in India, first edition (1939?), 12. The Birlas were one of the top industrialist families in Bombay; the bungalow depicted was a weekend getaway, built on an exclusive beach to the north of the city.

FIGURE 5.5

D. N. Dhar,  Industrial Housing in the Tropics (Bombay: Concrete Assoc. of India, 1958), fig. 7, 40. Chiks in use in workers’ housing, providing privacy and protection from the sun; they were unlikely to have been kept wet regularly enough to offer consistent cooling.

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Raised and lowered via a simple pulley system, chiks allowed residents a flexible way to respond to changing needs. Those needs might be climatic, with screens lowered to block out the sun in the middle of the day or, when wetted, to catch prevailing dry winds. Those needs might be for privacy, blocking doors or extending between support columns on verandahs in order to shield interior activities from view, extending the boundaries of private space. Either way, chiks did what structural elements could not. Merely closing windows and doors to keep out the heat would not cool an interior; it was only when wet chiks were hung over openings that temperatures fell. Similarly, a single-room unit opening onto a shared verandah could only block out the outside world by closing doors or windows— which then cut off much needed air. Hanging doors or verandah posts with chiks, by contrast, disrupted sightlines while still allowing air to move, offering temporary extensions of private life into otherwise public spaces. Curtains made up the third and final set of textiles used to adapt domestic spaces to the needs of privacy and climate. Although thoroughly integrated into local use now, curtains seem to have little precedent in the subcontinent. Historically, fabrics were hung as decoration on walls—most famously in Mughal interiors 36 —or spread on the floor, but not across windows or doorways. Instead, wall openings were fitted with stone, wooden or woven screens or covered with wooden shutters, offering openings large enough to let air move through easily while blocking sight lines. Even Europeans were slow to adopt curtains in India, given concerns that the fabric would harbor insects and impede the flow of air. Still, by the second half of the nineteenth century, Europeans were increasingly hanging curtains in their homes, adapting a Western decorative technique, utilizing Indian and Western fabrics, to the needs of Indian domestic spaces.37 In British homes, curtains fulfilled a variety of functions. In The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, British authors Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner advised readers on the need to close houses up during the hottest part of the day, keeping interiors dark and cool while allowing in the health-giving properties of sunlight at other points.38 Other British writers concentrated on the utility of curtains in providing comfort to the often-cavernous rooms of traditional bungalows, where doors opened in so many directions. When the Marchioness of Dufferin arrived at Calcutta’s Government House in 1884 as Vicereine of India, she set out to transform the building’s “long, dreary throne-room.” By introducing carpets and curtains into the space she made it into “our usual dining room … and is decidedly preferable to a barren marble hall, where we should shiver.”39 Still others used curtains in doorways for privacy. In the 1863 watercolor pictured in Figure 5.2, the drawing room is separated from adjoining rooms with white curtains, while what appears to be an exterior window features wooden shutters. Extending from just above eye level down to about a foot off the floor, the curtains leave large spaces of the door open to enable the easy movement of air. Even so, they separate off the space and provide it with a sense of intimacy, conducive to the private reading enjoyed by its British occupant—with shared use of white frills in curtains, punkah, and dress emphasizing the feminine domesticity of the whole.40 By the early twentieth century, curtains had begun moving beyond British bungalows, government houses, and Indian palaces,41 and into popular Indian use across classes and architectural forms. As a climatic response, curtains continued to be pulled closed to block out the heat of the sun, and then opened again to let in cooler air in morning and evening. In the interwar period, labor union leader Anasuya Sarabhai of Ahmedabad, for instance, had her curtains pulled every day after lunch so that she could sleep during the heat of the

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FIGURE 5.6

Ad for the Army and Navy Cooperative Stores, one of the top department stores in Bombay at the time, which offered a full range of furniture, furnishings, and interior decorating services. Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects ( July 1936), back cover.

day. When he was jailed in 1930 during the anti-colonial Salt Satyagraha movement, Jawaharlal Nehru (who later became the first prime minister of independent India) noted in his diary not just the relief from the sun, but also the privacy provided by curtains during the heat of April.42 That privacy was a particularly important element in urban homes. Modern house designs of the early twentieth century featured large exterior windows bathing interiors with health-giving sun and the free flow of air—designs which offered little by way of protection against either heat or the gaze of outsiders. Curtains could help to balance those sometimes contradictory imperatives. In wealthy homes, this might mean carefully curated textiles, chosen in the latest styles and colors, and carefully matched to other furnishings43 (Figure. 5.6). In poorer quarters, curtains might cover the single window or doorway into a room. Internally, frequent overcrowding within units meant the use of curtains to flexibly partition cramped spaces. In a much-cited case, a lady doctor investigating the condition of textile workers in Bombay found six families sharing a single room in 1921; to divide up the space, “bamboos were hung from the ceiling, over which, at night, clothes and sacking were hung.”44 Among the fabrics used to mediate heat and privacy in the home, curtains could be deployed with the least amount of labor. The most basic curtains would have required limited

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yardage and only simple sewing skills, meaning they could be stitched at home and hung on a simple rod, without the need for hired labor. Those simple curtains would, however, show dirt and wear out quickly, requiring regular maintenance, repair, and replacement. More elaborate curtains with boxed top panels, elaborate draping, or formal sashes obviously required more specialized labor, both to prepare the fabric and to install in the home. These elaborate curtains represented a more dramatic intervention into space, requiring fixtures installed and maintained. Thus, while not demanding the round-the-clock servants needed to pull a punkah or water a chik, curtains still necessitated labor: to open and close, clean and care, install and replace. Neither Mrs. Lingham nor Anasuya Sarabhai were probably in the habit of drawing their own curtains, leaving that to servant labor.

Conclusion In the nineteenth-century India, punkahs, chiks, and curtains helped to achieve new domestic ideals. In hot weather, they shut out the sun and moderated the oppressive heat. In spaces shared with others—whether servants in wealthy British households or subtenants in tenements for the poor—curtains separated one area off from another, carving out a modicum of privacy in rooms otherwise kept open for ventilation. Part of the everyday negotiations of domestic conditions, punkahs, chiks, and curtains appear only fitfully in the historical record, commented on as part of household management advice or records of individual experiences from the era. Their ubiquity in certain households, in some ways, rendered them invisible. And yet signs of them are there, in memoirs, letters, manuals, and fiction. A short Rudyard Kipling piece from 1888, evoking the invisible presences within bungalow life—servants who are just out of sight, or who slip out of a room ahead of the master—is saturated with textile references. Kipling complains about a man he imagines haunting his house, hearing in the hot, still night, the jar of the chik as he comes into the verandah. When he comes to the room I am in he stops, puts the purdah [curtain] aside and looks at me. I am sure of it, for when I turn, the purdah has always just fallen.… Why does he hang about the house? He should have learnt by this time not to touch the punkha fringe with his head or to leave a door on the swing, [as] I can track him then…45 Ubiquitous in Kipling’s India of the nineteenth century, punkahs, chiks, and curtains had a more varied trajectory in the twentieth century. Here it was not architectural but technological innovation that set the course: specifically, the advent of electricity that made possible mechanical fans and air-conditioning, rendering punkahs and chiks obsolete. Arriving first in port cities like Calcutta and Bombay at the end of the 1890s, electricity made its way into upcountry cities by the interwar years, reaching mofussil towns by mid-century. As it spread geographically, electricity was applied to new purposes as well, spreading from lighting into other areas. Cooling was a critical area of new electrical utilization, whether through fans, air conditioning, or refrigerators. Early adopters tended to be top British institutions or buildings. In Calcutta, the High Court decided to switch from punkahs to electric fans in 1899; government offices at Fort Williams followed suit in 1902.46 By the 1920s in Bombay and Calcutta, residential and commercial spaces offered electricity as a standard fixture in new construction. Operating on a grand scale, Bombay’s new Art Deco movie theaters of

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the 1930s, including the Regal (1933) and Eros (1938) cinemas, offered the comfort of full air-conditioning.47 In residential spaces, electricity meant basic lighting initially, but then branched into a much wider range of uses for the upper classes, including for cooling air and heating water.48 An ad from 1935 announced that the Dhanraj Mahal—then one of the most luxurious blocks of flats in Bombay—had over 300 electric fans installed throughout the building, examples of “high efficiency, noiseless models, incorporating every modern refinement” from the German company Siemens-Schuckert.49 In advertisements, electric fans, stoves and water heaters were essential to a modern, efficient, hygienic home. They also—crucially—relieved residents from a dependence on hired domestic labor. As one 1935 ad for electricity put it, “At the touch of a switch, you can bring these swift, clean new servants into your kitchen… Servants who will never fail you.”50 If hand-pulled punkahs and manually wetted chiks fell out of favor in the face of new electrical options, curtains had more staying power. Mid-century advertisements deployed film stars to promote specialized fabric lines designed for curtain use or dramatized the possibilities of home transformation through modern fabrics (Figures 5.7 and 5.8). Everyday visualizations of middle-class life, whether in advertisements, popular posters, or plans for ideal homes assumed the presence of curtains as a essential component of modern living; curtains appeared as the natural backdrop to middle class domesticity. But the lower classes

FIGURE 5.7

Ad for DCM curtain fabrics featuring L. Vijayalakshmi, who starred in a range of Tamil, Malayalam and Telegu films in the 1950s and 1960s. Illustrated Weekly of India ( June 23, 1957), 52.

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FIGURE 5.8

Ad for Simplex Mills. From Marg ( July 1949), n.p.

were assumed to be curtain-users as well. At the United Nations–sponsored International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing which opened in Delhi in January 1954, curtains were on prominent display in many of the 80 small structures in “varieties of designs, plans, styles and techniques,” presenting different solutions to the challenge of affordable housing.51 In photographs from the event, curtains flutter clearly in many of the windows.52 An official documentary entitled Modest Homes captured the event for wider audiences. Opening with a quick review of India’s housing problems, the film then leads viewers through some of the model houses on display in Delhi, repeatedly highlighting people interacting with the spaces: sitting in chairs on verandahs, arranging curtains, examining storage shelves in kitchens. The effect is to humanize the structures, making it easier to imagine life in them. According to the film, that imagination was the point. Thus, at the close of the film, the narrator solemnly intones how important it was that “our youngsters” saw good housing at the exhibition so that “they will appreciate better housing, no matter how modest, when they grow up. Appreciation creates a demand for good homes. And good homes build a good state.”53 The 1954 housing exhibition assumed the ideal home for even the poor would be a free-standing structure situated in a private compound, inhabited by a nuclear family where the wife held primary responsibility for household management. That ideal incorporated its own architectural innovations, in form, materials, and construction strategies. But it also relied, inevitably, on textiles—specifically curtains which would mediate sight and sun to ensure the habitability of the home. As in the nineteenth century, textiles made possible the new.

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Notes *

1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

I am grateful to Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, and Basile Baudez for their close readings, comments, and suggestions on this paper. All mistakes are, of course, my own. See, for example: Madhavi Desai, Miki Desai, and Jon Lang, The Bungalow in Twentieth-Century India (Burlington Ashgate, 2012); V. S. Pramar, Haveli: Wooden Houses and Mansions of Gujarat (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1989); Nikhil Rao, House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Ritu Kumar, Costumes and Textiles of Royal India (London: Christie’s Books, 1999); Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller, The Sari (New York: Berg, 2003); Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India (Chicago Chicago University Press, 1996). Important recent work has begun to shift attention to other kinds and uses of textiles. See, for two prominent examples: Pika Ghosh, Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020); Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton Princeton University Press, 2022). Jon Thompson, Oriental Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia (New York: Dutton, 1988); Daniel S. Walker, Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997). Mabel A. Needham and Ann G. Strong, Domestic Science for High Schools in India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1929), 66–68. Durga Khote, I, Durga Khote: An Autobiography, trans. Shanta Gokhale (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. Textiles helped to mediate architectural forms in cooler, highland areas of the subcontinent as well. To give but one example, in high elevation Himalayan regions, textiles are used to cover wattle and daub ceilings, protecting occupants below from dust or debris that might shake loose. This essay, however, will focus only on the hotter, lowland areas of the subcontinent. For a discussion of courtyard houses in western India, see: Pramar, Haveli. For an overview of the development of bungalow as a global form, see: Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2005), 120–21. For a discussion of the spread and diversification of bungalow styles across South Asia, see: Desai, Desai, and Lang, The Bungalow in Twentieth-Century India. For examples of floor plans, across a range of middle class budgets, in this era, see: R.S. Deshpande, Residential Buildings Suited to India (Poona: R. S. Deshpande, 1931); R.S. Deshpande, Cheap and Healthy Homes for the Middle Classes of India (Poona: Aryabhushan Press, 1935); R.S. Deshpande, Modern Ideal Homes for India (Poona: Aryabhushan Press, 1939); R.S. Deshpande, Build Your Own Home (Poona: R. S. Deshpande, 1948). For contemporary advice on designing luxury flats, see: Deshpande, Modern Ideal Homes for India. For an overview of the ubiquitous Bombay tenement form, the chawl, see: Neera Adarkar, ed., The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life (Gurgaon: ImprintOne, 2011). Harriot Georgina Blackwood Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from My Journal, 1884– 1888 (London: J. Murray, 1890), 7. E.A. King and Constance Gordon Cumming, quoted in Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 66. Swapna M. Banerjee, Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial ­Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). For complaints about this from a top planner in Bombay, see: James Peter Orr, The Need of Co-Operation Between Neighbours in the Development of Building Estates (Bombay: Premier Art Printing Works, 1915). William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 174. For a discussion of the punkah in British India, and how it moved into the antebellum American South, see: Dana E. Byrd, “Motive Power Fans, Punkahs, and Fly Brushes in the Antebellum South,” Buildings & Landscapes 23, no. 1 (Spring 2016), 29–51. The exact form could vary, with large frames covered in fabric in northern India, or polished bars from which a fringe was hung in the Bengal and Bombay Presidencies. Flora Annie Steel and

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21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46

Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 4th ed. (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 197–98. The article was reprinted in London as: “Punkah Pulling in India,” The Examiner and London Review (October 8, 1870), 647. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). In photographs of the Times of India building taken in November 1898 (now in the collection of the British Library), for instance, the editor’s and general manager’s offices feature punkahs hung directly over each man’s desk; by contrast, the various Indians who worked as clerks, printers, typesetters, binders, and more had no punkahs or other cooling mechanisms in their spaces. See: British Library Photo 643/(10) and 643/(11), as compared to 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 198. Needham and Strong, Domestic Science for High Schools in India, 67. Ritam Sengupta, “Keeping the Master Cool, Every Day, All Day: Punkah-Pulling in Colonial India,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 59, no. 1 (2022), 37–73. For a description of the many, many servants needed to pull the punkahs in a mid-nineteenth century British church in North India, see W. Knighton, quoted in Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938), 217–18. “Punkah Pulling in India,” 647; G. O. Trevelyan (1896) quoted in Sengupta, “Keeping the Master Cool,” 65; Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 197. Sengupta, “Keeping the Master Cool,” 48–49. J.E. Tanner, “Ventilation in India,” Indian Medical Gazette 5, no. 2 (February 1, 1870): 34. An Anglo-Indian, “India in the Hot Weather,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, no. 930 (October 22, 1881), 686. “Tatties at Night,” Indian Medical Gazette 4, no. 9 (September 1, 1869), 194–95. Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608–1937, 244. Louis Rousselet, India and Its Native Princes: Travels in Central India and in the Presidencies of Bombay and Bengal (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1876), 230. Fanny Parkes Parlby, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque: During Four-And-Twenty Years in the East: With Revelations of Life in the Zenana (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850), 199–200. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India for the Months of January, February, March and April 1872 (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873), 147. Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India. Robin D. Jones, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 53. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 199. Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India, 17. For a discussion of door-curtains, see: Jones, Interiors of Empire, 101–4. See, for example: Partha Mitter and Naman Ahuja, The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, n.d.), 35, 76–77, 81; Giles Tillotson, “Palaces and the Politics of Style : Nizam Osman Ali Khan Asaf Jah of Hyderabad, Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore,” in Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, ed. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009), 181, 183, 187. Madhav V. Kamath and Vishwas B. Kher, The Story of Militant But Non-Violent Trade Unionism: A Biographical and Historical Study (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1993), 376; Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. IV, ed. M. Chalapathi Rau et al. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972), 327. “Ad for Kamdar Ltd.: Gracious Living,” Times of India, June 27, 1938; “Ad: Kamdar Ltd. For Stylish Furniture,” Times of India, April 18, 1940; H.D. Darukhanawala, Parsi Lustre on Indian Soil (Bombay: G. Claridge, 1939), 126. Quoted in Alexander Robert Burnett-Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay; A Study in the Economic Conditions of the Wage-Earning Classes in Bombay (London: P. S. King, 1925), 28. “The House of Shadows,” August 1887, in Thomas Pinney, ed., Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88 (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 247–48. Suvobrata Sarkar, Let There Be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 161.

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of Advertising and Identity Formation in 20th Century India, edited by Bhaswati Bhattacharya and Henrike Donner, 75–97. New York: Routledge, 2020. Houghteling, Sylvia. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Jones, Robin D. Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800– 1947. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Kamath, Madhav V., and Vishwas B. Kher. The Story of Militant But Non-Violent Trade Unionism: A Biographical and Historical Study. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1993. Khote, Durga. I, Durga Khote: An Autobiography. Translated by Shanta Gokhale. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Kincaid, Dennis. British Social Life in India, 1608–1937. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938. King, Anthony D. The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kumar, Ritu. Costumes and Textiles of Royal India. London: Christie’s Books, 1999. Mitter, Partha, and Naman Ahuja. The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, n.d. “Modest Homes.” Director K. L. Khandpur (Films Division of India, 1954). Needham, Mabel A., and Ann G. Strong. Domestic Science for High Schools in India. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1929. Nehru, Jawaharlal. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. IV. Edited by M. Chalapathi Rau, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, B.R. Nanda, and Sarvepalli Gopal. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972. Orr, James Peter. The Need of Co-operation Between Neighbours in the Development of Building Estates. Bombay: Premier Art Printing Works, 1915. Parlby, Fanny Parkes. Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque: During Four-And-Twenty Years in the East. London: Pelham Richardson, 1850. Pinney, Thomas, ed. Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. Pramar, Vickram Singh. Haveli: Wooden Houses and Mansions of Gujarat. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1989. Procida, Mary A. Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. “Punkah Pulling in India.” The Examiner and London Review (October 8, 1870): 647. Rao, Nikhil. House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Ray, Raka, and Seemin Qayum. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rousselet, Louis. India and Its Native Princes: Travels in Central India and in the Presidencies of Bombay and Bengal. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1876. Sarkar, Suvobrata. Let There Be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Sengupta, Ritam. “Keeping the Master Cool, Every Day, All Day: Punkah-Pulling in Colonial India.” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 59, no. 1 (2022): 37–73. Steel, Flora Annie, and Grace Gardiner. The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 4th ed. London: William Heinemann, 1898. Tanner, J. Edward. “Ventilation in India.” Indian Medical Gazette 5, no. 2 (February 1, 1870): 6, 33–35. Tarlo, Emma. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India. Chicago Chicago University Press, 1996. “Tatties at Night.” Indian Medical Gazette 4, no. 9 (September 1, 1869): 194–95. Thompson, Jon. Oriental Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia. New York: Dutton, 1988. Tillotson, Giles. “Palaces and the Politics of Style : Nizam Osman Ali Khan Asaf Jah of Hyderabad, Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore.” In Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, edited by Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, 170–89. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009. Walker, Daniel S. Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997. Windover, Michael. “Exchanging Looks: ‘Art Dekho’ Movie Theatres in Bombay.” Architectural ­History 52 (2009): 201–32.

6 CONTRAST AND COHESION Textiles and Architecture in 1930s London Emily M. Orr

In the field of design, as in every other field, this is an “age of transition,” wrote British historian Robert Smithells in his book The Modern Home: Its Decorations, Furnishings and Equipment in 1936.1 Textiles gave rise to this significant transition in aesthetics and cultural values by propelling London’s spaces of life, work, retail, and leisure into modern styling in the early twentieth century. New and exploratory alliances between fine artists, textile studios, and manufacturers yielded abstract curtains, tapestries, upholstery, rugs, and fabrics by the yard for use in the some of the city’s most progressive private and public interiors. These modern textiles represented sophistication in design and technology and when paired with architecture, activated floors, walls, and windows. Fabrics were present-day inserts that could also relate to historic architectural styles and often decorated structures that predated them by decades, if not centuries, heightening the performativity of an eclectic interior. As one of the most adaptable and changeable aspects of interior decoration, textiles led shifts in taste. As modernism emerged as a style among others, abstract textiles often coexisted with revival styles from Victorian to Regency, and traditions from Georgian to Baroque. Curtains, rugs, and furnishing fabrics were a defining component of modern interior design as it appeared years ahead of a more widespread adoption of modern architecture. Through pattern, texture, color, and scale, textiles carried many styles of creative expression from classical and floral to geometric and linear. Rugs, furnishing fabrics, and curtains anchored some of the first stylistically unified interior schemes by contemporary architects who were eager to show an alignment with abstract art. As Vogue advised, Fabrics of modern design are often used to fulfil the function of the tapestries that used to adorn halls of our ancestors, and while forming in themselves a complete decoration, may also strike the keynote of the whole decorative scheme.2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-9

102  Emily M. Orr

Textiles, Art, and Industry The artist-designed textiles of the 1930s bridged a long-standing historical gap between the fine and industrial arts in Britain.3 New approaches to pattern design and the importance of textiles within Britain’s Arts & Crafts movement, led by William Morris (British, 1834– 1896), laid the groundwork for the adaptation of artistic techniques for commercial production. Textile manufacturers and weavers also provided continuity, carrying out orders for clients as tastes changed at the turn of the twentieth century. Pioneering collaboratives such as the Omega Workshops (founded 1913) and the Arts League of Service (founded 1919) provided a platform for artists who produced designs for the home. By the 1930s, with the collapse of the modern art market, many painters and sculptors were seeking new creative outlets and engaged with the textile industry, then in need of the guidance of artists who could supply up-to-date patterns. A number of government and professional initiatives helped to improve the dialogue between art and industry while raising public awareness about approaches to interior design and decoration. The Board of Trade’s Gorell Committee on Art and Industry (1931) and the publication of its report (1932) supported the development of the Council for Art and Industry (CAI). The CAI, in addition to producing reports on the condition of the working-class household and the role of the designer in industry, also organized some of the most important and popular exhibitions about the modern home, setting an example for the public in how to approach the use of new styles and materials. The founding of Britain’s Society of Industrial Artists in 1930 helped to legitimize the design professions and establish requirements for training as well as structures for quotes and commissions. Meanwhile Britain’s Design and Industries Association, founded in 1915 in the spirit of the Deutscher Werkbund to improve the quality and reputation of industrial design, advocated for the production of modern textiles with a series of dedicated meetings in the 1930s and through their journals Design in Industry and Design for To-Day.4 New professional alliances brought progressive artists, architects, critics, and designers together to discuss and disseminate the social and cultural importance of modern design for a modern lifestyle. Unit One, founded in 1933 by the painter Paul Nash, encouraged the application of abstraction across media involving artists, sculptors, and architects who championed architecture as an art form.5 The group’s headquarters was London’s Mayor Gallery, which opened as one of the city’s foremost galleries of modern art and design in 1925. The gallery moved to a new location at 19–20 Cork Street, designed in the modern mode by architect Brian O’Rorke and interior designer Arundell Clarke in 1933. The gallery was a gathering place for critics, collectors, and artists interested in contemporary creative activity. The Mayor Gallery hosted the one and only exhibition of Unit One members’ drawings and photographs in April 1934, an exhibition on Art Now to celebrate critic and historian Herbert Read’s publication by the same name. The gallery also promoted modern textiles with a show of furnishing fabrics by the artist-turned textile designer Allan Walton in 1938.6 Although the existence of groups such as Unit One and MARS (Modern Architecture Research Group, founded by Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry, and F.R.S. Yorke in 1933 as the British branch of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) was short-lived, the collaborations that they encouraged across creative industries led to significant future commissions and projects. One creative result was a range of Constructivist Fabrics designed by Unit One group members including sculptors Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth for the

Textiles and Architecture in 1930s London  103

experimental textile firm Edinburgh Weavers in October 1937. That same year Nicholson had co-edited the groundbreaking publication Circle, International Survey of Constructive Art. Edinburgh Weavers’ founder, the painter and designer Alastair Morton, identified parallels between architecture and textile design in the “same rhythmic beauty of pure shape and space and colour.” 7 He commissioned artists to produce woven textiles with pure geometries that would match well with interior schemes in contemporary buildings. The strict visual organization of Nicholson’s textiles emphasized the vertical or horizontal lines of surrounding furnishings, fitting in seamlessly to the overall design of the room. By 1937, Constructivist fabrics were a part of a larger embrace of modern styling by the British textile industry. That year historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote in his survey An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, that the production of three woven textile manufacturers in Britain was 97½ percent modern, 50 percent modern, and 85 percent modern, respectively. Pevsner also identified that one leading commercial designer of woven textiles in London was producing 75 percent modern patterns and at a major department store on Oxford Street, 90 percent of their woven textile stock had modern motifs.8 While it is likely that these three manufacturers were particularly progressive, closer relationships between art and industry made modernism more accessible by the late 1930s. Britain’s attempts at profit-making and creative collaboration between modern art and industry emerged alongside other, often earlier, longer lasting, and financially successful, attempts across Europe in the early twentieth century.9 In France, organizations of likeminded architects and designers including the Société des artistes décorateurs and smaller workshops such as Süe et Mare enabled fine artists to apply their skills to luxury furniture and decorative objects, including modern textiles, leading up to and around the time of the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. In the 1920s and 1930s, architecture and interior design were central to the De Stijl movement’s creation of total environments, including hangings and carpets sold by the Dutch department store Metz & Co. Russian artist-designers including Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova introduced an abstract style for textile production in the late 1920s that was carried out by state mills in industrial centers. In Germany, the Bauhaus’s curtains and tablecloths were printed through a licensing agreement by M. van Delden & Co in Gronau, Germany in 1931–1932. British awareness of these European models increased through magazines and books, education, and travel abroad. An influx of European immigrant designers and architects coupled with imports of objects made overseas brought new ideas to London in the 1930s.10 The Studio reported that “Even the man in the street, whose tastes are nourished by what he sees in the shop windows, is becoming aware of a new atmosphere, of alien forms of unusual interest glimpsed here and there.”11 Advice literature and periodicals on design and architecture featured textiles by an international set of contemporary artists who were translating their signature style into fibers.12 A branch of the Berlin-founded Reimann School became the first school of commercial art in Britain when it opened in London in January 1937. Reimann taught courses in topics that reflected the expanding role of the modern designer including fashion, dressmaking, and interior design. The ground-breaking couple E. McKnight Kauffer and Marion V. Dorn were among London’s rug and textile designers on the school’s part-time faculty that also included teachers from Germany.13 Paul Nash, a founding member of Omega Workshops and president of the Society of Industrial Artists, was one of the first modern British painters to become involved with textile design as he expanded his creative practice. Over the 1920s and 1930s, Nash sought out

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the ideal production partner and method for his design Cherry Orchard which abstracts and simplifies a pattern from nature, breaking a landscape down to essential elements of arcs, dots, and dashes (Figure 6.1). The application of muted grey-green for the trees’ branches has the irregular edges of a brushstroke just drying. The print’s rhythmic rows suggest the working path of the artist. The pale tree trunks against a dark background gives an impression of a nighttime view of the bounty of the orchard. For the swaying pattern’s first iteration, Nash collaborated with Footprints, a Londonbased fabric printing workshop that employed current female students and recent graduates of the important Central School of Arts and Crafts (founded in 1896).14 The Central School, along with the Birmingham School of Art and the Royal College of Art, offered Britain’s pioneering courses in textile and industrial design, broadening the technical training and career opportunities available to men and women. Footprints’ hand-block-printed textiles retailed at the shop Modern Textiles, first located in London’s South Kensington neighborhood where customers could purchase lengths of fabric as well as readymade accessories such as hats and scarves and custom garments. When Nash became dissatisfied with the quality of the printing, he established working relationships with other textile firms including G P & J Baker.15 He wrote on the “important point” of the relationship between artists and craftsmen in a 1926 essay on “Modern English Textiles”: …new life has come from the artists and not from the craftsmen. What is desperately needed is a better understanding between the two, for if the artist has the credit for the new life, he also bears the responsibility. Self-expression is not always a very scrupulous thing, being apt not to take much thought for the future.16 Nash called for better cooperation between craftsman and artist, while advising that artists’ designs with “new life” must be forward-thinking but also easily manufactured. Nash’s next

FIGURE 6.1

Textile, Cherry Orchard, 1930; Designed by Paul Nash for Cresta Silks Ltd; Printed silk; The Whitworth, The University of Manchester Ⓒ The Whitworth, The University of Manchester/Bridgeman Images.

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iteration of Cherry Orchard was produced with Cresta Silks, an enterprising textile firm based in Welwyn Garden City that offered artists the opportunity to design printed fabrics. Nash’s Cherry Orchard underwent six months of laborious color trials before the pattern went into production.17 Founded by Tom Heron in 1929, the firm produced lengths of hand-blocked (and later machine-printed after World War II) silk and readymade garments and accessories that were available by mail order and for sale in brick-and-mortar retail stores. Cresta counted among its collaborators artists Cedric Morris, Bruce Turner, John Armstrong, and Graham Sutherland. At Cresta Silks modern architecture played a direct role in the promotion of modern textiles. Heron launched the architectural and interior design career of Wells Coates with commissions for shop fittings and advertisements for his first silk company Crysede. Heron later hired Coates for Cresta’s storefronts, retail fixtures and fittings, and factory in Welwyn Garden City. Coates came to architecture via interior design, founding his practice in 1928. For Cresta’s shop at 92 Brompton Road in London, Wells Coates prioritized a sweeping expanse of plate glass, allowing consumers to view long cascades of fabrics (Figure 6.2). The sprawling entablature was designed to prominently show off the brand’s logo designed by commercial artist Kauffer, who was best known as a poster designer for the London Underground.18 His typography was also used on the company stationery and receipts, as well as printed on its package design. Kauffer’s refined lettering in stylized all capitals

FIGURE 6.2

Cresta Silks Shop, Brompton Road, London, 1930; Architecture by Wells Coates; Logo by E. McKnight Kauffer; Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections.

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complemented the bold lines of Coates’s façade. The building’s fascia stood out for its flatness, as compared to the surrounding shopfronts on Brompton Road, clad in stone carving and architectural details.19 A streamlined grill at sidewalk level provided a stylish stage for the window display. By 1930, Coates had developed a particular specialty in retail design, having completed about fifteen shops for the sale of dress silks.20 The architect designed Cresta’s unique façade to catch the eyes of passersby and make an enticing first impression on perspective purchasers. As he wrote, “The small shop… tends to become increasingly ‘individual’ in its appeal. It takes the place of the tradesmen who used to go from one house to another.”21 For the interior, Coates chose plywood as the primary material for his standardized dressing room equipment, wall and display fittings, gown stands, cabinets, shelves, benches, and tables. The architect exploited the plywood for its clean grain and pliability and gave it a place of prominence, although it was largely considered a cheap and inferior material at the time. Solid drawer and cabinet fronts with tubular metal handles hid most textiles from view, keeping the space visually spare until the grand reveal of pattern and color requested by a potential purchaser. Tables and stools balanced on delicate tubular steel legs leant a lightness to the display space. A harmonious message of modernism between architecture, textiles, and graphic design communicated to consumers that the brand was utterly up to-date. As the Cresta business grew, Coates completed shopfronts for stores in London, Bournemouth, Brighton, and Bromley from 1929 to 1932.

Textiles and the Modern Interior Those customers investing in Creta Silks for their fashionable dress would have likely been amongst those also eager to introduce modern textiles into their own homes. Tapestries and rugs, flat and scalable in size like a painter’s canvas, were some of the first new media that modern artists experimented with in the 1930s. This revival of interest in textile hangings and floorcoverings as areas to carry pattern and color was led in part by Francis Bacon, who at the age of twenty staged an exhibition at his London flat that foregrounded his talents as an interior designer, more than as a painter.22 The display brought together his organic designs for furniture alongside rugs that he showed on the floor as well as on the wall. In a double page spread in the August 1930 issue of The Studio magazine, a view of Bacon’s studio was featured under the headline “The 1930 Look in British Decoration.”23 The installation images showed sleek furnishings including a dressing table with a large circular mirror, a plywood stool with a swooping curve of a seat, and a round table in glass and tubular steel. Rugs in overlapping planes of contrasting color, flat pattern, and hard and soft shapes decorated the studio’s surfaces. The Studio called the rugs “purely thought forms” that are “particularly representative of to-day.”24 Bacon’s small yet influential group of rugs was inspired by the recent geometric designs for floorcoverings he had seen made by Kauffer and Dorn for the British firm Royal Wilton (Figure 6.3). Bacon also executed his rugs with the company, whose impressive history in partnering with artist-designers included William Morris and the members of the Omega Workshops. As Bacon found his footing in design, his friends and mentors in the field included the British interior decorator and textile designer Arundell Clarke who would later establish an office in New York. Clarke was one of a number of creative figures guiding clients and the British public in how to incorporate modern textiles into communal and private spaces. The

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FIGURE 6.3

Drawing, Carpet Design, ca. 1928; Designed by Marion V. Dorn; brush and watercolor, gouache on photostat; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Daren Pierce, 1982-79-17-11; Photo: Matt Flynn Ⓒ Smithsonian Instution.

interior designer, as an interloper between producer and consumer, had a design eye and knowledge of the marketplace that provided guidance and promoted the unique potential of textiles to bring interior surroundings into harmony with their occupants’ lives.25 At a time when modern design in furniture and furnishings was not readily available from many single sources in London, interior designers often had their own showroom and played a key role in sourcing, personalizing, and completing interior schemes for private and corporate clients. Through credit in magazines, articles, and public lectures, interior decorators became public-facing figures for advising on and promoting stylistic change. When Clarke moved to 18 Bruton Street in Mayfair in 1932, he also began a drastic renovation of a Georgian townhouse at 18 Berkeley Square around the corner. While the townhouse’s appeal may have been rooted in its history—a long-fashionable address and façade with symmetry and proportion based on classical principals—its interior showed a distinctly contemporary visual language. The permanency of the townhouse’s time-honored architectural shell contrasted with the convertible and modifiable nature of the home’s interior. One reviewer for The Sphere reflected on the benefit of the building’s original framework for the interior’s organization and design: “Here a certain beauty of proportion in the original architectural scheme considerably lightened the designer’s task.”26 The supporting structure and

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layout were about all that remained after Clarke stripped all cornices and woodwork from the interior to create a sleek backdrop.27 He erased and whitewashed the historic building’s interior architectural details, except for a spiral stair at the entry. By recklessly obliterating all ornament, Clarke left a strikingly modern canvas against which the furniture and furnishings could stand out. He chose one of Bacon’s rugs as a focal point in the spare back drawing room (Figure 6.4). Here Clarke carried out Kauffer’s advice that “we consider that pattern is much more restful and dignified when it is a definite decoration within a fixed area and has a distinct relation to the limits of the room.”28 Blank unadorned walls, painted presumably in a clean white or pale tone, allowed the colors and profiles of the sleek, sturdy furnishings to hold the room’s visual weight. Bacon’s rug of overlapping geometric forms, with his signature embedded in its pattern, perfectly complemented the hard-edged upholstered furniture that surrounded it.29 The crisp lines and strict geometries of the Georgian townhouse’s façade found contemporary resonance with Clarke’s interior scheme. This interior fulfilled modernist aspirations in the familiar setting of a traditional townhouse. Ronald Fleming was another of London’s foremost interior decorators who led the way in the stylistic transition of the 1930s. Before founding the department of interior decoration at the significant department store Fortnum & Mason, in the mid-1920s, Fleming began work at Keeble’s, a long-established London decorating firm, whose historicism Fleming celebrated and whose offerings he brought up to date. Keeble’s occupied Carlisle House, built

FIGURE 6.4

Modernization of 18 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London: The back drawing room, 1930; Interior Design by Arundell Clarke; Rug by Francis Bacon. Photo: Millar & Harris; Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections.

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in the 1660s in London’s SoHo neighborhood. The firm took over the house in 1899 and restored the interior as the headquarters of their decorating business. In a 1930s brochure, Ronald Fleming wrote that “many of the rooms still retain their original features, and furnished as they now are with antiques of the period, they strengthen the link which the house makes with the past…”30 As emblematic of his split desire for the historic and the contemporary, Fleming added both an eighteenth-century paneled room and in 1929, a modern room on an upper floor, featuring a glossy ceiling and built-in-cabinets, a rug by Dorn and a mirror-faced chimney. A large sofa invited consumers to relax and spend time visually exploring the arrangement of objects. The desk by the window appeared ready for quiet use. Decorative accents of vases, flowers, and small sculptures were carefully and prominently placed to fill out the scene. The large mirror offered the opportunity for the consumer to reflect and see themselves as part of the arrangement of modern design. In 1932, Ronald Fleming promoted recent achievements in artist-designed textiles by hosting the exhibition “Modern Decoration and Design for Walls, Panels and Screens” at Keeble’s. The exhibition celebrated textiles that demonstrated new directions in design for interior use. The display demonstrated a revival of the medium of tapestry and featured designs by leading figures in the art world including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Eric Ravilious, Edward Wadsworth, Dorn, and Kauffer (Figure 6.5). Kauffer’s design for a tapestry of an abstracted female figure

FIGURE 6.5

Tapestry, 1932; Designed by E. McKnight Kauffer; Woven by Jean Orage; Wool and cotton; Victoria and Albert Museum, T.368–1982 Ⓒ Simon Rendall/ The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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playing the lyre was woven by “Mrs. Jean Orage in Chelsea”, formerly employed by Morris & Co.31 This tapestry, one of a group themed around the arts, celebrated music. At over six feet tall, the tapestry’s central elongated figure, with folds of flowing fabric, was more than life size, adding commanding decoration from nearly floor to ceiling. One journalist for The Listener recalled, One of the most startling points about this exhibition, in fact, is the compatibility between the old and the new in the English tradition; not only mural decorations but furniture, textiles, rugs, and metalwork by the modern craftsman and his predecessors, seem to be steps in a logical progression when placed side by side in these typically English rooms.32 The reviewer remarked on how this unique combination of historic and contemporary design encouraged viewers to recognize visual alliances between the two and consider these modern textiles as the latest iteration in a longer historical continuum of advancements in British design and decoration. In this case equal attention was given to the objects on exhibition as well as their architectural backdrop, encouraging readers to imagine the potential of the modern furnishings and textiles in their own, likely dated, homes. Fleming advocated for interior design to inject architecture with personality: Can’t we be ourselves in 1932? If we know what we are and some of us think we know: but the architects are afraid of us it seems…No, you must give way a little; we can give you comfort and warmth, light, gaiety and space – a background for your belongings and personality.33 Textiles and other decorative objects could ease the transition to modernism as a style to be lived in, no matter what the architectural framework. Curtis Moffat was another interior decorator who encouraged the public to freely combine new and old while appreciating the aesthetic value of an object independent of its age. In 1929, Moffat, best known as a photographer, opened a studio on London’s Fitzroy Square, built by Robert Adam in the 1790s. Fitzroy Square, at the opposite end of Charlotte Street and Fitzroy Street, was home to the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops during World War I. Kauffer produced the invitation for Moffat’s opening and his and Dorn’s geometric rugs were sold in a room dedicated to floor coverings.34 The architect Frederick Etchells remodeled the space to include white walls with aluminum and copper accents and steel furniture. The Architect and Building News reported: “It is exceedingly interesting to see how well eighteenth-century architecture can adapt itself to twentieth-century functionalism without loss of dignity or character.”35 Similar to Clarke’s Berkeley Square project, the experience of visiting Moffat’s gallery encouraged critics to pay attention to how a modern interior could be compatible with a historical exterior. Vogue called Moffat’s gallery a “living history of decoration.”36 The expansive mixture of objects that Moffat sold encompassed African art and sculpture, Georgian dollhouses, Ming stone carvings, model warships, or antique glasses. Moffat promoted what he called a “medley of tastes” and his museum-like display showed consumers how to confidently combine objects across time period and geography in their own homes. A focus on the visual features of the furniture and furnishings freed people to explore new styles outside of the limitations

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of chronology. Fleming and Moffat were promoting an eclectic approach to home decoration that had a long history of affording its owners the chance to show off their cosmopolitan taste and knowledge of international art and design. As Mortimer recalled, “in the past ancient Roman sculptures, Chinese lacquer and porcelain, and Renaissance paintings have been used to adorn English houses by every generation since the time of Charles II.”37 This discerning integration of old and new allowed for self-expression and comfortable personalization of domestic spaces. Londoners transitioned their spaces by updating inherited tradition with new, modern acquisitions, one design at a time, often beginning with textiles. Contemporary fabrics and floorcoverings shared rooms with antiques in the 1930s. The art critic Raymond Mortimer’s article on “Modern Period Character Mania” in the Architectural Review identified this phenomenon of mixing in 1938. The dining room of a Victorian house in London’s neighborhood of Bloomsbury (Figure 6.6) illustrated the recent style with its modern American wallpaper, a new cork floor, English Regency chairs, a seventeenthcentury Venetian table of inlaid marble, an eighteenth-century majolica wig stand, a painting by Omega Workshops’ director Vanessa Bell, and curtains in a fabric designed by the Workshops’ other director, Duncan Grant, only recently released on the market by Allan Walton Textiles (Figure 6.7). This room celebrated the decorative spirit of the Omega Workshops, using colorful fabrics with lively pattern to enliven the walls and windows. In this case the curtains served as a backdrop of abstraction that helped to visually tie together the room’s

FIGURE 6.6

Dining Room in Bloomsbury, featured in The Architectural Review, January 1938, 49 © British Library Board (General Reference Collection EC.9.x.262/ January 1938, 49).

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FIGURE 6.7

Textile, Queen Mary, 1937; Designed by Duncan Grant for Allan Walton Fabrics; Hand screenprinted cotton; Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI Ⓒ Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS, London/ARS, New York.

otherwise disparate elements. The draperies’ fluttering leaves and flowers and the folding of their treatment brought a sense of movement echoed in the curving arms of the chairs, the flair of the wig stand’s base, the bending silhouette of Bell’s trees, and the dense patterning on the dining table’s top. Although far removed in time period, material, and style, all of the objects represented a high point of creative expression. This eclectic approach to decoration allowed British modernism to be seen and appreciated in an international context. The floral fabric, the most outstanding note of modern decoration in the room, is the product of yet another British partnership between art and industry in the 1930s. Trained as an architect and an artist, Allan Walton set up his own firm Allan Walton Textiles in 1931 and commissioned other artists in his circle, including Vanessa Bell, Cedric Morris, Frank Dobson, and Duncan Grant, to design screen-printed fabrics. He recognized the advantages of using textiles as a vehicle for modern art. In 1935, he wrote that printed fabric “is most suitable for experiments in the use of personality… it is a more suitable vehicle for the reproduction of the personal and particular flavour of an artist’s work.”38 In the 1930s, screen-printing, as opposed to roller printing, was a lower-cost way to produce short runs of contemporary designs.39 This new technique allowed many artists to seamlessly transfer their drawing and painting skills to designing patterns for textiles. Screen-printing could even simulate the painterly effects of color washes and brushstrokes. Nash praised Walton’s

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business model that directly engaged artists with industry, writing in 1932 that “Mr. Walton is a painter and it is to painters rather than craftsmen that he has applied for textile designs… that experiment has been completely successful.”40 The reason for this success, Nash believed, was due to the fact that Walton “secured a block cutter able to interpret instead of copy the vagaries of a painter’s technique… the result has been a number of excellent fabrics of original design which can be bought a reasonable price.”41 By carefully refining the translation of an artist’s concept to a completed pattern, Walton produced more cost-effective textiles that helped to expand the market for modern design. Even if Londoners did not purchase contemporary fabrics for their own homes, increasing opportunities became available to experience new designs in the semi-public or public sphere. Fashionable hotels, theaters, cruise lines, railway cars, model rooms, and corporate offices were some of the many sites that a Londoner might have encountered abstract pattern on seating, around windows, and on the floor. Dorn, previously mentioned for her rug designs, engaged with all of these contexts. From Claridge’s and the railway cars of the London Underground to the BBC offices and Orient Line cruise ships, Dorn was able to meet the demands of a wide range of design briefs. The dexterity and sophistication of Dorn’s style as well as her ability to adapt her skills to the architectural and spatial demands of the project, led to the wide appeal and application of her work. One reviewer for The Spectator reflected in 1939 that Marion Dorn’s versatility appears in the varied structure of the patterns themselves. They range from simple rows of stencil-like daisies on a plain white ground, through geometrical shapes of a relatively complicated kind, to immensely rich and intricate mixtures of weaving with super-imposed print. But in every case Marion Dorn discovers a new way of being herself.42 Trained as a painter and a batik artist, Dorn lived in California and Paris before moving to London in 1923. Between the world wars, she was one of the leading promoters of modernism in London. In the 1920s, her geometric rugs were some of the first abstract floorcoverings available in the city. Her creative partner in life and work was the leading graphic designer E. McKnight Kauffer, with whom she shared a number of individual and corporate clients. In 1934, she established Marion Dorn Limited, which handled everything from fabric design and production to distribution and interiors. While Dorn made an impact in those areas typically reserved for women designers at the time—textiles and interior design—she also broke through the gendered hierarchy in design by partnering her textile business with other industries including communication, transport, architecture, travel, theatre, and more.43 Dorn distinguished herself as “the architect of floors” for creating floorcoverings that specifically responded to their architectural surroundings.44 Her rectangular rugs mirrored the horizontal windows in modernist buildings, her large carpets demarcated seating areas, and her circular rugs provided dramatic focal points in passageways. In 1925 Vogue reported on Dorn’s appeal: [Dorn’s] decorative materials are unique in several respects, for they are all specially designed for the spaces they are to occupy: they are the only fabrics where the motif need never be repeated; and the variety of her inventiveness extends from fragile scarves and handkerchiefs to complete schemes of house decoration.45

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Architects and interior decorators used Dorn’s textiles as a device to encourage visual and spatial connections between the design elements of a building and its interior. Dorn, whose rugs and textiles were regularly in demand for commissions and exhibitions, was championed by the architect Oliver Hill. When the London, Midland, and Scottish (LMS) Railway chose Hill as the architect for their latest hotel on the northwest coast of England in Morecambe, he considered no one other than Dorn for the floorcoverings. At the time LMS was one of a few railways that invested in modern architecture and interior design to draw passengers to new locations reachable from London along their train lines. When the “question of room decoration” was brought up with the special Committee of the LMS overseeing the development of the Midland Hotel, it was noted that Mr. Hill was entirely responsible and could make what suggestions he liked within the approved budget. It was recorded in a confidential memo that those in charge see “no reason why Marion Dorn should not have an opportunity of doing the carpets.”46 Carpets were some of the first and most important notes of modern decoration considered in the hotel’s interior (Figure 6.8). In the entrance foyer, the carpets of interlocking and knotting parallel lines ideally complemented the circular stair with its handrails in stacked, stepped, bars of metal. The hotel’s polished white walls set off the shine of the interior’s metallic elements and provided neutral ground for the plush texture of Dorn’s rugs. Their circular shape added a layer of geometry and texture to the floor’s sleek surface. The swooping lines in the interior were matched by the building’s low, convex, curving profile along the seashore. With a sizeable

FIGURE 6.8

Midland Hotel, 1933; Architecture by Oliver Hill; Rug by Marion V. Dorn. Photo by Dell & Wainwright; Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections.

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budget at hand, Hill also invited the participation of artist Eric Gill and his wife Tirzah Garwood for a mural, for sculptural elements and carvings, artist Eric Ravilious for a mural for the tearoom, and Duncan Grant, Frank Dobson, and Allan Walton for textiles. Dorn’s work on the floor extended to mosaics featuring her sea horse design, which became the hotel’s logo and was used for tableware and linens.47 Hill leveraged the hotel as an opportunity to introduce its visitors to a diverse set of artistic perspectives. All those artists featured had partnerships with industry that made it possible for the public to purchase their designs for their own homes once back in London. In the 1930s textiles were a significant field of creative expression for designers and manufacturers who were committed to applying modern art to fashion and architecture. Modern textiles offered customizable, adaptable, and changeable ways to alter and energize buildings historic and contemporary. Many consumers’ first departure from traditional historical styles was in textiles that provided a possibly temporary, relatively simple yet significant way to update an already busy interior. Through textiles, artists had the opportunity to reach more consumers by engaging directly with industry while also helping manufacturers and studios to advance their techniques and technologies to achieve a more refined result. Partnerships between artists and manufacturers brought new vitality to the medium of textiles resulting in designs that propelled a change in attitude towards modernism in England.

Notes 1 Robert Smithells and S. John Woods, The Modern Home: Its Decorations, Furnishings and Equipment (Benfleet: F. Lewis Limited, 1936), 5. 2 “New Decorative Fabrics: Original Designs by Modern Artists for Curtains and Covers in Brocade and Linen,” Vogue (early May 1925), 48. 3 For more on this tension see, Patrick J. Maguire, “Industrial Design: Aesthetic Idealism and Economic Reality,” in Design and Cultural Politics in Post-war Britain: The “Britain Can Make It” Exhibition of 1946, ed. Patrick J. Maguire and Jonathan M. Woodham (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 111–122. 4 Emily Baines, Design and the Formation of Taste in the British Printed Calico Industry, 1919 to 1940, PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2002, 301. 5 For more on Unit One and other art and architecture groups active in early twentieth-century England, see Elizabeth Darling, “Institutionalizing English Modernism 1924–33: From the Vers Group to MARS.” Architectural History 55 (2012), 299–320. 6 See Unit One’s sole publication: Herbert Edward Read, Unit 1: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1934). 7 Morton Sundour Fabrics Ltd. Papers, National Records of Scotland: GD 326/164/22: 1938 address to buyers, introducing the Edinburgh Weavers Constructivist Fabrics, as part of the Autumn range, cited in Baines, Design and the Formation of Taste, 303. 8 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 50. The production of modern printed fabrics still lagged behind, amounting to 10 percent, 75 percent, and 30 percent for those manufacturers listed above for woven production. 9 For more on textiles and the modern interior across Europe see Jill Kachurin, Soviet Textiles: Designing the Modern Utopia (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006); Nancy J. Troy, De Stijl’s Collaborative Ideal: The Colored Abstract Environment, 1916–1926 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1982); Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 10 On the cultural and artistic exchange between Germany and the West, see Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019). 11 Shirley B. Wainwright, “The Modern Home and Its Decoration,” in The Studio Yearbook of Creative Art (London: The Studio, 1930), 60. 12 See for instance, Leslie Mortimer and Dorothy Todd, The New Interior Decoration: An Introduction to Its Principles, and International Survey of Its Methods (London: B.T. Batsford, 1929).

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PART III

Materiality and Material Translations Patricia Blessing

Chapters in this section consider textiles and textile motifs in architecture seen together and also address the question of textiles as building materials. For the premodern Islamic world, Lisa Golombek has noted the importance of textiles, where they took on an outsized role (literally and figuratively) as furnishings of religious and domestic spaces.1 Interior use of textiles was also connected to the use of textile structures such as canopies and tents, and to the outdoor use of textiles in gardens.2 Carpets, for instance, were used in permanent structures as well as in tents and outdoors and were eminently portable (even though heavy at a large scale, but that would not have posed a problem for the itinerant courts of the medieval and early modern Islamic world, which had the infrastructure to carry these and many other objects across significant distances several times a year).3 It is also worth noting that military campaigns took along lavish tents and furnishings for rulers and generals—the Ottoman tents preserved in German, Austrian, and Polish collections today for the most part from the hastily abandoned Ottoman camp at the second siege of Vienna in 1683.4 Textiles in the Islamic world are thus also closely connected to portability—in fact, the term “architecture on the move” has been aptly applied to textile architecture, but also to flexible architectural practices more broadly.5 Yet as Golombek notes, the split historiographies of architectural history, on the one hand, and of the study of textiles, on the other hand, have led to such contexts being neglected, with textiles long being studied as objects separate from their contexts.6 Carpets especially tended to be appraised in the context of a separate market for “oriental rugs” both old and modern.7 Further, the intentional fragmentation of textiles in the nineteenth century, as part of collecting practices that aimed at providing samples for movements such as Art and Crafts, contributed to studies that narrowly focused on technique and patterns, while function could barely be addressed.8 Similar divisions exist in other fields of art history, and only recently have scholars begun to consider textiles as part of interiors. Thus, an entire issue of Dumbarton Oaks Papers, edited by Gudrun Bühl, Sumru Belger Krody, and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, addresses the question of late antique and early Islamic furnishing textiles. Several articles in that volume

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-10

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also address the question of material translations between the extant textile fragments and the types of structures they may have adorned.9 Studies such as these finally attend to the architectural roles that textiles could and did take on, and examine how textiles physically, structurally, and symbolically, within space. Such material translations are a crucial aspect of the relationship between textiles and architecture. Important to note from the outset, and discussed in several chapters in this section, is the fact that textiles and textile motifs are not mutually exclusive. Thus, the presence of textile motifs in architectural decoration should not be seen—as it often stated in the historiography—as cheap substitute for textiles.10 On the contrary, architectural decoration that contains textile motifs was often designed specifically to be in dialogue with the textiles that were evoked themselves, as several of the chapters in this section clearly demonstrate, and complex technical, stylistic, and symbolical relationships existed between textiles, textile motifs, and architecture. In this section, Theodore Van Loan looks at Umayyad material and connections between textile floor coverings and mosaics in early Islamic palatial settings. Ashley Dimmig analyzes late Ottoman tents, and how architecture inspired by tents developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nicole Kançal-Ferrari discussed textiles recovered from a funerary context, the mausoleum of the Khans of Crimea in Hansaray, which are rare physical evidence for what he know was widespread practice, and here are combined with the use of textile motifs on the mausoleum itself. Andrew Hamilton examines textile motifs, and the use of textiles as architectural elements, in Andean cultures from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries. Olga Bush addresses the textility of making in the fourteenth-century palaces of the Alhambra.

Notes 1 Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Content and Context of Visual Art in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, ed. Priscilla Soucek (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 25–50. 2 Bernard O’Kane, “From Tents to Pavilions: Royal Mobility and Persian Palace Design,” Ars Orientalis 23, Pre-Modern Islamic Palaces (1993): 249–68; Fermo Chasuble as canopy: Annabelle Simon-Kahn, “The Fermo Chasuble of St. Thomas Beckett and Hispano-Mauresque Cosmological Silks: Some Speculations on the Adaptive Re-Use of Textiles,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 1–5 and Avinoam Shalem, “Architecture for the Body: Some Reflections on the Mobility of Textiles,” in Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence, ed. Alina Alexandra Payne (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 246–63, at 259–61; see also Avinoam Shalem, ed., The Chasuble of Thomas Becket: A Biography (Munich: Hirmer, 2017). 3 Charles Melville, “The Itineraries of Sultan Öljeitü, 1304–16,” Iran 28 (1990): 55–70; Scott Redford, “Portable Palaces: On the Circulation of Objects and Ideas about Architecture in Medieval Anatolia and Mesopotamia,” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012): 382–412. 4 Ashley Dimmig, “Fabricating a New Image: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period,” in Islamic Architecture on the Move: Motion and Modernity, ed. Christiane J. Gruber (Bristol: Intellect, 2016), 103–33. 5 Christiane J. Gruber, ed. Islamic Architecture on the Move: Motion and Modernity (Bristol: Intellect, 2016). 6 Golombek, “Draped Universe of Islam.” 7 In the case of carpets produced in Western, South, and Central Asia, “modern” does not equate “machine made” but synthetic dyes are often used instead of natural ones. 8 Patricia Blessing, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, and Eiren L. Shea, Medieval Textiles across Eurasiac. 300–1400, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 60–61.

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7 TEXTILES BY OTHER MEANS Seeing and Conceptualizing Textile Representations in Early Islamic Architecture Theodore Van Loan

The lion-gazelle mosaic located on the floor of a small apse at the Umayyad palace of Khirbat al-Mafjar is a study of pictorial dynamism (Figure 7.1). The large tree occupying the center of the composition presides over a scene of bucolic fecundity disturbed. The steadily darkening gradation of its leaves outwards from its trunk, and the readily visible offering of its fruit bespeak of a serene and welcoming visual experience that is then subverted by the ferocity of a pouncing lion in the lower right corner of the scene. The jarring proximity

FIGURE 7.1

Lion-gazelle mosaic, apse of diwan, Khirbat al-Mafjar, mid-eighth century, Jericho, West Bank. Sean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-11

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of tranquility and violence sets forth a dynamic of duality that informs other aspects of the picture. The leaves of the central tree connote both flatness and depth. Each are rendered imminently visible, as if the entire tree has been pressed up against the picture plane. The shadow effect created by the incremental darkening of the leaves outward from the central trunk subverts this flatness. It is as if a powerful spotlight is casting a deep shadow behind its object of illumination. The powerful sense of depth from this effect is at odds with the flatness of the animal figures and the vegetal tendrils within which they are entwined. As the lion launches itself upon the gazelle, it draws attention to the frame of the picture by utilizing its edge with its hind paw to gain momentum for the pounce. This frame consists of two parts, a band of intertwined red and blue cables and an outer border made up of red colored tassels. These tassels are a small, but significant, detail, as they transform the entire composition into an image of a textile.1 This essay is about these types of textile representations found in the domains of the Umayyad Caliphate during the first and second centuries AH or eighth century CE. It will examine this mosaic along with three other cases found in Umayyad Greater Syria. The lion-gazelle mosaic, along with these other textile representations, have always had complicated ontologies in art historical scholarship. The eminent Islamic art historian Richard Ettinghausen included it within his landmark study, Arab Painting.2 He surmised that the scene had “the special function of symbolically demonstrating the irresistible power of the caliphate.”3 This interpretation, he argued, is consistent with an imperial iconography dating back to the ancient Near East. He also connects the lion-gazelle mosaic with another display of caliphal power within the same building. According to an archaeological reconstruction, its entrance façade featured a sculptural relief of a regal Figure atop a pair of

FIGURE 7.2

Reclining Figure and attendants, southern wall of western side of the main hall, fresco on plaster, Qusayr ʿAmra, 723–43, Zarqa Governate, Jordan. Agnieszka Szymanska/Manar al-Athar.

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lions, thereby providing further visual support for connecting lions with caliphal power.4 Prior to this point in his essay, Ettinghausen made an off handed observation: “the whole might nevertheless represent a mosaic imitation of a textile, in this case probably a tapestry.”5 The fact that this mosaic pretending to be a tapestry appears in a book about painting perfectly embodies the ambiguities and complexities of signaling materiality that are at play in Umayyad art and architecture. As I will demonstrate, the ‘textile representation’ is an apt category within which to investigate such dynamics. These textile representations include a fresco painting in the bathhouse of Qusayr ‘Amra (105–25 AH /723–43 CE) located in Jordan’s eastern desert, the central floor mosaic at the forementioned palace complex of Khirbat al-Mafjar, and the southern façade of the Mshatta Palace (125–26 AH /743–44 CE), now in Berlin, but originally located just south of Amman (Figures 7.2–7.4). Each case constitutes an artistic effort to represent textiles by means of other media. However, this an inadequate and overly simplistic explication of these given visual scenarios. Close analysis will demonstrate that these three cases of textile representations are distinctive and nuanced. They are all located in architectural contexts, and do not function simply as decorative motifs visually enriching the spaces that hold them.6 They play a dynamic and interactive role in the visual experience of their audience and are highly idiosyncratic. Their extensive and diverse use is evidence of the complex play between medium and materiality extant within Umayyad art and architecture.7 These examples make clear that textile representations were common within the Umayyad artistic tradition, and transcended multiple mediums, including mosaic, fresco, and sculpture. The

FIGURE 7.3

Mosaic floor of the bathhouse reception hall Khirbat al-Mafjar, mid eighth century, Jericho, West Bank. Ross Burns/Manar al-Athar.

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FIGURE 7.4

Mshatta Façade, 5.07 m × 33 m, carved limestone, 743–44, Museum für Islamische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. Berlin, Germany. Photo: Theodore Van Loan.

apparent medium-fluidity and the related questions regarding visual meaning posed by the lion-gazelle mosaic and the other examples raise the following conceptual issue: what happens to the relationship between meaning and form when the given visual form has been emancipated from medium? The answer to this question varies, as the relationship between meaning and form shift between different textile representations. The cases from Qusayr ‘Amra, Khirbat al-Mafjar, and Mshatta, respectively, show distinct configurations of meaning and form. By parsing out these configurations, we can draw closer to answering this question. In so doing, we will consider topics including medium transfer, the semiotics of ornament, and the ways in which relationships between meaning and form were developed by the makers of these frescos, sculptures, and mosaics. The first example is the central painting on the wall at the southern end of the west aisle of Qusayr ʿAmra (see Figure 7.2). Qusayr ʿAmra is a small bathhouse originally part of a larger agricultural complex and contains one of the most extensive surviving programs of fresco paintings in the late antique/early Islamic world.8 In this painting, the textiles are as much a central concern for the fresco painters as their wearers and users. The focus of the composition is a robed central Figure sitting in repose upon a couch with an inlaid table or brazier in front of him.9 His attendants and/or courtiers are adorned with robes and patterned fabrics colored various shades of blue and red. Two sit cross-legged to his left and one stands just behind and to the left of them. An attendant holding a red fan-like object studded with blue-colored jewels, stands to his right, with his torso leaning inwards towards the seated Figure. The cushion, atop which the main Figure is sitting, has a yellow

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cover containing a pattern of regularly spaced flower petal motifs that alternate with a light blue cross-hatching. Another yellow cover is laid across the top of the mattress that contains a pattern of regularly spaced light yellow-blue crests. His left arm rests on yet another light-yellow pillow of indeterminant form that also frames the background of the upper sitting Figure. He is wrapped by another red gridded textile with squares that each contain a kind of upside-down fleur de lys. Although the folds and contours of the reclined Figure’s light blue robe are well indicated, especially over his legs, this red mantle does not seem to respond to the plastic pressures of his body, but simply confronts the viewer head-on. This whole scene is framed by a large gridded red textile that forms a canopy above the figures, with its grid pattern aligned horizontally in contrast to that on the reclining Figure’s wrap. This has been identified as a qubba, or ceremonial tent of the kind Umayyad princes were said to have employed in court ceremonies.10 The play of patterns and emphasis on the regularity of form within the textiles is contrasted by the red fan held by the attendant and by the plumes of the heraldic peacocks that frame the top portion of the composition.11 The painters of this fresco have clearly demonstrated a mastery of textile rendering. They show great skill at depicting draped textiles on the bodies of their wearers. The various fabrics are situated in such a way that they come to constitute the entire scene; it is as if the bodies of the various figures are secondary to the visual spectacle of their clothing and furniture. In this way, the Umayyad elite came to see their visual presence through the spectacle offered by textiles. One can hypothesize that within such a space as this vaulted reception area, the patron, crown prince al-Walid bin Yazid (d. 126/744), would have presented himself to his audience in a similar manner.12 In turn, his courtiers seated in the reception chamber would have been adorned in such a fashion regardless of his presence or absence within the space. Thus, the fresco painting would have mirrored a hypothesized real-life visual scene taking place within the same space. This doubling of textiles and their renderings in fresco cements their place within the courtly arts and attests to their importance within the visual fashioning of the Umayyad elite. Moreover, the open tent that frames the fresco image draws in its audience located in the reception hall. It serves as a prompt for this audience to visually connect the space of their repose in the reception

FIGURE 7.5

Marwan Tiraz, woven rosette pattern with embroidered tirāz inscription (fragmentary), textile: samite, silk, Africa, Iran or Iraq; embroidery: split stich, silk, Umayyad period (reign of Marwan I, 684–85 or Marwan II, 744–50). © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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chamber with the depicted space in the painting. While the tent could be connoting an outdoor location, it is its spatial relationship with the viewers in the reception chamber that is most important. The textile representations in this painting open a culturally charged visual analog to the real world, and their role is to facilitate an experiential reverberation with the textiles and their wearers that would have inhabited the reception chamber. The presence and co-habitation of textiles and images of textiles activate the similitude between them. The scholarly knowledge of textiles at this time is limited to the relatively few examples of Umayyad-era textiles that remain.13 The most well-known of these is the Marwan tirāz, named as such from an inscription band of woven silk that appears on one section of the textile naming Marwan amir al-mu’minin (commander of the faithful), most likely dating to the reign of Caliph Marwan ibn Muhammad between 126 and 132 AH / 744–50 CE (Figure 7.5).14 While not containing an exuberant display of flora and fauna, this textile’s geometric configurations are framed by repeating roundels containing vine scrolls within their circular frames. Some of the medallions and polylobed motifs do have analogs in a few of the textiles represented in the Qusayr ʿAmra frescos. However, the vast majority of the textiles represented in the fresco paintings lack corresponding examples in the corpus of surviving Umayyad era pieces. Due to the fragility of the medium, the body of evidence simply does not have an archive sufficient to make comparisons to these representations. Much of the understanding of early Islamic textile culture comes from these kinds of representations and textual sources, rather than from the extant material record of them, although this may be changing as dating and attribution methods for early medieval textiles are being updated.15 In the same building at the Khirbat al-Mafjar complex featuring the lion-gazelle mosaic are a far larger set of mosaics located on the floor of an adjacent reception hall (see Figure 7.3). This rectangular hall is shaped by four rows of thick piers, which once supported a vaulted roof system, and four walls that each feature multiple hemispherical exedras. The mosaics appear within the hemispherical spaces of each exedra, as well as in bands between the piers. These compositions showcase an astonishing diversity of geometric designs.16 They present themselves to the viewer collectively as a variegated grid that frames differentiated sets of motifs in repetition with additional design elements that visually punctuate these repetitions and symmetries. Oleg Grabar contended that the repetitive quality present in these compositions was meant to evoke textiles, arguing that, “the new Umayyad patrons wanted to create the effect of textile covering, whether with rugs or silks.”17 While Grabar offers no additional support to his claim, the pattern of the mosaics on the left-most and right-most halls features roundels similar in appearance to those on the Marwan tiraz and several other textiles dated to the Umayyad period (see Figures 7.3 and 7.5). Elizabeth Dospěl Williams has connected the manner in which the mosaic patterns are arranged in strips to Roman practices of creating visual paths for a building’s users to follow within a space.18 Additionally, the eclectic nature of these patterns matches the eclecticism in the patterns on display in the previously discussed painting from Qusayr ʿAmra (see Figure 7.2). Hana Taragan in a recent study has identified a number of motifs and patterns found in the extensive program of stucco revetment at Khirbat al-Mafjar that have corresponding links to a variety of late antique textile designs.19 It would follow, then, that the mosaic floor could possibly share such correspondences. It is clear, however, that there are a number of motifs within the mosaics that do not seem to be evocative of textiles, namely the large vortex-like circular composition in the center of the room. This speaks to an implicit ambiguity that was initially observed in the

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lion-gazelle mosaic. When it comes to representations of media by other means, there is not always a straightforward one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. “Representation” might in fact, be too strong a word. Rather, the term “allusion,” as utilized by Margaret Graves in her study of objects with architectural connotations, might be more appropriate.20 Allusion, as a conceptually looser term than representation or depiction, permits a degree of ambiguity that is certainly useful in coming to understand the reception hall floor at Khirbat al-Mafjar. If we can call these mosaics at Khirbat al-Mafjar an effort to represent textiles or perhaps allusions to textiles, they exhibit a different mode of presence than what was seen in the frescos of Qusayr ʿAmra. There, the textile representations mirrored the textile-rich courtly gatherings at the bath house. At Khirbat al-Mafjar, the mosaic textile “representations” act as supplements for actual textiles that would have occupied the same space. This is likely, considering what was seen of Umayyad courtly space from the Qusayr ʿAmra frescos, that the reception hall at Khirbat al-Mafjar would also have been adorned by an array of actual textiles. The visual relation between the real and the represented textiles would have been one of aesthetic reverberation. Here two worlds blend; one of real textiles and one of their mosaic representations, all within the same visual reality each amplifying and echoing the visual presence of the other.21 This aesthetic reverberation and visual intensity are echoed in the location of the liongazelle mosaic on the rear elevated floor of a small “diwan,” or reception chamber directly attached to the larger hall. The space is an intimate and restrictive one, only able to hold a handful of occupants, and once carried an extraordinary visual richness achieved by floor mosaics, ornate stucco revetment (only some of which remains in situ), and figural

FIGURE 7.6

Top-down view of the bathhouse diwan, Khirbat al-Mafjar, mid eighth century, Jericho, West Bank. Sean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar.

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sculpture (Figure 7.6). This would originally all have been pigmented, in the form of birds that line the inner drum of a dome since collapsed, and the round sculptural reliefs of senmurvs found in the squinches of the vaulting. A reconstruction of the space by Robert Hamilton, using fragments of sculptural revetment found on site, gives the impression of visual intensity, as a space with no conceits and without restraint.22 The tasseled border that outlines the lion-gazelle mosaic and defines the image field inside as a textile would be visible to anyone seated within the chamber. Doris Behrens-Abouseif has suggested that the textile association gives the image a “sense of intimacy.”23 The border around the image signifies the materiality of the image to be that of a tapestry or carpet. In turn, this aesthetic evocation would then further signify an association with a textile-centric courtly practice. The complexity of this chain of signifiers results in a viewing experience filled with “meaning-play”: the image accretes additional signification by transcending a fixed materiality. In the way that the mosaic compositions in the main reception hall hover between material categories, the lion-gazelle mosaic dwells within a visual realm that transcends its material grounding in mosaic, stucco, and pigment. The result is an image that plays with its own materiality, and in doing so draws the viewer into an artistic world in which material constraints no longer exist. This same phenomenon can be traced across the southern entrance façade of the Mshatta palace (743–44 CE) that stood approximately 50 meters long before its removal from Jordan. The carved limestone façade, approximately 5 meters in height, has two visually distinguishing features: a zig-zag molding that crosses from top to bottom, forming a series of triangles, and a series of polylobed rosettes set within these triangles (see Figure 7.4). The

FIGURE 7.7

Roundels with birds, first triangle on the left side of the façade, Mshatta Façade, 5.07 m × 33 m., carved limestone, 743–44, Museum für Islamische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. Berlin, Germany. Photo: Theodore Van Loan.

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lower triangles on the left half of the façade are occupied by various mythic and real animals. These figures are situated upon the top of the façade’s lower molding, which forms the base sides of each lower triangle. The upper triangles notably lack carving in various places because Mshatta was never completed.24 A close examination of the way in which the figural elements of its visual program are rendered and framed reveals how the designers and makers of the façade invited comparison to textiles, a comparison observed within art historical scholarship on the facade.25 A detail of the lower section of the first triangle on the left side of the façade shows two roundels with frames rendered with pearl borders inhabited by birds (Figure 7.7). This type of pearl-framed inhabited roundel is reminiscent of nearly contemporaneous textile design practices.26 A fragment of an eighth century CE woven silk in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum repeatedly employs a pearled roundel motif to frame a senmurv in a way that invites direct comparison to the Mshatta example (Figure 7.8).27 The same framing technique can also be found on the Marwan tiraz (see Figure 7.5). While there are no animal figures within its composition, the repeated roundels contain a red-colored vine scroll punctuated with gold-colored spheres. The red color scheme of the textile, also a Sasanian royal color, is present upon one of the in situ sculptural fragments, a half-rosette, at the Mshatta palace.28 The practice of pairing various animals within the triangular compositions on the façade also has a textile-related precedent. Scholars have speculated that these are images of peace and tranquility: “enemy creatures” coinhabiting a paradisical environment.29 A more speculative interpretation argues that they are images from the tales of Kalila wa Dimna (a collection of Aesop-like fables compiled in the eighth century CE).30 While these interpretations must remain inconclusive, this practice of pairing creatures is utilized in Sasanian-period

FIGURE 7.8

The Sēnmurw Silk, Iran/Central Asia, eighth century, woven silk, H. 36.5 cm, Max Width 54.3 cm, The Victoria and Albert Museum, 8579–1863, London. © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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textiles. This is most vividly demonstrated by the kaftan adorning the Shah Khusro II in a carved rock relief panel at Taq-i Bustan (591–628 CE) depicting a boar hunt.31 The lower front portion of the kaftan depicts two senmurvs on either side of its front seam. These details taken collectively would have given a contemporary viewer of the facade the visual impression of a large textile. It is also possible that the appearance of a largescale textile representation straddling both sides of the entrance portal was intended to evoke the role that textiles played within Umayyad courtly practice.32 In the Kitab al-Aghani (a tenth-century CE compilation of Arabic poetry, songs, and biographical anecdotes that includes material attributed to the early Islamic period), there is an account attributed to the Medinan singer Abu Harun ‘Uṭarrad which recounts an audience with Caliph Walid ibn Yazid: his messenger came and I was admitted to him in a bahw (a parlor) with a curtain lowered. Walīd spoke to be from behind the curtain and said: ‘Uṭ arrad! I said: ‘At your service, Commander of the Faithful’ He said: (recounting ‘Uṭ arrad’s past performances) ‘Imagine me and you both now in Medina, and in some meeting or assembly you speak of me and say: “The Commander of the Faithful sent for me and I went into his presence, and he bade me sing and I sang to him and delighted him, and he tore his clothes and I took his spoils and so on.33 Simply put, the curtain visually demarcates the separation of the caliph from his audience. This anecdote, however, introduces an additional sensory element to this interaction: the voice. The voice of the caliph comes to be embodied within the curtain, which acts as a visible extension of his body and authority. This authority, though, goes both ways, as the singer is capable through the magnificence of his voice to cause the caliph to rend his clothing. Textiles become a critical point of interface where the power and authority from political and artistic vantage points become enacted. When it comes to the connection between textiles, architecture, and authority, another important comparison must be made to the Ka’ba and its textile covering, the kiswa, in Mecca. As Simon O’Meara outlines in his monographic study of the Ka’ba, the kiswa in the early Islamic period was replaced annually, biannually, or perhaps three times each year.34 During the Umayyad period, an accumulation of old kiswas were removed and replaced, a practice that continued in various forms for centuries.35 The connection between the offering of the kiswa to the Ka’ba and the ruling power at the time, instilled the idea of a textile offering as a religio-political act. The act of wrapping an architectural space in fabric carried this connotation, one that could very well have carried over to Mshatta. The southern façade straddles the main entryway into the complex. In the completed monument, presumably, the band of bas-relief sculpture would have functioned as a visual threshold through which to access the interior spaces of the palace (see Figure 7.4). One can envision processions of visitors, envoys, and other suppliants seeking to access the spaces inside. The types of power structures undergirding this type of architecture are directly connected to those outlined in ‘Uṭ arrad’s account in the Kitab al-Aghani. In this setting, the presence of a large-scale textile representation makes perfect sense.36 The main carved elements of the façade sit at eye-level in a manner that is both visually imposing, but also at a scale that is relational to the human body. The deeply carved animals and vegetal motifs invite close looking, a looking that instills an intimacy like what was achieved in the diwan

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of Khirbat al-Mafjar. Visitors crossing the threshold, entering the confines “behind the curtain,” would have become active participants within this space of the textile representation. A crucial difference, however, being that the Mshatta façade is located on the exterior of the building, thus inviting a broader public into the makeup of its audience. Although little can be known regarding the demographic make-up of this space, the fact that the façade was located between a more-public and more-private world, only would further reinforce the sense of power a viewer would feel crossing the threshold. The Mshatta façade relates to the supplementation model as posited above for the mosaics of the floor of the Khirbat al-Mafjar reception hall, in that it performs the visual task of a textile at a scale impossible for a real textile to achieve. This is a textile representation that projects royal authority by both its monumental scale and its visual association with textiles used in court ceremony. The various figures that occupy the lower portion of the western side of the façade, including a lion, griffin, simurgh, and others also carry royal associations, but it is unclear whether their meaning is programmatic and in service to a specific narrative, or rather atmospheric; connotative in general terms of royal power. This must remain an ambiguous question given the incomplete nature of the monument. The mode of display created by the carved limestone and direct natural sunlight, creates a visual effect of light and shadow that animates and gives a depth to the visual elements in ways that would also not be possible to achieve on a flat textile surface. Thus, not only does this representation achieve a scale that would be unachievable for a textile, but also contains visual effects namely depth, light, and shadow that are outside the medium’s capabilities. The Mshatta façade exhibits the characteristics of being a textile representation but also transgresses and transcends them. Given this, like what was seen with the mosaic floors at Khirbat al-Mafjar, the term “representation” perhaps might be too strong. At Khirbat al-Mafjar, several of the mosaic compositions exhibited formal characteristics making them questionable textile representations, while here it is primarily the scale and sense of depth achieved that would call for “textile allusion” to be a more appropriate term. The connotations of frivolity and wit that are an integral part of the visual context of the lion-gazelle mosaic at Khirbat al-Mafjar, however, are strikingly absent in this case. Mshatta, in its symmetry, monumentality, and spatial hierarchy, is a profoundly formal and serious building. Textile-related materiality-play during the early Islamic period was by no means a cultural phenomenon confined to settings of courtly leisure. In the Sahīh al-Bukhārī, a third-/ ninth-century compilation of Hadith (accounts related to the Prophet Muhammad), there is an anecdote recalled by the Prophet’s wife ‘A’isha regarding a tapestry.37 The passage reads: The Messenger of God returned from a journey when I had placed a curtain with images over a room of mine. When the Messenger of God saw it, he tore it down and said, ‘The people who will receive the severest punishment on the Day of Resurrection will be those who try to make the like of Allah’s creations!’ So we turned [the curtain] into one or two cushions.38 The main purpose of this hadith is to elucidate a position regarding the propriety of representational images of living beings. A curtain with figural images is used to create a soft barrier between two rooms, much like the account of the curtain between the caliph and the singer in the Kitab al-Aghani. The Prophet finds the likenesses on display in that fashion to be unacceptable, and the textile is transformed into cushions. It is thus through

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the transformation of a textile where the material is preserved, and the form altered, that converts the unacceptable to the permissible. This hadith demonstrates that in the early Islamic period, textiles and their visual transformation were a part of wider cultural and religious discourses, and not tightly related to the courtly arts. This hadith also states something profound about the materiality of textiles that likewise applies to the Mshatta façade: that there is no fixity between material and form. The tapestry does not have to be destroyed, only transformed into a different type of object to make it permissible. The materiality of the textile is rendered irrelevant, as it is only its form that must undergo transformation. Similarly, the Mshatta façade displays the visual attributes of a large textile, but also transcends them, and calls into question its material allusion as a heuristic category. This is the condition of postmateriality. When one material is used to visually evoke another, the fixity of that material to its physical appearance dissipates. While a viewer would always understand that they are looking at one medium rendered in another, the relationship between the visual character of the given form and its medium becomes unstable. Appearance becomes free-floating, emancipated from its media and from its anchor in the material world. The textile representation becomes an abstraction. In a visual environment where medium ceases to matter, images are emancipated from their material grounds. Each of the examples considered in this essay engages with the emancipated status of the textile representation in different ways. The tasseled border around the lion-gazelle mosaic is not a neutral frame but one that frees the composition from its visually rich surroundings (see Figure 7.1). It is a subtle artistic gesture that projects the image into a string of associative meanings that include material, symbolic, and semiotic orders. At Qusayr ʿAmra, the carefully rendered textiles induce close looking and visual absorption (see Figure 7.2). The viewer is brought into the picture through this absorption and through the framing of the open tent, creating a fictive space shared by the viewers and the inhabitants of the painting. The visual blending of reality and representation is also key to understanding the “mosaic carpets” at the Khirbat al-Mafjar reception hall (see Figure 7.3), a place where mosaics and textiles would have been given equal visual weight. The Mshatta façade likewise plays with the established categories of materiality to create an immersive sculptural composition that supersedes the aesthetic potential of real textiles (see Figure 7.4). The architectural spaces in which these textile representations are situated activate distinct perceptual relationships with the viewer. They provide the viewer guidance with which to activate their visual expectations and make the textile representations and their architectural contexts relatable to prior visual experience. From these cases, one can understand that an effort was made in the Umayyad period to create visual experiences that were no longer anchored to a concrete materiality, but efforted to transgress and transcend it. The use of textile representations became one of the central means by which this aesthetic goal was accomplished.

Notes Support for the publication of this article was provided by the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment at Washington and Lee University. 1 Identified as a textile by Robert Hamilton, Khirbat Al Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan ­Valley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 337–38; Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (Geneva: Skira, 1962), 38; Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “The Lion-Gazelle Mosaic at Khirbat al-Mafjar,”

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2 3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Muqarnas 14 (1997):16; and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, “A Taste for Textiles,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019): 73. See Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 36–40. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 38–39. Robert Hillenbrand also connects the lion motif as one connected to caliphal power and also the practice of hunting. See Robert Hillenbrand, “Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East Versus West at Mshatta,” in Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture: in Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. Abbas Daneshvari (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1981), 16. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 38. Also see Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar, fig. 26. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 38. Robert Hamilton in his contextual study of Khirbat al-Mafjar, Walid and his Friends, makes an equally off-handed remark regarding the materiality of the liongazelle composition, calling it a “mosaic carpet.” See Robert Hamilton, Walid and His Friends: An Umayyad Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41. A similar description is featured in his monographic descriptive analysis. See Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar, 337–38. Much art historical scholarship on textiles and textile representations within Umayyad architecture focuses almost exclusively on the decorative aspect of these compositions. See Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, ed. Priscilla Soucek (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 25; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 141; Dospěl Williams, “Taste for Textiles,” 409–11,427–28. For a discussion of shared motifs between Umayyad textiles and other media, see Avinoam Shalem, “The Nation Has Put on Garments of Blood,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019): 400–1. Recent comprehensive studies of Qusayr ʿAmra include: Claude Vibert-Guigue and Ghazi Bisheh, Les peintures de Qusayr ʿAmra: Un bain omeyyade dans la Bâdiya jordanienne (Amman: Institut Français d’Archéologie du Proche-Orient, 2007) and Garth Fowden, Quṣayr ʿAmra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). For a pre-restoration sketch of this wall segment see Vibert-Guigue and Bisheh, Les Peintures, Pl. 26. Fowden, Qusayr ʿAmra, 180–81. The inscription above the peacock on the right side reads NIKH, the Greek for ‘victory.’ See Fowden, Qusayr ʿAmra, 175. The inscription above the left peacock is much more incomplete, and it has been suggested that it reads XAPIC, the Greek for ‘grace,’ although this has been debated. See Fowden, Qusayr ʿAmra, 193–95. The patronage can be established by virtue of a recently discovered inscription located above the image of the reclining prince. For an extended discussion of this inscription and its context ̣ ʿAmra,” see: Frédéric Imbert, “Le prince al-Walid et son bain: itinéraires épigraphiques à Qusayr Bulletin d’études orientales 64 (2016): 321–63. For additional information regarding the relative scarcity of early Islamic textiles, and the difficulty in dating and classification, see Dospěl Williams, “Taste for Textiles,” 411–21. For additional scholarship, a digital reconstruction, and further analysis of the so-called Marwan Tiraz, see Helen Evans and Brandie Ratliff, Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition 7th-9th Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), catalog number 173A-C, 238 -240. Also see Louise Mackie, Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th-21st Century (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015), 52–55. See Dospěl Williams, “Taste for Textiles,” 411–21 and Shalem, “Nation,” 389–408. These are meticulously described in Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar, 327–42. Grabar, Mediation, 141. Dospěl Williams, “Taste for Textiles,” 427. See Hana Taragan, “Textiles in Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Case of the Umayyad Palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar,” Al-Masaq 32, no. 2 (2020): 140–55. For a general explication of the term “allusion” as utilized in this study, see Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. There is precedent for this type of representational practice in Umayyad architecture. These mosaics share something in common with the jeweled motifs on the spandrels of the inner face of the Dome of the Rock’s (691 CE) inner arcade. Those motifs, in echoing the appearance of the

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22 23 24

25

26

27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

crowns and jewels once suspended by chains under the dome, amplify the appearance of these objects in the same way that these mosaics amplify whatever real textiles that existed within the reception hall. On the textual accounts related to these motifs see Nasser Rabbat, “The Dome of the Rock Revisited: Some Remarks on al-Wasiti’s Accounts,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 71–73. The sculptural fragments, now in the collection of the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in occupied East Jerusalem, also display extensive pigmentation, further enhancing the visual spectacle. For a thorough description of this space, see Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar, 63–67. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “The Lion-Gazelle Mosaic at Khirbat al-Mafjar,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 16. For an extensive and recent archaeological study of Mshatta, as well as a projected reconstruction of the monument, as it is thought to have been planned, see Barbara Perlich, Johannes Cramer, and Günther Schauerte, eds., Qasr al-Mschatta: Ein frühislamischer Palast in Jordanien und Berlin (Petersburg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016). Katharina Meinecke compares the façade to a textile in her analysis, calling it a “tapestry” that is “draped on the façade.” This observation, which does not play a major role in her larger argument about the façade’s relation to visual discourses of empire, is here taken in a more literal way, where the implications for this observation are directly addressed. See Katharina Meinecke, “The Encyclopaedic Illustration of a New Empire: Graeco-Roman-Byzantine and Sasanian Models on the Façade of Qasr al-Mshatta,” in Using Images in Late Antiquity, eds. Stine Birk, Toels Myrup Kirstensen, and Birte Poulson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 285 and 298. Talgam has noted also a comparison of the façade to carved stucco, and has made note of the fact that during the Umayyad period the distinction between carved stucco and carved limestone was a blurred one. This observation speaks further to the idea of the façade as being operational between media. See Rina Talgam, The Stylistic Origins of Umayyad Sculpture and Architectural Decoration (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), 29–30. The pearl-bordered roundel is also a feature of Sasanian textiles. See Carol Bier, “Sasanian ­Textiles,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, ed. Daniel Potts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4; Heleanor Feltham, “Lions, Silks and Silver: The Influence of Sasanian Persia,” Sino-Platonic Papers 26 (August 2010): 15–16; Matthew Canepa, “Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction Among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran, and SuiTang China,” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): note 108, 152. For further analysis of this kaftan see Mackie, Symbols of Power, 59–60. For discussion of the Sasanian associations with red, see Mackie, Symbols of Power, 55. The majority, if not all the examples of Umayyad textiles discussed by Dospěl Williams and Shalem make extensive use of red pigments. The rosette with preserved pigmentation is discussed in Perlich et al., Qasr al-Mschatta, 147. See Claus-Peter Haase, “Ancient Creatures and New Ornaments: Studying the Program of the Mshatta Façade in Berlin,” in Synergies in Visual Culture - Bildkulturen im Dialog, eds. Annette Hoffmann, Manuela de Giorgi, and Nicola Suthor (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), 180–81. Ibid. See Mackie, Symbols of Power, 50; for further information on the significance of this rock relief for the study of Sasanian textiles, see Bier, “Textiles,” 119–25. This practice of visually obscuring the Caliph or prince from the wider courtly entourage which was undoubtedly at play with the diwan room at the Khirbat al-Mafjar bathhouse is discussed in relation to wider early Islamic courtly practices in Avinoam Shalem, “Manipulations of Seeing and Visual Strategies in the Audience Halls of the Early Islamic Period Preliminary Notes,” in Visualisierungen von Herrschaft, Byzas 5, ed. Franz Alto Bauer (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları/German Archaeological Institute, 2006), 213–32. Translation, Hamilton, Walid, 37. Abū’l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, vol. 3 (Cairo: Dār al-Sha’b, 1905), 96. A similar scene is cited in Robert Hillenbrand, “La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria: The Evidence of Later Umayyad Palaces,” Art History 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 10. Simon O’Meara, The Kaʿba Orientations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 132. Ibid. The incorporation of textiles into courtly ceremonial practice is of course a widely documented practice, both in Byzantine and Sasanian court ceremonial practice as well in later textual sources regarding the Umayyad court as well as during Abbasid period: Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 2009), 140–43 and 145–47; Gülru Necipoğlu, “An Outline of Shifting Paradigms in the Palatial Architecture of the Pre-Modern Islamic World,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 6; Eva Hoffmann, “Between East and West: The Wall Paintings of Samarra and the Construction of Abbasid Princely Culture,” 123. Jamal Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: 37 Harvard University Press, 2012), 9–13. This hadith is also discussed by Dospěl Williams, but only as evidence for the prevalence of textiles in early Islamic visual culture. Dospěl Williams, “Taste for Textiles,” 412. 38 Translation after Jamal Elias, see Elias, Aisha, 9, and Sahīh al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-libās, 5610; 7:72:838.

Bibliography Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. “The Lion-Gazelle Mosaic at Khirbat al-Mafjar.” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 11–18. Bier, Carol. “Sasanian Textiles.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (online edition), edited by Daniel Potts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Accessed 28 June 2018. http://w w w.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733309.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780199733309-e-049?rskey=9teITn&result=1. Canepa, Matthew. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Canepa, Matthew. “Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction Among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran, and Sui-Tang China.” Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 121–52. Dospěl Williams, Elizabeth. “A Taste for Textiles.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019): 409–32. Elias, Jamal. Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Ettinghausen, Richard. Arab Painting. Geneva: Skira, 1962. Evans, Helen and Brandie Ratliff, eds. Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition 7th-9th Century. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Feltham, Heleanor. “Lions, Silks and Silver: The Influence of Sasanian Persia.” Sino-Platonic Papers 206 (August 2010): 1–51. Fowden, Garth, Qu ṣayr ʿAmra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Golombek, Lisa. “The Draped Universe of Islam.” In Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, edited by Priscilla Soucek, 25–50. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Grabar, Oleg. The Mediation of Ornament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Graves, Margaret. Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Haase, Claus-Peter. “Ancient Creatures and New Ornaments: Studying the Program of the Mshatta Façade in Berlin.” In Synergies in Visual Culture - Bildkulturen im Dialog, edited by Annette Hoffmann, Manuela de Giorgi, and Nicola Suthor, 167–83. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. Hamilton, Robert. Khirbat Al Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan Valley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Hamilton, Robert. Walid and His Friends: An Umayyad Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hillenbrand, Robert. “Islamic Art at the Crossroads: East Versus West at Mshatta.” In Essays in Islamic Art and Architecture: In Honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, edited by Abbas Daneshvari, 63–86. Malibu: Undena Publications, 1981. Hillenbrand, Robert. “La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria: The Evidence of Later Umayyad Palaces.” Art History 5, no. 1 (March 1982): 1–35.

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Hoffman, Eva. “Between East and West: The Wall Paintings of Samarra and the Construction of Abbasid Princely Culture.” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 107–32. ̄ et son bain: itinéraires épigraphiques à Qusayr ̣ ʿAmra.” Bulletin Imbert, Frédéric. “Le prince al-Walid d’études orientales 64 (2016): 321–63. al-Iṣfahānī, Abū’l-Faraj. Kitāb al-Aghānī. Cairo: Dār al-Sha’b, 1905. Mackie, Louise. Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th-21st Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015. Meinecke, Katharina. “The Encyclopaedic Illustration of a New Empire: Graeco-Roman-Byzantine and Sasanian Models on the Façade of Qasr al-Mshatta.” In Using Images in Late Antiquity, edited by Stine Birk, Toels Myrup Kirstensen, and Birte Poulson, 283–300. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “An Outline of Shifting Paradigms in the Palatial Architecture of the Pre-Modern Islamic World.” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 3–24. O’Meara, Simon. The Kaʿba Orientations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Perlich, Barbara, Johannes Cramer, and Günther Schauerte, eds. Qasr al-Mschatta: Ein frühislamischer Palast in Jordanien und Berlin. Petersburg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016. Rabbat, Nasser. “The Dome of the Rock Revisited: Some Remarks on al-Wasiti’s Accounts.” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 66–75. Shalem, Avinoam. “Manipulations of Seeing and Visual Strategies in the Audience Halls of the Early Islamic Period Preliminary Notes.” In Visualisierungen von Herrschaft, Byzas 5, edited by Franz Alto Bauer, 213–32. Istanbul: Ege Yayınları/German Archaeological Institute, 2006. Shalem, Avinoam. “The Nation Has Put on Garments of Blood.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019): 389–408. Talgam, Rina. The Stylistic Origins of Umayyad Sculpture and Architectural Decoration. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004. Taragan, Hana. “Textiles in Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Case of the Umayyad Palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar.” Al-Masaq 32, no. 2 (2020): 140–55. Vibert-Guigue, Claude and Ghazi Bisheh. Les peintures de Qusayr ʿAmra: Un bain omeyyade dans la Bâdiya jordanienne. Amman: Institut Français d’Archéologie du Proche-Orient, 2007.

8 THE TEXTILITY OF THE ALHAMBRA Olga Bush

From the Architectonic to the Textilic I begin this study of the textility of the Alhambra, the palatial city erected by the Nasrid dynasty (1237–1492) in Granada, Spain with the genealogy of the theoretical framework. The multifaceted social anthropologist Tim Ingold is going kite-flying and he invites his students to join him. The day’s lesson is what Ingold calls, “the textility of making,” in an expression borrowed from Victoria Mitchell.1 He begins with the making: “Using fabric, matchstick bamboo, ribbon, tape, glue and twine, and working indoors on tables, we each made a kite. It seemed that we were assembling an object.”2 But that surmise is precisely wrong. Ingold would teach that “What we thought to be an object was revealed as what I would call a thing.”3 Where we are accustomed to view making architectonically as a sequence that leads from a design, to a plan, to a selection of building materials to the execution, which results in the object, Ingold would have his students grasp an alternative textilic process leading from materials—one might even say materiality—to “fabrication” (Mitchell’s term),4 to thing, understood by Martin Heidegger, and Ingold in turn, as gathering: “The thing things. Thinging gathers.”5 Until Ingold’s students go outside into the open, they will be deceived by what they see, in fact, by their reliance on seeing. For they will be in the habit of thinking of themselves as Cartesian subjects, he avers, who see a world of objects outside themselves from the static perspective of a virtual, interior space that we call mind. Ingold, in his steadily increasing concern for environmental understanding, presents perception instead as a multisensory exploration in the midst of the world, undertaken through movement—an exploration that generates (that makes) a changing life-world out of materials at hand. The textilic is his name for making as a process of ongoing becoming, modeled on the fabrication of textiles, that is logically and ontologically prior to architectonic design and that continues the life of the work of art in the experience of its beholder or user long after the art object as product is completed. Ingold’s discussion of the kite in the classroom extends to the architecture of the room itself, when conceived as the realization of a prior intent, rather than the gathering place for

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-12

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ongoing activity, corresponding to Heidegger’s distinction between building and dwelling, respectively.6 For Ingold, the kite springs to life in the wind, not least because the flight path may be guided, but not planned. Nor can the subject-object dualism be recuperated by transferring agency to the kite, for it does not stay aloft by its own action. The living kite, rather, is a thing in the sense that “the very ‘thinginess’ of the kite lies in the way it gathers the wind into its fabric and, in its swooping, describes an ongoing ‘line of flight.’” 7 Ingold correlates Heidegger’s gathering here with the flow theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, from whom he takes the term “line of flight.”8 Ingold will later write, “the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of the material that bring the work into being…”9 He speaks of forces of, not on, the material—not wind on kite, but the wind-and-kite (force-and-material) gathered as thing. Thus, Ingold and Mike Anusas explain that “by making lines of matter and energy flow directly perceptible, in a weave of interstitial relations linking proximal and distal environments, the material qualities of the weave, rather than its outward appearance, would become the focus of aesthetic attention.”10 For Ingold, this “consideration of matter and energy as lines” constitutes the “textilic way.”11 It is well to note, however, that in theorizing the “desiring machine,” Deleuze and Guattari speak not only of flow, but also its stoppage. They define the machine as “a system of interruptions or breaks […] related to a continual material flow (hyle) that it cuts into.”12 So too the kite-flying machine: the air flows and the kite flies, but it is most particularly the pliability of the fabric, stretched to a point of tension, that allows for the gathering of wind as a regulated cut in the airflow. Ingold further argues for a correspondence between kite and flyer such that “Like the kite’s line of flight, so the life-trajectory of the flyer follows a course orthogonal to any line we might draw connecting the kite as (quasi-)object with the flyer as (quasi-) subject.”13 This is to construe kite and flyer in parallel movements, each in its own element (air and earth), held together precisely by the line drawn between them, namely, the kite string. As with the wind-and-kite machine, the key to the larger kite-and-flyer machine is the ongoing process of tension embodied in the textile string. Were it not so, the fabric might well be buffeted about in the air, but it would not be a kite, nor would merely seeing it carried off comprise kite-flying. More so than Ingold, Mitchell emphasizes the materiality of textiles in two senses. First, focusing on spinning, she argues that the textilic is predominantly haptic, rather than optic. So, where she points to the familiar etymological relation between textile, text, and the techne of architecture, she also insists on the relation between textile and tactile in the embodied experience of making. Ingold extends this textilic embodiment to the experience of the user in the ongoing “vitality of the work of art,” asserting that it is “precisely because no work is ever truly ‘finished’ (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.”14 The “tombstone” information on a museum label marks art as an object for the viewer to look at, whereas the textilic thing gathers the user into an embodied process, “join[ing] the artist as a fellow traveler, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product.”15 Second, Mitchell remarks that the “line drawn out as matter through the action of spinning, serves as a medium through which sight and space is measured, drawn and ‘framed.’”16 Indeed, she argues that the straight line of architectonics was first made, perhaps even first known in ancient Egypt and earlier, from taut thread. The priority of the textilic was reversed in the Renaissance. Citing Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) as the turning point

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at which, in Ingold’s words, “the textility of building gave way to an architectonic of pure form,” both Mitchell and Ingold also note the corresponding gendered elevation of architecture as men’s technology and the debasement of the textility as women’s making.17 Mitchell and Ingold would restore a more fundamental textility, obscured by the modern predominance of architectonic design, much as Heidegger would disclose dwelling as the forgotten foundation of building. Indeed, what we call modernity may be none other than just that predominance that has arisen from just that forgetting. I will follow Mitchell and Ingold back to a moment prior to the architectonic turn to bring their theoretical concerns to bear on the Alhambra as a textilic dwelling rather than an architectonic building. Elaborating on textility as “a practice which informs thought”18 brings to the fore the ongoing processes by which the Alhambra, as a “living work of art,” constituted an environmental artefact (to use a term that came to be more prevalent in Ingold’s theoretical idiom) in the embodied experience of the beholders.19 Lisa Golombek spoke memorably of “the draped universe of Islam,” to convey the ubiquity and importance of textiles in the Islamic world, which offers a broad material basis for the theoretical discussion of textility in the Islamic context.20 It will not be possible in this short essay to offer a comprehensive reconstruction of a medieval Islamic textilic worldview. Some sense of its reach may be suggested, however, by brief reference to the discussions of craft in the encyclopedic philosophical work, Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ or the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, who lived and worked in the tenth century in Baghdad, the capital of the ‘Abbasid caliphate. The Epistles circulated in al-Andalus as early as the 920s,21 and their enduring influence is attested in both Jewish and Islamic circles in Iberia at least as late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.22 Three observations may serve to sketch the place of textility in their view of making. First, and most simply, the Brethren maintain the high standing of textiles in their hierarchy of crafts, in which “land-plowing, tailoring, and building” (as in the triad of Latinate world of agricultura, vestiaria, and architectura) are considered primary, while other crafts were seen as subordinate.23 Second, the Brethren adopt the hylomorphic physics of Aristotle— the imposition of form, conceived in the mind, upon formless matter—which Ingold is at pains to overturn. However, they also convey the much earlier, pre-Socratic conception of the things of the world that “are varied […] according to their composition from the four elements, which are fire, air, water and earth, and following the proportion of the magnitudes of their parts and of their powers with regard to each other.”24 The immediate referent here is the world of living things, namely plants and animals, but they later add man-made artefacts. In either case, the four elements are understood ontologically by the Brethren to be at once force and matter. Where Ingold urges, with respect to kite flying, for instance, that “the flow of air—the wind (anemos), the very breath of life—is the very antithesis of embodied agency,”25 his objection is that the embodied agent would be indistinguishable from the Cartesian subject (or, in the case of the wind that has no intentionality, the occupant of a subject position). And yet, when he speaks in the same passage of “a correspondence between the animate movements of the flyer and the currents of the aerial medium in which he or she is immersed,”26 he falls back into the dualism he seeks to contest, now cast as the distinction between “animate movement” and “current,” held together by the thread of a metaphor, “the very breath of life.” For the Brethren, there would be no need to construct the antithesis to begin with, since the element of the air is at once flowing matter and embodied force; and this would be no less the case for the kite and flyer, both composed (or gatherings) of the living matter-force of the same basic elements.

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Finally, the Brethren represent what Ingold calls correspondence, above all, as the relationship of macrocosm to microcosm, which they observe, for instance, in the very process of making. They describe the activity of the artisan as a set of seven corporeal movements—one rotational and six rectilinear—corresponding to the seven movements of the celestial spheres. 27 The mirror image of cosmological movements in artisanal work might be understood as parallel courses, “orthogonal to any line we might draw connecting” the heavenly and earthly spheres, as Ingold says of kite and flyer. But not for the Brethren, whose Neo-Platonic understanding of emanation makes the resemblance of micro- to macrocosm more than a metaphor. The generative process of emanation draws the kite-string between kite and flyer, as it were. When the Brethren refer to the artisan’s body as an “instrument,” whose powers and whose matter are extended by the prostheses of “the hatchet of the carpenter, the hammer of the blacksmith, the needle of the tailor, the pen of the writer,” they conceive of the maker, or more precisely the animate movements of the maker, as the line of conveyance between the forces inherent in their materials and the life-forces of the cosmos.28 In the textility of making, then, the artisan is to be understood less as impressing form upon inert matter, and more as drawing forth force from material. In this sense, the Brethren articulate a worldview that could underwrite the suggestion of Ingold and Anusas, to consider form as textilic, “the material world as comprising energetic lines, and design as a practice of enriching the weaves that bind people and their environments.”29 In what follows, I will first develop an inter-medial understanding of the correspondence between textility and architecture in the Alhambra, on the way to proposing that the design is an environmental artefact, metaphorically a weave, but quite literally a set of energetic lines channeling flows that connect people and their environment.

Textile Architecture I have previously spoken in favor of a larger role for textiles in reframing the Alhambra as a living environment.30 The first textilic aspect is to be found in the oft-remarked visual resemblance between Nasrid textiles and architectural decoration. Although no extant Nasrid textile has ever been securely identified as having been present in or produced for any specific precinct of the Alhambra, that actual resemblance provides the basis for recourse to the medieval Islamic optical theory of harmony, such as articulated by Ibn al-Haytham, to pursue the virtual relationship between extant textiles and standing architecture, as I have proposed, for instance, in the study of the Cuarto Dorado.31 Once the precincts of the Alhambra are reconstructed as furnished dwellings rather than empty architectural structures, the next step is to recognize that the portability of textiles provided dynamism to the apparently static spaces. Much as Ingold suggested, users would have constantly transformed architecture by bringing textiles (e.g., cushions and curtains) to outfit a given space for different occasions. More specifically, portable textiles would have regulated movement and sightlines, which is to say, textiles would have been able to take on architectural functions in the strictest sense, becoming what I have called textile architecture. I would now revise my position. I had previously distinguished transient textile architecture from the permanent architecture of the Alhambra,32 but the theory of the textilic makes a conception more like kite-and-wind available. Textiles and architecture taken together— and other inter-medial gatherings of forces and matter—make the Alhambra as a whole into

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a living environment. That is to say, rather than study the building(s) of the Alhambra, one may speak more cogently of the textility of its making. That argument may be articulated by reference to the Nasrid dynastic ceremonial tent— the most elaborate of textiles—which was erected on the grounds of the Alhambra in December of 1362 on the occasion of the mawlid al-nabī, that is the celebration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. According to Nasrid vizier Ibn al-Khatīb, who attended the mawlid, the tent was of enormous dimensions, requiring experts of formidable engineering skills to set it up and, once standing, it was ample enough to accommodate “a great mobilized army.”33 Depictions of royal tents, especially those standing on palatial grounds for court celebrations, may be found in manuscript paintings from the courts of the Ilkhanids, Timurids, Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals,34 as corroborating, if circumstantial, evidence of the scale of the Nasrid tent. One may speak here straightforwardly of textile architecture: a standing structure made of textile materials stretched taut over wooden poles to provide shelter, thus fulfilling the fundamental architectonic function of separating an interior space from an exterior environment. The materiality of textiles, of course, namely the tensile properties, made possible the erection and stability of so large a structure without benefit of foundations or bearing walls. It is also the materiality of textiles—now the light weight relative to surface area as well as the pliability—that made it possible to disassemble and store the large structure, allowing for mobility and reuse. The point is not so much to underline that a tent is impermanent in comparison to the primarily brickwork architecture of the surrounding buildings, but rather that the tent served to redefine the built environment by the use of textiles. The erection of the Nasrid royal tent is thus a primary example of the becoming of the Alhambra as a whole; that is, the entire palatial complex was a site of unfinished, everchanging process of which the experience of its beholders was a constructive element. Since no vestige of the Nasrid royal tent has been identified, certain comparative examples need be adduced before returning to Ibn al-Khatīb’s description of the elaborate decoration of the tent at the mawlid in the Alhambra. One finds a relevant example in a type of large-scale textile decorated with a blind arcade as a main motif, which has a long artistic trajectory in textile arts. A few preserved historical textiles decorated with a blind arcade and made as tent panels and wall hangings are of special interest. Eleven panels of an Ilkhanid tent, each measuring 222 cm × 61 cm, and woven in gold-brocaded silk—most likely, a royal commission—dated to the late thirteenth-early fourteenth century, is possibly the earliest of such examples.35 Closer to extant Nasrid silks in technique, design and color scheme, however, is a textile measuring 187 cm × 561 cm, woven in one length in lampas technique in silk of vivid colors, whose main field is embellished with a blind arcade—with a hanging mosque lamp under some of the arches—and with varied geometric motifs. It belongs to a group of nine large-scale textiles of this type crafted in Morocco, dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.36 Similar to the Ilkhanid panels, this textile would have decorated the interior of either a tent or of a hall, and it is often referred to as a wall-hanging. The latter example runs the risk of anachronism, of course, when offered in comparison to the Nasrid tent (in absentia), but Nasrid craftsmen emigrated to North Africa, especially after the Christian conquest of their kingdom in al-Andalus was completed in 1492. Nasrid artistic traditions, therefore, were widely employed in the architecture and crafts of the Marinids (1244–1465) and of their successors in present-day Morocco. Both examples are cited here to reconsider the mimesis of architecture in textile decoration in the blind

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arcade motif. The inter-medial relation is made all the more vivid by the term hayti, used to designate a type of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Moroccan textile wall-hanging, executed in appliquéd technique (rather than woven in silk, as in the previous example), depicting a blind arcade in one color on a solid background in a contrasting color. These hayti have been employed to adorn the interiors of the royal tents on state occasions (Figure 8.1). The Arabic noun hayti is related to the verb hayyata, which means “to build a wall.” Hence, hayti bespeaks an inter-medial relation between textiles and architecture embedded in the language of the culture. The blind arcade motif, then, is a mimetic resemblance that conveys that the hayti are like, but are not architectural arcades. And yet at the same time, they remind the viewer that the wall-hangings are walls, and not only metaphorically.37 Ibn al-Khatīb’s description of the panels of the Nasrid royal tent at the mawlid portrays another complex inter-medial relation, here between textiles and the art of garden cultivation, set off against the natural beauty of a meadow: Embroidered upon them were leaves of more varied colors and subtle details than those displayed by valley meadows well-watered by the loosening of the strings of the dark clouds’ water-skins, when the clouds incline tenderly over them, heavy with rain, more even than those displayed by gorgeously arranged gardens embellished by puddles and inlets, all turned into brocades by the rain clouds.38

FIGURE 8.1

Sultan Moulay Youssef, surrounded by state officials in his imperial tent during the Fez commercial fair, 1916. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, Fonds Iconographique Maroc, série E, carton 51, “Fonds de la Sécurité” (artwork in the public domain; Photo: Ashley V. Miller, courtesy of Ashley V. Miller).

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A preserved fragment of a Nasrid silk textile might serve as an example of similar artistry (Figure 8.2). Most simply, the embroidery mimetically reproduces foliage. But Ibn al-Khatīb suggests that the tent is like a garden because the garden is already textilic. The rain is gathered in the water-skin clouds, like the wind in the kite, and then the garden is arranged, in turn, to gather the rain. The puddles and inlets do not simply reproduce the clouds, however, but, beyond mimesis, they transform the water-skins into brocade. The tent corresponds to the garden as a gathering place, a thing and not an object. The embroidery is the textilic line connecting the life-world of the tent and that of the garden. Textile metaphors are frequent in the poetic inscriptions in the Alhambra, for example, Ibn Zamrak’s verses inscribed in, and in praise of, the Hall of Two Sisters: “With what vestments of brocade you honoured it!/They make one forget the textiles of Yemen.”39 But there are other poetic vehicles for textilic correspondences. One finds, for instance, in the same parietal inscription: “I am a garden which is adorned with beauty” (Figure 8.3). The trope by which the wall speaks for itself in the first person, thereby giving a figurative voice to the architecture, is prosopopeia. As I have discussed elsewhere, the speaking I implies a you, staging a dialogical relationship between an animated architecture and the beholder who pauses to read the inscription.40 Prosopopeia is a chief characteristic of the poetry in the Alhambra, but, more generally, all of the poetic inscriptions serve to arrest

FIGURE 8.2

Nasrid silk textile, fragment, Granada, fifteenth century, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.167–1929. © The Victoria and Albert Museum.

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FIGURE 8.3

Hall of Two Sisters, looking north, with the Mirador de Lindaraja in the background, Palace of the Lions, Alhambra. Photo: Olga Bush.

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the movement of the beholder, since they required more concentrated reading than did the short, much-repeated dynastic motto or even the Qur’anic verses that would have been known by heart. Hence, recalling the contrast that Ingold makes between the iterative repetition of ever the same motion in mechanical production and rhythmic “itineration” in the textility of making,41 the poetic epigraphy functions to interpose a temporary interruption or cut in the flow of bodies through architectural space. The tropes of the poetic inscriptions underscore the reciprocal intermediality in which the Nasrid beholder was instructed to come to understand architecture and textiles in terms of one another. In this light, the decoration of the interior of the Moroccan royal tent with panels decorated with the blind arcade motif, discussed above, amounts to a visual prosopopeia, as if proclaiming, “I am a courtyard”—not simply that the tent was like a courtyard, but rather that it is a functional extension of the courtyard (see Figure 8.1). And the dialogue of materials, moreover, is enacted in the dialogue between the Alhambra and its Nasrid beholders as well, staged explicitly by prosopopeia as the conversation of an animated, speaking I and a reading you in interrupted movement. In the textilty of its making, poetic inscriptions play the role of the kite string, the connecting thread in the Alhambrabeholding machine. A further remark by Ibn al-Khatīb locates the processes of poetic figuration in the very materiality of the tent. The tent panels did not construct a continuous enclosure, but rather were tied together, leaving openings in the sides of the tent. Far from a defect best dissimulated, these interstices were made more prominent by separate textile strips hung precisely so that they would flutter in the wind like “potent dragons,” according to Ibn al-Khatīb’s description, making visible the already palpable airflow. They were, then, kites, and by extension, so was the whole textile tent, whipped by the wind atop the Sabīka hill where the Alhambra is situated, but anchored to the earth by ropes. Drawing out the theoretical implications for the textility of making from the material labor of spinning, Mitchell coins the inter-medial metaphor of “textile hinge,” of which Ibn al-Khatīb’s flapping dragons are an instance: Tracing and articulating the action without words of the spinner leads to speculations about the substance that is formed: is the substance the thread that is wound onto the spool, or is it that which is in formation, the accumulated gene-fiber of the actions that describe a tracing of the reflective measuring of the body’s presence in time and space? I suggest that it offers a measure of the space within which the human drama (dromenon) unfolds. It is a textile hinge between prosthetic extension and the built environment, a textile-text of an interior-exterior space which is articulated in the first instance as fiber.42 In the human drama, the silent spinners become the textile-text, their spinning, more than the thread itself, the line connecting the stuff of matter to the measured, that is ordered or made space of human habitation. So, like the artisan in the understanding of the Brethren, the spinner in her spinning is an instrument, a kite-string. And again, as in the account of the Brethren, the drama unfolds simultaneously on a macrocosmic level. The textile dragons of the Nasrid tent speak without words for the flow that is never fully stopped and therefore for an interior-exterior space that is never fully interior nor fully exterior.

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Textilic Beyond Textiles As Mitchell brings another essay on the subject to a close, she laments that “Spinning is perceived as an anachronism rather than a pre-grammatological tool and as a result, the potential of textiles as a form of spatial drawing, a ‘prefiguring in a linear way,’ is also underestimated, an absent textile trajectory over which to grieve.”43 To recuperate that trajectory, one would proceed beyond the architectural functions of textiles to the textility of making architecture. So even where Mitchell herself, for instance, speaks of an architectonic textile hinge, one might well conceive of hinges as a textilic folding. In sum, while Mitchell and Ingold draw upon the materiality of textiles to theorize a pre-architectonic conception of making, they also both point to a theory of the textilic beyond textiles. The way beyond is through. An example from a group of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury large-scale textiles, executed either as a single rectangular panel or multiple panels sewn together and crafted in appliquéd, pierced technique offers a starting point (Figure 8.4). The overall composition of this group usually consists of a border around its perimeter and a field below the top border, which, in some examples, is made of vegetal and bird motifs in appliqué. In the central area below it, one finds, once again, an arcade, articulated by columns of a vase motif that support arches of flower garlands. The use of cotton in these textiles, the combination of solid and pierced appliqué techniques, and the vivid, contrasting colors have led art historians and curators to suggest North Africa and North India as places of their production.

FIGURE 8.4

Hayti, North Africa(?), late nineteenth-early twentieth century, cotton, cut and appliquéd to baste fiber cloth, 250 cm × 369 cm (98 3/8 in × 145 ¼ in). Former Henri Matisse collection. Private collection, on deposit at the Musée Matisse Nice. Photo: François Fernandez, © Matisse Nice.

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The grid composed of rows of radiating stars executed in pierced appliqué within each arch is enclosed by the arcade. The motif is ubiquitous in window grills carved in stone and stucco in Islamicate architecture, dating back as far as the Great Mosque of Damascus (706–14/15) and the Great Mosque of Cordoba (784–86, 833/52, 961/76, and 987). A simplified octagonal or circular grid was employed in the window grills in Ottoman buildings, like Süleymaniye Mosque (1550–57), Sultan Ahmet Complex (1609–17), and Laleli Mosque (1760–64) in Istanbul. More intricate geometric grids of radiating stars were used in Mughal architecture for carved marble jalis in such outstanding examples as the Tomb of Salim Chisti (1580–81) at Fatehpur Sikri and the Taj Mahal (1632–43) in Agra. Carved window grills with radiating stars are also found in the upper elevation of many interiors in the Alhambra, but no Nasrid pierced textiles have survived (Figure 8.5). Material evidence of the intermediality of the pierced star motif is available, however, in comparing Mughal and post-Mughal jalis carved in stone and corresponding textiles in pierced appliquéd cotton.44

FIGURE 8.5

Hall of the Ambassadors, Palace of the Myrtles, Alhambra. Photo: Olga Bush.

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Like the window grills carved in marble, stucco, and wood, pierced textiles have served at once to obstruct the view of the interior (especially of women in the interior) and to facilitate the view from the interior for those with little access to the world beyond the walls. They also allowed the passage of air, light, sound and even aroma. It is possible to read the inter-medial relationship underwritten by the shared star motif to infer the architectural function of window grills as the basis for their translation to hayti, and, to this effect, one may cite the testimony of Henri Matisse, who visited the Alhambra and the Great Mosque of Cordoba during travels in Spain in 1910, and then collected Moroccan hayti. He not only included depictions of the hayti as colorful, patterned screens in his paintings, but also employed them as window grills in his studio in Nice (see Figure 8.4).45 But following Mitchell’s express call, it is also possible to reverse the perspective. Without recourse to the fruitless argument that the first textile preceded the first window, it is nonetheless fruitful to think in this regard of the materiality of textiles. Whether pierced or not, textiles are made by an interweaving of thread and interstitial space—a gathering of fabric and wind, matter and force, flow and obstruction. And as such, textility offers a conceptual model for the architecture of walls pierced by windows and doors, and indeed, of architectural interiority itself—whether of room, or courtyard, or a plaza within the urban fabric—as interstitial spaces in the regulated flow of elemental matter-forces: air, for instance. The window grills and the windows themselves are textilic, and perhaps more so than the textiles are architectonic. In this light, Ingold voices a corresponding lament for Mitchell’s “absent textile trajectory” in his concerted environmental critique of modern architectural design, which, he argues, suppresses the “textility of interstitial surfaces, woven from the flowlines and circulatory pathways of matter and energy”46 so as to foster the illusion that the built environment is wholly sheltered from rather than part of nature. One might compare Ibn al-Khatīb’s textile dragon strips that deliberately bring into view the machinery of medieval air conditioning, which today we hide as unsightly infrastructure; and the same may be said, Ingold notes, of the flowlines of water and electricity. Ingold goes a step further when he observes that in basketmaking the same grass leaf weaves now inside, now outside the warp elements, such that the interstitial textilic surface is not, strictly speaking, a surface at all.47 The very grammar of the distinction interior-exterior, which is the primordial architectonic figuration, has its pre-grammatological, pre-figuration in textility—and, for Ingold, the dominance of the architectonic in a world under threat of climate change might find its potential saving alternative in the recuperation of the textilic. Our uncurbed consumption of resources, he argues, is fostered by the masking of the lines that connect our material lives to our environment.48 Like other medieval and earlier sites, the Alhambra participated fully in the textility of making. The textilic quality is especially apparent with respect to the element of water, or more precisely, in the gathering of water and air. Firstly, and on the largest scale, the aqueduct bearing water from higher up on the Sabīka hill to the palatial city left the machinery of water flow in plain sight in the courtyards and precincts of the palaces (contrast, for instance, the modern paving over of much of the course of the Darro River at the foot of the hill). Secondly, water was collected in the great reflecting pools in the palaces, most noteworthy among them, the pool on the central north-south axis that occupies nearly all of the Court of the Myrtles in the Palace of Comares. The mimetic function of the pool leaps to the eye, since, when the surface is still, the architectural elevations are redoubled to striking visual effect. But when the air flows over the water, the mimesis is disrupted; one is then reminded that the pool in the interstitial space of the courtyard functions as a machine

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for cooling the air through the evaporation of the water, the cooled air then flowing into the halls and pushing the warmer air out through the window grills. Most of all, the things called fountains gather together and make evident the flow of water in the flow of air. And it is then in the system of fountains in the Palace of the Lions that the textility of the Alhambra may be most apparent (Figure 8.6). At the center of that system stands the famous fountain in the courtyard in which twelve sculpted lions support a large basin, with a jet of water spraying from the basin’s center as well as water flowing from the mouths of the lions. Smaller marble water basins with jets are sunk in the marble pavement in the Hall of Two Sisters and the Hall of the Abencerrajes adjoining the courtyard on the north-south axis, and in the pavilions on the east-west axis of the palace (Figure 8.7). The water basins in the two halls belie the fundamental architectonic division of interior and exterior. Ibn Zamrak’s poetic inscription, cited above, articulates the blurring of that boundary when it says, in the voice of the Hall of Two Sisters itself, “I am a garden.” The prosopopeia guides the beholder from the multi-sensory perception of the elaborately decorated and also water-cooled space to a cognition of the environment as a gathering of life-forces and man-made fabrication, whose paradigm is the garden, by means of the imagination, embodied by poetry.49 To put this otherwise, the Hall of Two Sisters, with its fountain, is not only like a garden—a metaphor—but is a garden that extends from the interstitial open-air courtyard to the interstitial pavilion of the Mirador de Lindaraja, a belvedere pierced by windows, looking out onto a post-Nasrid courtyard below. Originally, this space

FIGURE 8.6

Fountain of the Lions, Palace of the Lions, Alhambra. Photo: Olga Bush.

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FIGURE 8.7

Court of the Lions, Palace of the Lions, Alhambra. Photo: Olga Bush.

was occupied by a real, not metaphoric, garden, where another fountain stood, its marble water basin inscribed with verses.50 Finally, the fountains are more than a set of replicas on different scales in separate spaces, as though those in the pavilions were microcosmic models of the macrocosmic fountain in the courtyard’s center. For, like the kite-and-flyer, they are connected by a textilic line: the

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FIGURE 8.8

Hall of Two Sisters, looking east, with water basin and water channel, Palace of the Lions, Alhambra. Photo: Olga Bush.

channels in which the water flows from fountain to fountain, an embodiment of emanation, a visible, audible, tactile enactment of the ongoing becoming of the living space of the Palace of the Lions. But then, the Fountain of the Lions speaks for itself (Figure 8.8). The verses inscribed on its basin read, in part: “So similar is that which flows to that which does not/ that we cannot say which of the two dis-courses,”51 relating the water metaphorically to white marble with which the courtyard is paved. The building flows, the water speaks, and their dialogue is the textility of making in the Alhambra.

Notes 1 Tim Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 ( January 2010): 91–102; and Victoria Mitchell, “Textiles, Text and Techne,” in Obscure Objects of Desire: Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century, ed. Tanya Harrod (London: Crafts Council, 1998), 324–33. 2 Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” 95. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Victoria Mitchell, “Drawing Threads from Sight to Site,” Textile 4, no. 3 (2006): 340–61. 5 See, Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hjofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975a), 174. 6 See Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hjofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975b), 143–61; and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 172–88. 7 Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” 96.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Dimmig, Ashley. “Fabricating a New Image: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period.” In Islamic Architecture on the Move: Motion and Modernity, Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East Series, edited by Christiane Gruber, 101–34. Bristol: Intellect, 2016. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. On Composition and the Arts: Epistles 6–8. Edited and translated by Nader El-Bizri and Godefroid de Callataÿ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. García Gómez, Emilio. Foco de antigua luz sobre la Alhambra. Desde un texto de Ibn al-Jatib en 1362. Madrid: Publicaciones del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos en Madrid, 1988. Garver, Valerie L. “Sensory Experiences of Low-Status Female Textile Workers in the Carolingian World.” In Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited by Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey, 50–76. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. Golombek, Lisa. “The Draped Universe of Islam.” In Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers from a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, edited by Priscilla Soucek, 25–50. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Graves, Margaret S. Arts of the Allusion. Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hjofstadter, 163–82. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975a. Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hjofstadter, 143–61. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975b. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: ­Routledge, 2000. Ingold, Tim. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (January 2010): 91–102. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011. Ingold, Tim. Making. Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. London, New York: Routledge, 2013. Ingold, Tim. Correspondences. Cambridge: Polity, 2021. Komaroff, Linda and Stefano Carboni, eds. The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. McBreen, Ellen and Helen Burnham, eds. Matisse in the Studio. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2017. Mitchell, Victoria. “Textiles, Text and Techne.” In Obscure Objects of Desire: Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century, edited by Tanya Harrod, 324–33. London: Crafts Council, 1998. Mitchell, Victoria. “Drawing Threads from Sight to Site.” Textile 4, no. 3 (2006): 340–61. Puerta Vílchez, José Miguel. Leer La Alhambra: Guía visual del Monumento a través de sus inscripciones. Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra/Edilux, 2011. Robinson, Cynthia. “Tents of Silk and Trees of Light in the Lands of Najd: The Aural and the Visual at a Mawlid Celebration in the Alhambra.” In Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam, edited by Michael Frishkopf and Federico Spinetti, 199–227. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Rogers, J. Michael. Empire of the Sultans. Ottoman Art from the Khalili Collection. London: PJ Print, 2000.

9 THE TEXTILE FOUNDATIONS OF ANCIENT ANDEAN ARCHITECTURE Andrew James Hamilton

Scholars have long understood that textiles and their constituent fibers were the most important medium of the ancient Andes. Since well over two thousand years ago, societies in this region frequently buried their dead with elaborate trousseaus of exquisitely made garments, often bundled around their bodies. Many of these graves were located in extremely dry deserts along the Pacific Coast where the absence of moisture caused their bodies to mummify and allowed these delicate organic materials to survive to the present in extraordinary condition. The massive quantities of ancient cloth that were preserved in the region are reputedly the longest, continuous, archaeological textile record found anywhere in the world. Extensive studies of these ancient cloths have made clear that the defining features of the Andean textile tradition was its technical complexity. Artists in this region independently developed a majority of the woven structures separately invented elsewhere in the world. They were continually formulating ever-more complicated permutations of threads, resulting in mind-bending woven structures like double cloth, where the weaver simultaneously created two separate pieces of cloth in different colors, but switched which one they wove on top in order to create designs. What is curious about such weavings is that their technical sophistication often exceeded their iconographic heft—many examples of double cloth were simply adorned with repetitions of cats, birds, or fish. Obviously, if the weaver only wanted to make a textile with such motifs, they could have just woven them into a single piece of cloth. Instead, many Andean weavings seem to have been intended primarily as a demonstration of their maker’s technical virtuosity and mastery. As a result, the study of Andean textiles requires a tremendous knowledge of weaving techniques, as well as specialized vocabulary to describe them. Many scholars have devoted their careers exclusively to these works. But, perhaps on account of this unfamiliar terminology, scholarship on Andean textiles is less widely read by the field at large and less often incorporated into more general scholarship. In consequence, knowledge of Andean textiles can at times be somewhat disconnected from understandings of other Andean media and cultural phenomena—including, for example, architecture.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-13

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The breadth, depth, and intensity of the Andean textile tradition begs the question: why? Why did textiles become the dominant medium in the Andes? Given their artistic and intellectual stature, what influence did they have on artistic practices in other media? Most especially, what was the impact of the intricate and laborious woven structures that weavers toiled over?

I. To begin to answer these questions, it is necessary to consider one of the defining theories about the region, called “the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization,” published by Michael Moseley in 1975.1 If these deserts were so brutally dry that they preserved buried textiles for thousands of years, why were people even living there? Moseley argued that in contrast to other so-called cradles of civilization in the world—nurturing, fecund river valleys that promoted agriculture—the Andes evidenced an alternate model where societies developed in order to harvest the rich bounty of the sea. The Humboldt Current flows northward along the Pacific Coast of South America, bringing cold water up from Antarctica and huge quantities of fish. But rather than primarily sustaining themselves on large fish like tuna, early Andean societies plied these waters for massive schools of tiny fish like smelt and anchovies. Such practices were predicated on being able to make large fiber fishing nets. Countless net fragments have been excavated at coastal sites such as Ancón on the central coast and Huaca Prieta on the north coast. The Världskulturmuseet in Göteborg conserves an entire fishing net from a later period, found at Pachacamac, south of Lima, that shows the seine-net design long-used in the region, complete with dried gourd husk floats and weights. Such nets would have been used to encircle and trap fish in shallow waters along the beach. Early coastal societies eventually domesticated the local cotton that they used to make nets—turning to agriculture, in part, to more effectively harness the bounty of the sea. Moreover, agriculturalists may have heightened the natural colors of the fibers through selective breeding, creating multiple shades including tan, dark brown, green, and pinkish-grey, which would have been less visible underwater. Thus, Andean civilization was arguably as much founded on the utilization of textiles as maritime resources. And while the sea gradually came to play less of an outsized role in societies across the region as reliance on agriculture increased, textiles have remained at the center of Andean civilization for millennia. What this means is that, in the Andes, textiles were not just another medium—they were a prime technology. While the ornate garments created in the region might appear more often in scholarship, fishing nets make clear that from a very early date fiber was considered an important tool and even intellectual approach. Indeed, as various communities eventually moved off the beaches and into narrow river valleys to more effectively grow crops, fishing nets themselves strongly influenced how people structured their settlements. At more inland sites like Caral, settled around 3000 BCE and often touted as the oldest city in the Americas, builders constructed their most important ceremonial architecture using devices that were structurally similar to fishing nets. They raised large stepped pyramids and platforms by amassing fieldstones inside thick net bags, which archaeologists call shicras. Heaped together, the fiber bags structured the fill like gabions, allowing the main temple to reach a height of 28 m or over 90 ft. At its core, this architecture was comprised of textiles; moreover, these textiles were structural rather than decorative. The Andes region is prone to significant earthquakes,

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and the shicras helped prevent settling and collapse.2 This was especially important because builders often encased earlier phases of temples inside later ones to maximize architectural volume. Critically, even at this early date, people recognized that the very dry environmental conditions of the desert meant that the shicras would not deteriorate—indeed, they still support the structures today. Furthermore, at a site called El Paraíso, on the outskirts of Lima, studies have shown that these bags were created as regular units, each containing around 25 kg of stones.3 This standardization suggests that fiber served as a fundamental building block and measure of early Andean architecture.

II. Textiles likely came to play a significant role in the Andes because they were essential for fishing. But, as a result, they became a means of problem solving. The same technological approach to manipulating fiber also allowed for the creation of monumental architecture, which understandably defined these civilizations, their systems of belief, structures of power, and social identities. In so doing, the Andes brings an important body of evidence to bear on Gottfried Semper’s theorizations of the relationship between textiles and architecture.4 Semper considered the origins of architecture to have been ephemeral constructions made of fibers (like canopies and tents) or created through woven structures (such as wattle fences fashioned from branches).5 While these kinds of constructions likely also existed in the Andes, the unique climactic conditions of the deserts reveal that early intersections of textiles and architecture did not have to be insubstantial or impermanent. Rather, textiles were a powerful technology that could be lobbied to build edifices that have stood for 5,000 years. Architecture offers a useful vector along which to consider the ramifications of the Andean textile tradition. Later periods of Andean architecture would seem to accord with Semper’s idea that, subsequently, many forms of architectural ornament were derived from textile forms, such that buildings were often superficially dressed in visual references to textiles.6 A paradigmatic example of this phenomenon in the Andes would seem to have occurred in the Early Intermediate Period, on the north coast of what is now Peru, at the Moche temple complex of El Brujo.7 In 2006, at the top of Huaca Cao Viejo, archaeologists excavated the burial of a high-ranking woman ruler or priestess that dated to around 400 CE. Her tomb was situated in a large, square patio emblazoned with resplendent murals featuring a variety of designs. The long south wall was painted with diagonal repetitions of motifs that were overtly derived from textiles (Figure 9.1). These fiber origins are most obvious in the mural’s stepped contours. They mimic the interactions between horizontal wefts and vertical warps, which shaped how colors were allocated in Moche textiles. It is possible that the mural was meant to convey the aesthetic of a plain-weave cloth with supplemental wefts, a technique commonly used by Moche weavers.8 An actual textile fragment in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago provides a sense of what such stepped lines looked like when woven, even though its motifs are quite different (Figure 9.2). As well, the fragment shows how the weavers’ horror vacui caused them to divide spaces or fill them with smaller motifs to avoid open expanses of a single color of thread. Together, these two design principles—the stepped lines and horror vacui—yielded a third, more subtle, premise of weaving: the tendency to create diagonal lines with roughly 45-degree slopes. The weaver formed them by shifting the colors of wefts from warp to warp at regular increments. It was convenient to move multiple elements within a design in tandem, which resulted in multiple diagonal parallels.

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FIGURE 9.1

Unknown artist(s), Moche, South Wall Mural (detail), c. 400, paint on earthen plaster over adobe bricks, burial patio of the Señora de Cao, Huaca Cao Viejo.

FIGURE 9.2

Unknown weaver, Moche-Wari Fragment, 500–1000, cotton and camelid fibers with natural dyes, 52 × 28 cm, possibly the Huarmey Valley, central coast, Peru, The Art Institute of Chicago, Kate S. Buckingham Endowment, 1955.1653.

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All these fundamental conceits of weaving conspicuously shaped the composition of the Huaca Cao Viejo mural—in spite of the fact that it was painted. Of course, because it was, the painter’s or painters’ task was much harder. They were not able to rely on the latent grid of warps and wefts to organize the images. They could not just expect the wefts to produce horizontal lines; these had to be carefully plotted.9 And they could not simply count the warps to create even intervals of colors; they had to measure them. These thousands of nested right angles did not result from the mechanisms of the loom; they had to be painstakingly drawn and filled in with a brush. The painter or painters went to extraordinary lengths to invoke the visual language of textiles. Because scholars are so familiar with seeing textile designs that look like this, it perhaps takes some time to recognize this feat of image making—as well as to spot its visual departures from its woven precedents. While it may sometimes be argued that this kind of painted rendition of a textile was a cheaper substitute, the decision to create these images may have had more to do with emulation and longevity. Still, no matter how arduously the composition was laid out, the painted rendition of the textile could only be a superficial act of mimicry. Because its lines and shapes were not grounded in the actual techniques of weaving, it somewhat inevitably violated them. This relationship based in resemblance would seem to support Semper’s notion that the architecture invoked textiles primarily as surface ornament. Indeed, the mural is composed of a fairly common woven motif, usually interpreted as representations of the heads of fish or snakes. It has been argued that, for Moche artists, the creatures specifically represent life fish (Trichomycterus punctulatus), a freshwater species of elongated catfish.10 That said, artists working both before and after the Moche civilization used similar motifs across a broad geography.11 Regardless, notice how the whiskers or barbels are smooth spirals rather than stepped ones. Such sinuous shapes could not have been easily woven upon the same loom as the remainder of the design. Indeed, the four curved points of the Art Institute textile, actually anthropomorphized waves, give a sense of how such spirals would have had to have been woven. The fiber “curves” are essentially pixelated. The mural drifted from its textile inspiration and instead perhaps gravitated toward the kinds of designs often painted upon Moche ceramics. But, more subtly, notice the small, red, stepped triangles that fill gaps in the white background. Interestingly, these same stepped shapes were constructed in three dimensions from adobe bricks on the other side of the patio, forming a kind of openwork parapet, and presenting another intersection between textiles and architecture. But while the two lowest motifs in this section of the mural were correctly oriented so that their stepped, angled sides ran parallel to the contours of the adjacent composition, the middle two motifs should have been oriented toward the other side so that their stepped contours would parallel the bodies of the fish—as in other sections of the mural. Someone actually weaving these designs would not have made this mistake because the shapes defy the logic of weaving embedded in the synchronized movements of threads within the loom. Even if the painter or painters knew how to weave, they did not have the benefit of the physical act to remind them. These errors seem to hint at how, as Semper suspected, the mural may only indicate a visual affinity between textiles and architecture. Indeed, in the other murals within the patio, it is possible to imagine how they could have been woven—but were they definitely woven designs? The mural on the long east wall of the patio, painted with diagonal repetitions of bicephalic fish or serpents, bears the next-closest resemblance to a textile (Figure 9.3). Its repetitions and diagonally arranged motifs are qualities often seen in weavings. The geometric S-curves and serrated contours of its designs could have been woven in warp floats, for example; but the painted lines are smooth and do not

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specifically indicate the movements of threads. In the corner of the patio, two shorter walls create a ceremonial enclosure. Both were painted with repetitions of rectangular motifs, implying the kinds of designs weavers often create on looms. The one adjacent to the first mural is somewhat closer to woven imagery and represents a mythical animal in profile— sometimes described as a “lunar animal” or “crawling feline.” Similar creatures were woven into textiles, as another fragment conserved by the Art Institute of Chicago documents (Gift of Alan R. Sawyer, 1957.442). But, such animals have equally been sculpted in ceramic. Much like the spirals in the previous mural, it would have been challenging to weave the painted creatures’ circular eyes and curvilinear tongues, limbs, and tails. Finally, the last wall of the patio bears repetitions of more naturalistic figures holding condors that, in and of themselves, have no discernable compositional or structural similarity to woven motifs. If the relationship between these murals and textiles were only one of ornament, then the strength of their bond might seem to diminish in the order that I have described them. Nonetheless, the four contiguous murals created a continuous architectural surface. Can they actually be separately parsed, even though their designs differ? When the allusion to textiles is so strong in one, does it matter if the influence was less visually apparent in the others? The painted images bear a collective relationship to the patio, and necessarily to the burial of the female ruler or priestess and her attendants. As mentioned earlier, there was a long history of Andean peoples burying their dead wrapped in layers of textiles that were often quite elaborate. The ruler or priestess was no exception. Her body was enveloped in twenty-six layers of cloth.12 Many of the textiles featured stylized fish and spirals, not unlike the murals. In adorning the walls surrounding her tomb, the murals may have fulfilled a conceptual role as a final, outer layer of exquisite cloth wrapping the body of the deceased. The intricately painted murals, rather than fabricating a superficially ornamental relationship between textiles and architecture, an aesthetic reference, might have functioned more similarly to a simulacrum, an architectural embodiment of textiles, and a funerary offering in their own right.

FIGURE 9.3

Unknown artist(s), Moche, South Wall Mural (detail), c. 400, paint on earthen plaster over adobe bricks, burial patio of the Señora de Cao, Huaca Cao Viejo.

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III. Throughout ensuing centuries, textiles continued to shape Andean architecture, especially in the manner evinced at Huaca Cao Viejo. Certainly, fiber also played other roles in building, whether in lashing together thatch roofs or creating suspension bridges, but it is in the facades of monumental architecture that the artistic impact of the Andean textile tradition is most powerfully observed. Indeed, there was a proliferation of such textile-inspired walls in the palaces of the later Chimú kingdom, which dominated the north coast of Peru from around 1100 to 1470 from their capital of Chan Chan. The Chimús were in many ways inheritors of the Moche civilization, but their architecture was structurally distinct. As was evident at Huaca Cao Viejo, Moches had created large volumetric temples that encased earlier building phases within later ones—as had been done for thousands of years on the coast—which allowed the fragile mural paintings to be preserved. Chimú rulers, on the other hand, built sprawling, quadrangular adobe palaces that scholars call ciudadelas. Unfortunately, the much-thinner walls of the labyrinthine complexes were less able to withstand the periodic torrents of rain brought on by El Niño events. Over time, many of the upper portions of the walls melted, although the slumped adobes had the effect of encasing and preserving the lower sections of the walls. These surviving foundations make clear that throughout these complexes, the walls’ huge surface areas were heavily ornamented through a technique developed by their Moche predecessors: Chimú builders covered the adobe walls with a thick layer of stucco and then carved out sections of the stucco while it was still wet, creating ornate reliefs. Although most of these reliefs are now unpigmented, it seems probable that they were once brightly painted—as was the case in Moche architecture. The ciudadela that scholars refer to as “Gran Chimú,” likely built in the 1300s, contains what are perhaps the most elaborate textile-inspired reliefs. Unfortunately, the compound has been severely damaged—a highway now even cuts through it. Nonetheless, early explorations and excavations at least recorded glimpses of the palace’s former glory. In the 1860s, Ephraim George Squier visited the site and dubbed a section of it the “Hall of the Arabesques.” The wood-engraved illustration published in his Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (1877) reveals that the so-called arabesques were actually sculpted reliefs of interdigitating birds, likely pelicans (Figure 9.4). Other sections of the same room were later photographed by Major Otto Holstein in the 1920s, but many were severely damaged and even destroyed in March 1925 during significant rains. The images reveal that the motifs had the same kinds of stepped contours seen in the painted mural at Huaca Cao Viejo. Although the birds’ heads were well defined, their bodies were simply a series of triangles. Each bird was paired with another one slanting in the opposite direction to form a V-shape. They were stacked in zigzag columns, and the repetition of these columns created chevron patterns. Such pelican motifs were actually a sort of basic building block that weavers frequently manipulated in a variety of ways within Chimú textiles. But while the mural paintings at Huaca Cao Viejo might have referenced supplementaryweft textiles that were common in Moche culture, it seems possible that the Chimú relief indexed the kinds of discontinuous warp and weft techniques that Chimú weavers frequently produced. A large textile in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art perhaps indicates the type (Figure 9.5). It features very similar pelican designs, with bodies comprised of two triangles rather than four. They interlock with simplified fish motifs, akin to those painted at Huaca Cao Viejo, as is evident by their triangular heads with

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FIGURE 9.4

Ephraim George Squier, Hall of the Arabesques, Chimu, 1877, wood-engraving.

FIGURE 9.5

Unknown weaver, Chimú, Fragment of a Wall Hanging, 1300–1470, cotton, 162 × 208 cm, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979.206.601.

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two protuberances on their mouths. The textile’s stepped designs resulted from numerous scaffolds inserted into the loom that grafted different-colored sets of warps to each other to lay out the composition. The scaffolds, however, mandated that all the horizontal junctures within the designs remain in perfect alignment. And, just as errors were introduced into the mural at Huaca Cao Viejo through the process of translating the woven designs into painted ones, the motifs of the sculpted frieze in the “Hall of the Arabesques” do not line up in the regimented way that they should have because they were hand-formed in the wet stucco. In some places, the slanting bodies of adjacent birds closely interdigitate while in others they merely abut. Very clearly, like the mural at Huaca Cao Viejo, the underlying geometry of the sculpted composition was not a consequence of the inherent rectilinear intersections of warps and wefts. The builders had to carefully slice through the wet stucco to create the countless right angles, stepped lines, and parallel diagonals that formed the images. It could not have been lost on the makers that the inherently plastic nature of the wet medium was diametrically opposed to the strict structures of a loom—only further evidencing the aesthetic sway that textiles held over architecture. At the same time, the Chimú friezes introduced a new quality to these familiar motifs: dimensionality. Textiles primarily relied on color to construct such images. Color may also have played a role in the wall reliefs, but it was likely superseded by depth and shadow in the visual experience of the walls. The stucco reliefs made an assertion of positive and negative space that was mostly foreign to their woven progenitors, formed from a continuous web of threads. The sculptural quality of wall reliefs in Chimú palaces may have served to further dissociate these motifs from textiles. While the “Hall of the Arabesques” sought to capture the all-over nature of textile motifs that was a consequence of manipulating a loom in repetition, in other areas of Chan Chan the sculpted motifs gained greater independence from one another and lost their horror vacui. For example, in the palace scholars have dubbed Tschudi, likely built during the 1400s, various walls bear repetitions of pelican motifs (Figure 9.6). Although the motifs retain their characteristic stepped contours, identifying them as having been derived from textiles, they do not tesselate with each other as they might have in cloth, and the irregular, interstitial spaces between them were wholly unaddressed. That is, although the motifs clearly had their origins in textiles, they were not handled in the same way that textile motifs would have been composed on a loom. The sculpted birds simply punctuate the surface of the architecture at intervals, almost like clip art. Such examples would seem to shortchange or even disavow the intellectual inheritance of these designs. However, while it is possible to guess that the Moche murals and Chimú reliefs might reference different woven structures based the kinds of weavings each society more often created, these differences in technique are not actually visually apparent from the architectural renditions. The problem here, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter in my discussion of double cloth, is that there were many ways to potentially weave such basic motifs. The murals and reliefs only capture a general visual aesthetic of cloth. But while the murals around the patio at Huaca Cao Viejo may have gained deeper symbolic significance as a conceptual burial cloth, the reliefs of Chimú palaces may also have born a symbolic function, brought into focus by the pelican textile preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The height of the woven panel measures seven feet or over two meters. Given its very large size, it seems likely that it would have been used as a wall hanging. But weaving such sizable pieces of cloth, especially with complex designs, would have been tremendously

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FIGURE 9.6

Unknown maker(s), Chimú, Sculpted Adobe Relief with Pelicans, 1400–1470 with 2008 conservation, adobe, Tschudi Complex, Chan Chan.

time consuming and would have required extensive resources, not only in thread but also in dyes. As has been observed, it was likely much cheaper and faster to craft these sprawling compositions in stucco than to arduously weave them—particularly given how quickly the stucco would have dried in the hot desert.13 Thus, the wall reliefs were perhaps a less lavish and more durable substitute for finely woven wall hangings. Even so, in the same way that extravagant, woven, wall hangings might have inspired more basic stucco reliefs, the stucco reliefs may have eventually gained their own textile imitators. Chimú makers also created cloth wall hangings that were painted rather than woven. They were made from large panels of white cotton cloth that would have been easy to weave and, because of how immediately the fiber absorbed the pigments, quick to paint. As a result, they would have been much faster to produce than stucco reliefs and certainly much faster to create than large, intricately patterned weavings. Two such painted wall hangings were discovered in 1951 perhaps in a tomb east of Chan Chan. The more famous one—which scholars refer to as “The Prisoner Textile”—appears to have been at least 75 ft or 23 m long; but, the processions of bound captives that it depicted were not so directly related to the imagery of stucco reliefs at Chan Chan.14 In contrast, the lesser known wall hanging, dubbed the “Marine Fauna Textile,” featured myriad depictions of fish, birds, and marine mammals—by far the most common subject matter of stucco reliefs within the ciudadelas. Unfortunately, while much of the Prisoner Textile survives, only one panel of the Marine Fauna Textile is known to exist in the collection of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum (Figure 9.7). It includes a marvelous depiction of a pelican where the bird’s gullet is rendered as a fishing net. Two additional panels were sold at auction in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1956; although their whereabouts are unknown to me, the auction catalog included a photograph of one which shows the painted borders bore the same kinds of repetitions of fauna that were sculpted into wall reliefs.15 Indeed, Henry Reichlen was able to study a number of the panels and commented, in a 1965 article, that one particular design featured repetitions of a human head between two birds that were analogous to wall reliefs

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FIGURE 9.7

Unknown artist(s), Chimú, Fragment of the “Marine Fauna” Textile, 1200–1470, pigments on cotton, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, P.428.61-1.

at Chan Chan.16 It seems like the sprawling textile may have been created as an ephemeral decoration for a wall, potentially temporarily transforming the sculpted decorative program of the architecture for a special ceremony or pageant.

IV. While Moche and Chimú societies were closely related and geographically overlapping, visual manifestations of textiles in architecture were not limited to the north coast. Far to the south and high in the Andes mountains, between Lake Titicaca and the Uyuni Salt Flats, in the Río Lauca area near the Bolivian border with Chile, Aymara communities created mausoleums called chullpas painted with textile motifs. The forty-three structures date to the 1200s and 1300s. The most famous example, at Wila Kollu, bears a red band with repetitions of serrated diamonds. The design closely resembles the motifs later woven at the waists of many Inca tapestry tunics. Due to the degree that garments constructed social identities throughout the Andes, it seems likely that these painted textile motifs might have been intended to visually preserve the identities of kin groups buried within. Clearly, textiles played an essential role in the early architecture of the Andes. As but one example, builders used fiber bags to structure the fill of temples. In ensuing centuries, however, Andean architecture continued to demonstrate a keen awareness of textiles—but perhaps

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most prominently through visual reference rather than direct technological dependence. The example of the murals of Huaca Cao Viejo highlight this relationship, while the later sculpted reliefs of Chan Chan document that it was an ongoing phenomenon, and the chullpas of Rio Lauca show it was geographically widespread. These architectural references may have been symbolically understood as the kinds of elite weavings eventually interred in burials, as less time-consuming ways of ornamenting walls than creating woven wall hangings, or as reifying the social identities constructed by garments. Notably, however, none of these architectural renditions of textiles demonstrated a certifiable understanding of the complex woven structures that Andean weavers so arduously labored to create over millennia and are now so famous for. Because weavers often did not use these intricate techniques to develop new or differentiated imagery, and because a given motif could be rendered through a variety of woven structures, it is consequently difficult to assess the impact that weaving techniques actually had on architecture—or, for that matter, other media. This may indicate that weaving, in spite of being the most important artistic tradition in the Andes, was specialized and even esoteric knowledge only actually understood by the most experienced textile artists. However, by the time of the last, sovereign, Indigenous civilization in the Andes—the Inca Empire—the potential for architecture even to just superficially mimic textiles would seem to have been totally outmoded. The Incas rose to power in the 1400s, subjugating myriad communities between southern Colombia and central Chile, but their reign was cut short by the Spanish invasion and brutal conquest, which began in 1532. Inca art and architecture was wholly different from that of the cultures who preceded them, and was, on the whole, far more conceptual. Often described in scholarship as “geometric” and “abstract,” Inca art less frequently manifested flora and fauna than in earlier periods.17 And, when it did, plants and animals were often less detailed, more stylized, and less individuated. These qualities can make Inca art difficult to interpret—but immediately recognizable stylistically. Notably, from a technical standpoint, too, Inca art was often less experimental or capricious. The finely woven tapestry tunic mentioned earlier is a quintessential example. In their most accomplished imperial garments, Inca weavers largely eschewed the many, more convoluted, woven structures pioneered in earlier periods in favor of tapestry weaving, a timeless and straightforward form of cloth, probably known to all Andean weavers and wearers alike. Nonetheless, Inca weavers demonstrated their mastery of the medium through meticulous execution, creating some of the most finely woven textiles in Andean history. They inserted minute wefts into a field of plain warps, carrying them over and under, and carefully interlocking them at junctures between different colors. Each weft volleyed to and fro, row after row, slowly creating fields of shapes, ultimately eclipsing the underlying warps from view. That is, the wefts entirely comprised both faces of the cloth and were wholly responsible for its designs. Nonetheless, the wefts remained inherently organized by the warps, and their generally perpendicular interactions in many ways yielded the oftengeometric nature of Inca art. Inca architecture similarly poses interpretive challenges. It was highly restrained and, in many instances, meticulously finished, but in its other formal qualities would seem quite different from Inca weaving. Often described as “unadorned,” the finest Inca buildings were constructed from stones that were carved with surgical precision and assembled with the patience of a watchmaker—all without mortar. The surface of the stones was never painted or stuccoed. The walls did not bear any motifs or repetitions of designs, and no portion was

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differentiated from the rest by friezes, cornices, or decorative carvings. Similarly, additional attention was not given to the front of an edifice, which bore an architectural program consistent with the sides and back. Buildings generally took a number of predetermined shapes, almost like modular architecture. Both windows and doors had the same trapezoidal form, created at different dimensions; and the only interruption or augmentation of walls were niches that also had trapezoidal shapes and could be used for storage. All in all, this codified style was a highly recognizable signifier of Inca imperialism. But, under these aesthetic strictures, there were understandably few ways for Inca buildings to incorporate even the abstract or geometric motifs woven into Inca cloth. Inca architecture and textiles would therefore seem wholly disconnected, at least in the visual manner of earlier Andean societies. Really, their greatest similarity might seem to be how they articulated the identity and existence of the Inca state, especially within territories that they had recently incorporated into their empire. But there may be another way of considering the intersection of Inca weaving and architecture. What is critical to understand about an Inca wall is exactly how each ashlar attained its shape. Masons did not carve the stones in any regular, standardized, or interchangeable way. Rather, as is evidenced by the wall of a former Inca terrace that is now incorporated into the Archbishop’s Palace in Cusco, each block, whether quadrangular or polygonal, was individually and uniquely carved for its specific location within a construction (Figure 9.8). In an ideologically consistent manner, Inca weavers also did not mass-produce bolts of cloth and cut from them; they wove every piece to the dimensions they desired. And, when they wove motifs, they did not follow predetermined numerical configurations of threads, for example, composing design elements across a set number of warps or inserting a regular number of rows of wefts. Moreover, as masons shaped each stone, they simultaneously carved the abutting edges of the stones below and adjacent to it in order to attain a perfect fit. What this means is that masons were placing the same emphasis and focus on the junctures between blocks as weavers would have between different colors of threads in tapestry weaving. The contours of a stone block or an area of colored fiber were only created in contradistinction to the other surrounding blocks or areas of color. And, after masons finished shaping an ashlar, they had to lower it into place; critically, the angles of the vertical junctures between stones in a wall reveal the direction they were working in. The blocks under sloping lines had to be laid first, while the ones on top of the diagonals were laid second. From these small details, it is possible to see how masons worked across each row, laying stones in sequence, just as weavers sequentially laid wefts across warps, depositing threads underneath diagonals before those on top of them. In both Inca masonry and weaving, the result was an almost cellular construction, a composition formed through networks of junctures in their respective materials. While it is difficult to prove that Inca masons and weavers self-consciously recognized these congruencies in their working practices, they nonetheless offer further potential insights. In Inca weaving, these junctures and contours defined the imagery, the visual interest of the cloth. It seems likely that Inca masons similarly considered these mortarless crevices between ashlars, these miniscule fissures, to be the visual interest of a wall. That is, walls were not adorned by some kind of added architectural ornament, but through the way that the laborious process of their construction configured their materials. This was the crux of their intended aesthetic appeal. Thus, whereas the relationship between textiles and architecture was often articulated through visual resemblance and superficial decoration in

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FIGURE 9.8

Unknown maker(s), Inca, Wall, 1400–1532, stone, Calle Hatunrumiyoq, Cusco.

earlier Andean societies, and which Semper hypothesized was largely one-directional, it seems possible that in Inca art, where visual resemblance or representation was already so streamlined or suppressed, weavers and masons may have operated within a similar technical ideology resulting from and perhaps cross-pollinated by their analogous attentions to artistic processes. Over millennia, textiles were the most important artistic tradition in the Andes, and their influence was manifest in Indigenous architecture in a variety of ways—whether as a technology for building, an inspiration for architectural ornament, or, perhaps, as an artistic practice with an analogous focus on technique. However, the Spanish invasion and protracted conquest of the Andes dramatically upended these artistic traditions. Many of the most important Indigenous temples and palaces were cruelly sacked or destroyed, representing an incalculable loss of both culture and knowledge. The invaders introduced European architectural styles that radically changed the nature of building in the region, as well as European approaches to making and using textiles that upended the Andean textile tradition. In consequence, textiles and architecture came to interact in ways they had not previously. This is perhaps most seen in the introduction of carpets with European and even Islamic designs, which Inca weavers were frequently tasked with producing under colonial rule.

Notes 1 Michael Moseley, The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing Company, 1975). 2 Cirilo Huapaya Manco, “Vegetales como elemento antisismico en estructuras pre-hispanicas,” Boletín del seminario de arqueología PUCP 19/20, 1977–1978, 27–37.

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Quilter, Jeffrey. “Architecture and Chronology at El Paraíso, Peru.” Journal of Field Archaeology 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 279–97. Reichlen, Henry. “Dos telas pintadas del norte del Perú.” Revista Peruana de Cultura 5 (1965): 5–16. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Trever, Lisa. Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

10 THE RULER’S CLOTHES AND THE MANIFOLD DIMENSIONS OF TEXTILE PATTERNS ON MUSLIM FUNERAL ARCHITECTURE IN THE MAUSOLEUM OF THE FIRST CRIMEAN KHANS Nicole Kançal-Ferrari

This chapter investigates the multifaceted relationship between textile and Islamic funeral architecture through the example of real textile, imitation textile, and textile-like patterns in the mausoleum of the first Crimean khans.1 This structure, known as the Türbe of Haji Geray I or of Mengli I Geray, is situated on the Crimean Peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea, in Salaçik, the khans’ early capital and future suburb of their later one, Bahçesaray. The mausoleum was the burial place of the first three generations of rulers of the Crimean Khanate, the successor state of the Golden Horde and the period’s most powerful political entity in the northern Black Sea (ca. 1466–1550). In 2007, the sensational discovery of a previously unknown and intact crypt at the site greatly excited the scholarly community. The crypt contained untouched, although decomposed, wooden sarcophagi with the remains of eighteen individuals, identified as the first Crimean khan, Haji Geray I (r. 1442?–66), and his successors and family members. Significantly, the coffins were covered with precious and rare textiles from the period, many bearing Italian and Ottoman floral patterns.2 Given the vital role played by textiles—tentlike structures, sarcophagus and cenotaph covers, shrouds, clothes, and banners—in pre- and early-modern Turco-Islamic ritual, this trove of textiles shines an unparalleled light onto how the Crimean khans, and particularly the powerful Mengli Geray I (r. 1468–74, 1478– 1514), engaged with the rich cultural and visual diversity of the world around them at a time when, to the west, Europe was flourishing under the High Renaissance; to the south, the Ottomans were prospering under Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1444–6, 1451–81); and to the north, Moscow was arising as a political and cultural power under Ivan III (r. 1462–1505).3 Through the lens of Muslim funerary culture, textiles, and textile motifs, this chapter seeks to understand the meanings that textiles like those in the khans’ mausoleum held for those who used them, and to trace their application, imitation, and representation in architectural ornamentation in Crimea and beyond. This chapter identifies connections linking the khanate not just to the Ottoman Empire (a relationship well documented in the literature), but also to neighboring principalities, Europe, the Mamluks, and even further afield, revealing a web of cultural interaction through textile that spanned much of the early-modern world. DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-14

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The argument I develop proceeds in several stages. In the first three sections, I argue that the mausoleum’s architectural and ornamental program—epitomized by its elaborate entrance façade, which bears sophisticated, textile-like decorative patterns of elaborate foliate design combined with Quranic verses—was based on portable, textile models from other parts of the Turco-Islamic world. I begin with a discussion of the mausoleum and its decoration in relationship to “soft architecture” (e.g., curtains, covers, tents, and canopies), stressing the close parallels between the mausoleum’s architecture and the textile tradition. I then move on to an analysis of the combination of ornamentation and Quranic inscriptions to identify a particular class of textiles—military banners and coverings from the Islamic holy sites—as the most likely source of the mausoleum’s decorative program. Finally, I lay out evidence for the circulation of such textiles during the early-modern period to explain how a pattern on a textile from half a world away could have wound up being applied in stone to a mausoleum in fifteenth-century Crimea. In the final two sections, I return to the textiles found adorning the wooden sarcophagi in the crypt of the khans’ mausoleum. Some of these precious textiles bear designs paralleling those on the mausoleum’s façade, which suggests that a similar style of decoration was applied to both textile and stone. With this as my starting point, I reflect on the meaning of the funeral memorial through the references its decorative program makes to various dimensions of the ruler’s body, effectively “resurrecting” him through the symbols, motifs, and patterns employed on the edifice and the textiles, shrouds, covers, and clothes within. I argue that this mausoleum permits us to reconsider the interaction of the representation of secular and sacred dimensions of Turco-Islamic funeral architecture, the role they played in confirming and displaying the rulers’ worldly power, and the reference they make to the afterlife. Some of the textiles in the crypt also resemble those found in other parts of their contemporary world, which points to what might be described as a shared early-modern visual culture. In the chapter’s final section, I investigate the larger context of these textiles and how they made their way into the khans’ possession, exploring similar representational and architectural uses of comparable luxury textiles at the turn of the sixteenth century. Through the presence of the precious textiles in the crypt and their parallels, as real fabric or pictorial representation, in the tombs of other rulers in Europe and in neighboring principalities in the Balkans, the mausoleum testifies to the impressive scope and range of cultural interactions and dialogue through concrete material transfers in the early-modern period.

The Mausoleum in Its Artistic and Cultural Context: The Tent and Textile Traditions According to its inscription, the mausoleum was constructed in 907 AH/1501–2 CE for Mengli Geray I.4 The edifice is an octagonal, single-domed structure with a deep, vaulted iwan at the western entrance and a crypt below. In its shape, the structure resembles a polygonal, domed tent, a structural type in the tradition of Turco-Islamic funeral mausolea.5 Tents are portable items and dwelling solutions which were closely connected with pre- and early-modern Turco-Mongol lifestyles. Canopies in the form of small, polygonal or circular tents are related to rulership and political authority and depicted in many representations of Turco-Mongol and Islamic rulers holding audience, thus offering a glimpse into what such scenes would have looked like.6 The form of the tent and its substitute in stone incorporate, and are thus part of, the symbolic

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FIGURE 10.1

Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum in Salaçik, near Bahçesaray, Crimea. Mid-fifteenth to early-sixteenth century. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari.

self-expression of the ruler and his representation toward his subjects.7 In addition, the relationship and formal similarity between tomb construction and tents is visible in depictions of funeral scenes in Ottoman book paintings, such as the well-known depiction of the funeral of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66), where a tent is being erected as a temporary mausoleum on an earthen grave until a permanent structure can be built in its place.8 Besides the proposed relationship between tent architecture and Turco-Islamic mausolea, the decoration of the monument in Crimea evokes specific textile patterns. The entrance iwan bears rich ornamental decoration all over its façade; even the engaged columns next to the door and in the side niches (mihrabiye) are covered with decorative patterns. All three surfaces of the façade bear an elaborate foliate design with split-palmettes, rumis (arabesques), and peonies, pointing to the Persianate late-Timurid style of the period.9 These would likely have been colored, and the barely discernible pattern would have been clearly visible. A floral motif in a two-dimensional niche design on the lower part of both sides of the door on the entrance façade is similar to that on a piece of textile from the crypt.10 The foliate design on the upper part of the entrance façade bears a triangular, halfmedallion arrangement in the center and two smaller medallions in the corners, all of them with undulated contours. This arrangement has parallels in textiles, but also appears on Timurid façade designs and carved objects such as tombstones and chests. It bears similarity, too, with textiles used for tents, as depicted in illustrations. The decoration on the edifice can thus serve as an example of the versatility of textile-like decoration and its reciprocal relationship with surface ornamentation on architecture.11

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FIGURE 10.2

Detail of the entrance iwan of the Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari.

FIGURE 10.3

Drawing of the façade design (taken from Bozkurt Ersoy and Aygül Uçar, “Kırım Salacık Hacı Giray Han Türbesi,” in Prof. Dr. Hakkı Önkal’a Armağan [İzmir: Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, 2013], Figure 16).

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In the early-modern Turco-Islamic world, the designs for versatile patterns for textiles, book bindings, decorated objects, wood and stone carvings, and even tiles for façade decoration were elaborated in workshops.12 To our knowledge, no such workshop existed at the court or in the realms of the Crimean khan. Around 1500, the khan was searching for master builders from abroad, and on occasion employed architects from as far away as Italy.13 As a consequence, two possibilities for the elaborate decoration on the mausoleum can be put forward: either that craftsmen from outside the khanate brought models and patterns for decoration with them; or that textiles coming from the Timurid, Mamluk, or Ottoman realms (which in that period all still bore similar stylistic features of the late-Timurid style, i.e., the Persianate aesthetics disseminated by the Timurid courts in the fifteenth century) served as models of transmaterial patterns and ornamentation.14 In both cases, the patterns would have traveled and then been executed locally. Although there is no exact match among the scarce textile examples from that period, extant fabric patterns resemble the decoration in many ways.15

Political and Sacred Dimensions of Textiles in Turco-Islamic Funeral Architecture The references to textile-like patterns on the mausoleum’s façade raise the question of whether other parts of the decoration of the entrance iwan could also be related to or inspired by textile models. Besides these floral-interlacement ornaments and the niche design, an important dimension of the decoration is the calligraphy applied on the façade, specifically the Quranic inscriptions.16 The first verses of Sura al-Fath surround the entrance door (see Figure 10.2)17; and on the two sidewalls of the entrance portico, niches with muqarnas hoods and small columns contain the thirteenth verse of Sura al-Saff in a circular, mirrored (muthanna) composition in the spandrels.18 Both suras relate to a victory achieved with the help of God and thus also have a political dimension. Parts of Sura al-Fath appear often on mosques and funerary architecture, especially in late-fifteenth-century edifices in Cairo and Delhi.19 Examples appear in the funerary complex of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay (r. 1468–96) in Cairo (completed in 1472–74) and his madrasa in Jerusalem (1482).20 Sura al-Saff, however, is rarely applied to architecture.21 One of the few exceptions is the Mamluk-era madrasa/funerary complex of Qansuh al-Ghawri (r. 1501–16) in Cairo (909 AH/1503 CE), where the thirteenth verse of al-Saff is inscribed above the entrance door. Significantly, in this contemporary of the Crimean mausoleum, Sura al-Fath is also displayed on the walls of the madrasa courtyard. The appearance of these suras in the funerary complexes of Mamluk rulers is important, since at the time the Crimean khans’ mausoleum was constructed, the Mamluks were the protectors of the holy places of Islam and claimed the caliphate. This connection is even more striking because the 1532 ascension ceremony of Sahib Geray Khan I (r. 1532–51), the last khan to be buried in the mausoleum, was held inside “a majestic tent with a canopy gifted by the sultan of Egypt.”22 That it was a tent from Egypt and not an Ottoman one used for the ascension at a time when the Crimean Khanate was already part of the Ottoman political world points to the khanate’s insistence on presenting itself as a legitimate, historically and politically independent actor.23 We do not, however, know how the khans came into possession of this tent. It was most probably an item gifted by the Mamluks to the Golden Horde khans. No diplomatic contact is attested between the early Crimean Khanate and the Mamluks before the conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate by Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) in 1516–18.24 Another possibility is that the Mamluks

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FIGURE 10.4

Detail of the entrance iwan of the Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum. Side wall with Quranic inscription. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari.

gifted the tent to the Ottomans, who then regifted it to the Crimean khan.25 In contrast to the importance given the Mamluk tent in the Crimean investiture ceremony, Selim I allegedly sold the tent of the former Mamluk sultan Qaitbay—a gigantic, magnificent, and prestigious “symbol of the state” and “wonder of the world” that he saw in the citadel of Cairo—at a giveaway price; the buyers then cut it into pieces to be sold individually, thus visually destroying the state symbol.26 In the Islamic world, and especially the Ottoman environment, it was common to repurpose precious textiles from the holy places in Mecca and Medina for use as funeral covers on cenotaphs and in mausolea. It was the privilege of the protectors of the holy sites to furnish and periodically replace these precious textiles. After Selim I’s conquest of Egypt had brought an end to Mamluk rule, the Ottomans were the holders of this privilege, and they would prepare and send textiles every year from Istanbul or Cairo. This included door curtains and interior and exterior covers (kiswa) of the Kaaba, the shroud for the mausoleum of the prophet, and diverse textiles and covers for the other holy stations in Mecca and Medina. After being replaced, the old covers were often cut into pieces and repurposed as funeral covers for privileged persons, and Kaaba door curtains were allocated to devotional sites such as mosques and mausolea, either as whole pieces or as fragments.27 These textiles most often combined writing/text with pattern and therefore resemble architectural façade decoration. The ornamentation on some of these textiles has parallels to the inscription texts and decorations on the entrance façade of the Crimean mausoleum.

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Parts of both suras on the edifice’s façade appear on portable objects like banners (sancak), banner filials (alem), and textiles for the holy places in Mecca and Medina. Mamluk alems and, unique for the Ottomans, one attributed to Selim I, bear the thirteenth verse of al-Saff.28 An example with the same verse is a sixteenth-century makhmil banner today in the Topkapı Palace Museum.29 Ottoman examples of door curtains from the sixteenth century and examples of cloth for the tomb of the prophet Muhammad in Medina contain verses of Sura al-Fath.30 Verses of both suras also appear on early Ottoman military banners, including a banner of Selim I now in the Topkapı Palace Museum, and one belonging to Barbaros Hayrettin Pasha (d. 1546) today in the Maritime Museum in Istanbul. The banner of Selim I shows the parts of Sura al-Saff in the same mirrored arrangement in a circle as the Quranic inscriptions in Crimea.31 Such banners could also be hung in mausolea, like the banner of Barbaros Hayrettin Pasha, which was reportedly still hanging in his mausoleum some three centuries after Barbaros’s death.32 The blind-arcade design below the muqarnas entablature on the upper part of both side façades of the Crimean mausoleum’s iwan evokes another dimension of a textile-like architectural structure, as this kind of niche design appears on façades and also on architecture-related textiles, especially door curtains.33 An example for the circulation of sacred textiles in the Ottoman Empire even before the Ottomans became the protectors of the holy places is the “veil of Mecca’s door” (burqa’ bab al-Makka), which was sent by the sharif of Mecca to Mehmed II sometime after his conquest of Constantinople in 1453.34 Based on this evidence, I suggest that it was textiles, banners, or repurposed (gifted) coverings from the Islamic holy sites that served as sources of inspiration, material transmitters,

FIGURE 10.5

Banner of Selim I. Early sixteenth century. Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, TSM 1/284. © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National ­Palaces Administration.

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or models for the application of the Quranic verses on the entrance iwan of the mausoleum of the Crimean khans, combining religious and political dimensions.35

Circulation of Textiles in the Early-Modern Islamic World When the ruler of the Golden Horde Berke Khan (r. 1257–66) announced to the Mamluk sultan in 1263 that he had converted to Islam, the sultan sent him, among other prestigious presents, items linked to religious practice, like a precious Quran, prayer rugs, and clothing for prayer.36 Twenty years later, in 1283, Tuda Mengü Khan (r. 1280–87) asked the Mamluk sultan to send him a caliphal banner and a royal banner for his war ( jihad) against the infidel.37 And, as discussed above, a sixteenth-century source mentions “a tent from the Egyptian sultan” that was used for the ascension ceremony of the Crimean khan. These few examples furnish evidence that religiously or politically meaningful items from the Islamic heartland and political centers did indeed circulate in the Golden Horde and later Crimean Khanate realms. It is quite possible that such items were given on other occasions, both as support for the “cause of Islam” and as a political statement. Mengli Geray I had close contact with the Ottoman sultans Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) and Selim I. He supported them actively during their campaigns and contributed to their military success in the Balkans and the northern Black Sea.38 It is quite probable that he was given a banner while participating on those campaigns, as well as pieces of textile from the holy sites. A particularly noteworthy piece of evidence for the presence of these items in the possession of a member of the khan dynasty is furnished by the records of an estate in a village near Istanbul from as late as 1875. Discovered by Hakan Kırımlı, this estate, belonging to a female member of the Geray lineage, Fatma Sultan Hanî, owned several extraordinary holy relics, including a cloak belonging to the prophet’s daughter Fatma al-Zahra and three holy banners (mushaf-ı şerif sançağı). All these items subsequently entered the Ottoman palace collection. That these holy relics were in the possession of a woman of the Geray dynasty, passed down for generations, likely since the sixteenth century, shows that religiously significant objects of this sort were indeed in the possession of members of the Crimean Khanate.39 But how are these items related to funeral monuments? Politically meaningful items pointing to the position and achievements of the person in life could be part of funeral decoration, as was the case in the mausoleum of the admiral Barbaros Hayrettin Pasha. Items linked to symbolic visualization of rulership and authority may well have been displayed on occasion at the mausoleum of the deceased ruler in Crimea. The expression of Mamluk, and later Ottoman, political and religious authority was, through rites of legitimation during the investiture of a new ruler, related to mausolea; Steenberger, following Behrens-Abouseif, counts among the symbolic meanings of (Mamluk) mausolea the following three dimensions: relationship/ memorial to military victory, a stage for royal memory, and a symbol for dynastic continuity.40 In this view, a funerary monument can be understood as a symbol of victory. Could we suppose that this was also the case for the mausoleum of Mengli Geray I? It was erected during the lifetime of the khan upon his decisive victory over Sheikh Ahmed (r. 1481–1502), last khan of the Great (Golden) Horde, in 1502. The inscription over the entrance door not only lists the khan’s (new) titles, as does the palace’s so-called Iron Gate (dated 1503–4), but also makes reference to the lineage of the Crimean khans, thereby establishing a new dynastic claim.41 This edifice was likely understood as a memorial to this legendary victory and symbol of a transition of power, representing the initiation of a new dynastic tradition even before the Iron Gate. This would also explain the mausoleum’s construction during the lifetime of the khan and its reference to political and ideological (textile) symbols.

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The Body and Architecture: Textile, Clothing, and Funeral Practices in Crimea and the Ottoman Realm Textiles were important items in funeral processions and then, later, the interior arrangement of mausolea.42 In early Turco-Islamic funerary practices, the body was commonly interred in a wooden coffin in a sealed separate underground grave chamber of a mausoleum. Often, additional burials of the same lineage were later placed in the same crypt. The upper part of the mausoleum, a single chamber open to visitors, contained cenotaphs of all the deceased individuals buried in the crypt below. These aboveground cenotaphs, like the sarcophagi in the crypt, were usually covered with precious textiles. In the Ottoman realm, besides the use of textiles from the holy places of Islam as funeral covers and shrouds (pūşīde), it was customary to put the robe (kaftan or entāri) and the headgear (turban) of the deceased on the cenotaph. Especially in mausolea in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, several layers of covers and cloth were often placed on the cenotaphs.43 This representation of the deceased’s body through clothing during funeral processions and later on the cenotaphs in the mausolea was noted by travelers.44

FIGURE 10.6

Coffin of Şehzade Mustafa’s son with funeral cover and robes. Hünername, 1584. Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Istanbul, TSMK H 1524 fol. 171a. © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National Palaces Administration.

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The anthropomorphic dimension of Turco-Muslim tombstones and cenotaphs with the turban and textile (real or imitation) both make concrete reference to the deceased’s position in society and, through its visual rearrangement in mausolea, assured its continuation even after the individual’s death. Examples of displaying similar precious textiles (clothing) on wooden coffins and stone cenotaphs exist in many places of the Islamic world.45 Ottoman tombstones in cemeteries, mainly in Istanbul, show the transfer of fabric and of imitated textile patterns onto stone.46 What makes this kind of cenotaph or tombstone even more body-like—or, in other words, what makes it look even more like the prostrate body of the deceased—is the practice of presenting not only the imitation of fabric, but also the belt, and in some cases also the sword or dagger, both objects belonging to, and underscoring the importance of, the deceased.47 In the two mausolea of the khans’ nearby palace in Bahçesaray, marble cenotaphs with textile-like decoration show not only a belt with sword or dagger arrangement but also steles painted in imitation of exclusive fabric patterns in the Ottoman tradition, thus exemplifying the transferability of ornamentation.48 While the parallels to fabric and textile-like ornamentation on the façade of the Crimean khans’ mausoleum are made through allusion, the discovery of textiles in the crypt in 2007 offered a new window onto the early Crimean Khanate’s material culture. The textiles discovered in the crypt must predate the mid-sixteenth century, the terminus ante quem

FIGURE 10.7

Imitation of textile on the stelae of the marble cenotaphs of Devlet Geray Sultan (1041AH/1631–32CE) and Mahmud Geray (1100AH/1688–89CE), with a representation of a dagger on the cenotaph of the former. From a mausoleum in the cemetery of the khans’ palace in Bahcesaray. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari.

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when the last burial was made, after which the crypt remained closed off for centuries until its recent rediscovery. The burial chamber contained the bodies of eighteen persons in wooden sarcophagi with covers and shrouds of excellent quality which were laid over the coffins during the funeral. Among the fabrics are silk velvets with silver and gold threads/ mesh with rich vegetal patterns; based on technical analysis, at least one of these textiles is with certainty of Italian origin.49 These textiles are of tremendous importance for two reasons: first, they furnish concrete proof for the presence and circulation of a certain kind of luxury textile in the khan’s household in that region at that time and its use in ceremonies, here the funeral rites.50 Second, they permit us to look into the representational practices of the early khanate and, as I elaborate below, its participation in a visual language in dialogue with neighboring ruling elites and even with early-modern European environments.51 The mausoleum of the first khans would probably also have had textiles arranged on its cenotaphs. Unfortunately, all the objects originally present in the mausoleum’s interior have been lost, and after restoration, only two plain cenotaphs are currently housed inside. Our knowledge is thus limited to the finds in the crypt. We can only suppose that one or several

FIGURE 10.8

Detail of a textile fragment from the crypt of the Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum, voided silk velvet with metallic thread, probably Italy, early sixteenth century. (This textile is attributed to the burial of Mengli Geray I in Gavrilyuk and İbragimova, Türbe Hana Haci Geraya, 94). © Bahçesaray Tarihi-Medeniy ve Arkeolojik Müze Koruması / Bakhchisarai Historical, Cultural and Archaeological Museum-Reserve.

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FIGURE 10.9

Detail of a silk lampas (kemhâ) textile fragment from the crypt of the Haji Geray (Mengli Geray I) Khan Mausoleum. Italy or Ottoman Turkey. First half of the sixteenth century. © Bahçesaray Tarihi-Medeniy ve Arkeolojik Müze Koruması / Bakhchisarai Historical, Cultural and Archaeological Museum-Reserve.

cenotaphs would have been present in the upper part of the edifice covered with fabrics and shrouds similar to those in the crypt, this symbolic “presence” then being visible for visitors. In the Crimean Khanate, as in most early-modern societies, clothing was the most important symbolic distinction between the ruler and his subjects, and fabrics of diverse quality and robes of honor were used as a common form of diplomatic gift and annual allocation by the Ottomans. It was also these precious clothes that visually and culturally established a relationship and dialogue within the upper strata of society and with other rulers. Textiles were among the most frequently exchanged gifts between rulers. A gift register for the year 909 AH (1503–4 CE) gives an idea of the amount, kind, and quality of different textiles and robes distributed to vassals, envoys, and representatives of foreign states by the Ottoman court that year, and also indicates the type of packaging used to present these “gifts” (irsāliye). According to this register, the Ottoman court presented Ottoman and Italian textiles of excellent quality to highly esteemed “partners” with whom it entertained diplomatic contact, as well as to its vassal principalities in the Balkans and to the Crimean khans. The amount and the quality of the allocated items and the value of the gift package expressed the regard in which the Ottomans held the recipient. According to this register, the precious fabrics given to the Crimean khan’s envoys for the khan or members of his family included different kinds of velvet, some with indications of origin (Venice, Genoa, and Bursa).52 We have here an exact date when this kind of textile was given to the khan and the princely court in Crimea, and this register entry makes it plausible that some of the fabrics found in the crypt come from this gift package. The textiles were not used primarily for cenotaph covers, but mainly for garments or decoration. Similar allocations were likely made in other years, and we may assume that the Crimean khan’s entourage would have used and displayed these items. Together with the shrouds, at least one cloak/kaftan was discovered in the crypt of the Crimean mausoleum; others could

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well have been present in the upper part on the cenotaphs.53 The origin of similar exclusive textiles found in another mausoleum nearby furnishes further evidence for their circulation in Crimea at the turn of the sixteenth century and their use in a funerary context.54 The texture-like architectural decoration, the associations through calligraphic inscriptions, and the textiles from the crypt form a multifaceted showcase for the representation of the khan and his lineage. In the last section of my chapter, I look into the larger context of this “dialogue” through precious and meaningful textiles linked to funeral monuments.

Textiles’ Larger Context: The Early-Modern World as a Universe of Portable Items and the Production of Meaning through Luxury Textiles in the Islamic and Western Worlds The travel, gifting, use, and reuse of exclusive textiles connected distant places through not just their material luxury but also their visual lavishness and obvious value. But as they were repurposed and their function was altered, the textiles gained new identities. The result was a new meaning containing associations to an earlier one, to a specific, shared dimension of visual and cultural language. Especially in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, a particular type of luxury textile, often with undulating patterns and floral and pomegranate (pinecone or artichoke) motifs, was in circulation: it appears in Renaissance art for curtains used for settings, precious clothing in portraits, and in the cloak of the Virgin Mary in religious paintings.55 Only a few examples of this type of luxury textile survive, and it is difficult to determine their place of origin; often an advanced analysis is needed to get information on their place of production, which may have been Italy (Venice, Florence, or elsewhere) or Bursa. This blurry attribution, especially for luxury textiles, is due to the common visual idiom of the early-modern period, when the Ottoman court was ordering specific types of textiles from Italy, mainly velvet lavishly decorated to suit Ottoman tastes, and the Ottoman textile mills in Bursa were producing products in the “Frankish” style to cater to Western markets.56 These precious textiles were displayed at princely ceremonies, official settings, and audiences, and clothing and robes of honor made of these exclusive fabrics were worn and later transformed into funeral covers and shrouds. This discourse of a shared visual language through textile was so important that, at times of lack of real textile, or in an architectural representational framework, pictorial imitations of these textiles were produced, sometimes in combination with real textile. Clothes and luxury dresses of the ruling Boyar families in the Balkans—mainly the Ottoman vassal principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania—were made from these textiles, and the precious fabrics were depicted in great detail in their portraits, many still extant in decorations on the walls of audience rooms in private houses, or as portraits in architectural settings in churches, funeral chapels, and tombs. In these depictions, efforts were made to show the high quality of the lavish clothes, indicating the importance attributed to these textiles. Examples include the Gothic-style tomb of the Moldavian boyar, diplomat, and statesman Luca Arbore and his wife and two sons in the Arbore (1503), and representations of Stephen the Great of Moldavia (1457–1504), an Ottoman vassal and neighbor of the Crimean Khanate, and his family in the churches of Voroneț (1488) and Pătrăuți (1487), Romania. In these examples, in addition to the pictorial representations, shrouds of the same textile were draped over the sarcophagus/ cenotaph.57 We could even speak of the realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk in these tombs, the creation of a representative showcase reflecting the owners’ position in society during their

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lifetime, and this representational dimension thus establishes parallels with Turco-Islamic mausolea. A particularly interesting example is the shroud of Maria of Mangup (d. 1477), the second wife of Stephen the Great, in the Putna Monastery (Romania). This shroud shows the deceased Maria dressed in a lavish cloak whose pattern imitates that of other luxury textiles of the period, pieces of which are preserved in the monastery and closely resemble the Frankish-style fabrics in the Crimean mausoleum. This type of representation (in the true sense of the word) is a textile, a soft-architectural, version of Western tomb effigies.58 The shroud links Western funeral sculpture as effigy and the Turco-Islamic funeral tradition of symbolically representing the deceased’s body through fabrics and other belongings like belts, daggers, swords, and headgear. All these types of funeral arrangements are an effort to commemorate and represent the deceased. Through the textile imitation, Maria’s shroud establishes a concrete link to the crypt of the khans’ mausoleum. Only a few textiles of this type have survived, mostly repurposed and often only as small pieces, as parts of liturgical vestments in monastery collections, as shrouds, or as parts of church equipment. Besides the fabrics in the Crimean mausoleum, examples exist in the collection of Santa Maria Novella in Florence; shrouds in the Putna Monastery; and, most importantly, in the funeral monument of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III (r. 1452–93) in Vienna, where an investigation into the crypt has revealed the existence

FIGURE 10.10

A AND 10.10B The tomb of the Moldavian boyar, diplomat, and statesman Luca Arbore, in Arbore, Romania. Portrait with his wife and two sons, displaying lavish Italian textile patterns (1503). General view and detail. Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari.

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FIGURE 10.11

Imitation of luxury textile from a detail of a representation showing the Moldavian ruler Stephen the Great, his wife Maria of Wallachia, and his sons Alexandru and Bogdan. Wall painting in the church of Voroneț, Romania (1488, painting dated to 1498). Photo: Nicole Kançal-Ferrari. For the complete painting, see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stefan_cel_Mare_and_family.jpg.

of this kind of textile.59 The importance of the textiles from the crypt of the Crimean mausoleum, besides their being among the few examples of real textiles from the era that have survived intact, lies in their witness to this shared visualization of the luxury culture of the period’s ruling elite.

Conclusion The mausoleum of the first Crimean khans furnishes an excellent example of the sorts of insights that may be gleaned through an examination of the complex interplay of architecture, artistic allusions, and real objects. The monument and its complex ornamentation lie at the intersection of various cultural and visual traditions and escape strict categorization. On the one hand, the architectural decoration of the khans’ mausoleum continues the pre- and early-modern Turco-Islamic visual tradition of funeral architecture, confirming and displaying the rulers’ worldly power, position in society, and dynastic claim in conjunction with reference to the afterlife. As I have shown here, textiles and textile aesthetics in the form of tent-like structures, banners, and sarcophagus and cenotaph covers, shrouds, and

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clothes linked architecture and the deceased’s body, fusing them into a display of the ruler’s worldly power, success, and final merit for his deeds in the name of religion by creating artistic connections and visual allusions to the Islamic heartland and other dominant cultural centers. Such textiles, many bearing meaningful inscriptions, also likely served as portable models through which these connections were rendered visually in architectural form. Yet the mausoleum, and especially the textiles in its crypt, also testifies to a shared cultural imagination beyond political borders within the princely environment in earlymodern Europe, where luxury textiles were among the primary agents of artistic transfers and producers of meaning. The textiles from the mausoleum’s crypt embody Renaissance (including Turco-Islamic, mainly Ottoman) visualities, linking the early khans not only to Ottoman vassals in southeastern Europe but also to states further west, including the Holy Roman Empire, thus pointing to the broad reach of the era’s textile culture and to the shared forms of cultural meaning-making of which it was part. Together with the famous Renaissance-style portal of the khan’s palace, the mausoleum thus exemplifies the cultural eclecticism and openness of early modernity.

Notes 1 An early version of this paper was presented as “The Ruler’s Clothes Turned into Stone: Textile Patterns on Muslim Funeral Architecture in the Example of the First Crimean Khans’ Mausoleum” at the Woven Spaces: Building with Textile in Islamic Architecture session of the 2018 CAA (College Art Association) conference, Los Angeles, 22–24 February 2018. I would like to thank Patricia Blessing, the chair of the session and co-editor of this volume, and her fellow co-editors Didem Ekici and Basile Baudez for inviting me to prepare this expanded version of the paper. 2 A detailed account of the mausoleum’s restoration, the items found in the crypt, and relevant scholarship is given in Nadiya Avksentiyevna Gavrilyuk and Aliye Mustafakızı İbragimova, Türbe Hana Haci Geraya (po materialam arheologiçeskih issledovaniy (2003–2008 gg.) (Kyiv Dyke Pole, 2010); see especially page 94 for a list of the attributed burials in the crypt and their tentative dates. 3 For these visualities, see Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, “An Italian Renaissance Gate for the Khan: Visual Culture in Early Modern Crimea,” Muqarnas 34 (2017): 85–123, https://doi. org/10.1163/22118993_03401p005; and Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, “Transcultural Ornamentation and Heraldic Symbols: An Investigation into the Aesthetic Language of the Architecture and Artistic Environment in Early Modern Crimea and the Northern Black Sea Shore (Thirteenth–Sixteenth Centuries),” in The Land between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300–1700, ed. Alina Payne (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 152–76, https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004515468_009. For the early period of the Crimean Khanate, see Hakan Kırımlı, Geraylar ve Osmanlılar: Kırım Hanlık Hânedânının Osmanlı Devleti’ndeki Hikâyesi (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2022), 25–78. 4 Hakan Kırımlı and Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, eds., Kırım’daki Kırım Tatar (Türk-Islâm) Mimarî ­Yadigârları, 2nd ed. (Ankara: YTB, 2021), 496–503. 5 Yaşar Coruhlu, “Kurgan ve Çadır (Yurt)’dan Kümbet ve Türbeye Geçiş,” Geçmişten Günümüze Mezarlık Kültürü ve İnsan Hayatına Etkileri Sempozyumu, 18–20 Aralık 1998 (Istanbul: Mezarlıklar Vakfı Yayınları, 1999), 47–62. 6 For an illustrated Ottoman example, see Kançal-Ferrari, “An Italian Renaissance Gate for the Khan,” fig. 24. 7 Bernard O’Kane, “From Tents to Pavilions: Royal Mobility and Persian Palace Design,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 249–68; Nurhan Atasoy, Otağ-ı Hümayun: Osmanlı Çadırları (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2000). 8 Turgay Yazar, “Osmanlı Defin Merasimlerinde Otağ Kurma Geleneği,” Belleten 78, no. 281 (April, 2014): 93–122. For the posthumous construction of mausolea, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “Dynastic Imprints on the Cityscape: The Collective Message of Funerary Imperial Mosque

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9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23

Complexes in Istanbul,” in Colloque Internationale: Cimetières et traditions funéraires dans le monde islamique, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1996), 27–29. Also see Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ, XVI. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Devleti’nde Cülûs ve Cenaze Törenleri (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 1999), esp. 131 (fig. 45) for the tent over the grave of Sultan Süleyman I, from an illustration in the Süleymanname, 987/1579–80, CBL Ms. 413, fol. 115v. Gülru Necipoğlu, “Early Modern Floral: The Agency of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Cultures,” Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 132–55, 367–73; Amanda Phillips, Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 64–71. Gavrilyuk and Ibragimova, Türbe Hana Haci Geraya, 61–62. Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, eds., Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 216. For the versality of fabric and architecture in the Islamic world, see also Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World, ed. Eva Hoffman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 97–114. For a study of examples of the contemporary Renaissance, see Alina Payne, “Wrapped in Fabric: Florentine Facades, Mediterranean Textiles and A-Tectonic Ornament in the Renaissance,” in Histories of Ornament, 274–89. For Timurid façade design, see David J. Roxburgh, “Timurid Architectural Revetment in Central Asia, 1370–1430: The Mimeticism of Mosaic Faience,” in Histories of Ornament, 116–29; and for early Ottoman architecture, see Patricia Blessing, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 80–85. Lentz and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, 189–221. Kançal-Ferrari, “An Italian Renaissance Gate,” 93–99; Tatiana Sizonenko, “Romes Outside of Italy,” in The Land between Two Seas, 177–99, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004515468_010 Vera-Simone Schulz, “Crossroads of Cloth: Textile Arts and Aesthetics in and beyond the Medieval Islamic World,” Perspective 1 (2016): 93–108. While underscoring the importance of textile in the Turco-Islamic world, Schulz raises the question of “how far these patterns were associated with textiles and how far textiles, as highly portable artifacts, simply functioned as transmitters of patterns and ornamentation from one medium to another,” 100–5. See also Anna Contadini, “Threads of Ornament in the Style World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Histories of Ornament, 290–308. For Mamluk textiles, see Louise W. Mackie, Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th–21st Century (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015), 241–75. See the comprehensive inventory of Quranic inscriptions by Erica Cruikshank Dodd and Shereen Khairallah, The Image of the Word: A Study of Quranic Verses in Islamic Architecture, vol. 2 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981). The first four verses of Sura al-Fath and the first part of the fifth, 48: 1–5. Al-Saff, 61:13. See also Figure 7.4 in Kançal-Ferrari, “Transcultural Ornamentation and Heraldic Symbols.” See Dodd and Khairallah, The Image of the Word, 118–22, for examples mainly from the fourteenth and especially the late-fifteenth centuries. For the few pre-Ottoman and Ottoman examples in Anatolia, see Murat Sülün, Sanat Eserine Vurulan Kur’an Mührü (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 2006), 519–20. For a discussion of Sura al-Fath on monuments in Cairo, see Dina Montasser, “Modes of Utilizi ng Quranic Inscriptions on Cairene Mamluk Religious Monuments,” in Creswell Photographs Re-examined: New Perspectives on Islamic Architecture, ed. Bernard O’Kane (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 187–218. Cruikshank Dodd and Khairallah, The Image of the Word, 132. Özalp Gökbilgin, Târih-i Sâhip Girây Hân, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Mahmet Veli Menger Vakfı, 2000), 55 (P28b). For a discussion of the complicated status of the Crimean Khanate vis-à-vis the Ottomans and its behavior as independent state even after becoming part of the Ottoman world, see Natalia Królikowska, “Sovereignty and Subordination in Crimean-Ottoman Relations (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” in The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kunčević (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 43–65; and Kırımlı, Geraylar ve Osmanlılar, 146–66.

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Kırımlı, Hakan. Geraylar ve Osmanlılar: Kırım Hanlık Hânedânının Osmanlı Devleti’ndeki Hikâyesi. Istanbul: Ötüken, 2022. Kırımlı, Hakan, and Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, eds. Kırım’daki Kırım Tatar (Türk-Islâm) Mimarî Yadigârları. 2nd ed. Ankara: YTB, 2021. Królikowska, Natalia. “Sovereignty and Subordination in Crimean-Ottoman Relations (Sixteenth– Eighteenth Centuries).” In The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kunčević, 43–65. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Kurtoğlu, Fevzi. Türk Bayrağı ve Ay-Yıldız. 3rd ed. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1992. Lenz, Thomas W., and Glenn D. Lowry. Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Mackie, Louise W. Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th–21st Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2015. Monnas, Lisa. Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1500. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Montasser, Dina. “Modes of Utilizing Quranic Inscriptions on Cairene Mamluk Religious ­Monuments.” In Creswell Photographs Re-examined: New Perspectives on Islamic Architecture, edited by Bernard O’Kane, 187–218. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009. Muhanna, Elias I. “The Sultan’s New Clothes: Ottoman–Mamluk Gift Exchange in the Fifteenth Century.” Muqarnas 27 (2011): 189–208. Necipoğlu, Gülru. The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “Dynastic Imprints on the Cityscape: The Collective Message of Funerary Imperial Mosque Complexes in Istanbul.” In Colloque Internationale: Cimetières et traditions funéraires dans le monde islamique, edited by Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, 23–36. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1996. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “Early Modern Floral: The Agency of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Cultures.” In Histories of Ornament: Between Local and Global, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, 132–55. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Necipoğlu, Gülru, and Alina Payne, eds. Histories of Ornament: Between Local and Global. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. O’Kane, Bernard. “From Tents to Pavilions: Royal Mobility and Persian Palace Design.” In Pre-modern Islamic Palaces, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu, special issue, Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 249–68. Payne, Alina. “Wrapped in Fabric: Florentine Facades, Mediterranean Textiles and A-Tectonic Ornament in the Renaissance.” In Histories of Ornament: Between Local and Global, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, 274–89. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Phillips, Amanda. Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. ­Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Roxburgh, David J. “Timurid Architectural Revetment in Central Asia, 1370–1430: The M imeticism of Mosaic Faience.” In Histories of Ornament: Between Local and Global, edited by Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, 116–31. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Schmitz-von Ledebur, Katja. “Samad, seiden guldener tucher: Textilien im Hochgrab Kaiser Friedrichs III.” In In Hoc Precioso Monomento: Die Bestattung Kaiser Friedrichs III. im Wiener Stephansdom, edited by Frank Kirchweger, Katja Schmitz-Von Ledebur, Heinz Winter, and Franz Zehetner, 199–219. Vienna: Holzhausen, 2019. Schulz, Vera-Simone. “Crossroads of Cloth: Textile Arts and Aesthetics in and beyond the Medieval Islamic World.” Perspective 1 (2016): 93–108. Shalem, Avinoam. “The Body of Architecture: The Early History of the Clothing of the Sacred House of the Kaʿba in Mecca.” In Clothing the Sacred: Medieval Textiles as Fabric, Form, and Metaphor, edited by Mateusz Kapustka and Warren T. Woodfin, 173–87. Berlin: Edition Imorde, 2015. Sizonenko, Tatiana. “Romes Outside of Italy.” In The Land between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, 1300–1700, edited by Alina Payne, 177–99. Leiden: Brill, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004515468_010.

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Slade, Sir Adolphus. Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c. and of a Cruise in the Black Sea, with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1830, and 1831, vol. 1. London: Saunders and Otley, 1833. Sülün, Murat. Sanat Eserine Vurulan Kur’an Mührü. Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 2006. Székely, Maria Magdalena, and Ştefan S. Gorovei. Maria Asanina Paleologhina: O prinţesă bizantină pe tronul Moldovei. Suceava: Sfânta Mânăstire Putna, 2006. Tarım Ertuğ, Zeynep. XVI. yüzyıl Osmanlı Devleti’nde Cülûs ve Cenaze Törenleri. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1999. Teplyakova, Anastassia N. “Fragmenty Barkhata iz Mavzoleya v Khanly-Dere (Bakhchisaray).” Восток (Oriens) 5 (2016): 137–52. Tezcan, Hülya. Sacred Covers of Islam’s Holy Shrines with Samples from Topkapı Palace. Istanbul: Masa, 2017. Tezcan, Hülya, and Turgay Tezcan. Türk Sancak Alemleri. Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 1992. Van Steenbergen, Jo. “Ritual, Politics, and the City in Mamluk Cairo: The Bayna l-Qaṣrayn as a Mamluk ‘Lieu de Mémoire,’ 1250–1382.” In Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean, edited by Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou, and Maria Parani, 227–76. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Yazar, Turgay. “Osmanlı Defin Merasimlerinde Otağ Kurma Geleneği.” Belleten 78, no. 281 (April 2014): 93–122.

11 A TENTED BAROQUE Ottoman Fabric (and) Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century Ashley Dimmig

Over the course of the Ottoman Empire (circa 1299–1922), extravagantly decorated tents functioned as a form of monumental yet portable imperial architecture. Pitching appliquéd and embroidered fabric edifices marked special occasions, at which time tents acted to promote the power and might of the empire for both local and international audiences. In the last century and a half of Ottoman rule, as sultans faced shrinking territories, exciting new technologies, challenging political movements, and an otherwise changing world, they continued to employ monumental and highly ornamental tents. While their continued use was built on longstanding Turko-Islamic tent histories, the mutable socio-political contexts of this period added new layers of meaning to imperial fabric architecture which themselves exhibited a much broader aesthetic and material repertoire. For these reasons, I look to Linda Darling’s periodization of Ottoman history to frame the analysis of tents in this period. Darling terms this era as one of transformation, which “allows for the concurrent occurrence of several types of change”1—politically, socially, and artistically. Her brief note on the art and architecture of this period illuminates the character of the age further: [A]t least one of the changes of the Tulip Period proved to be permanent: the transformation in artistic styles. The baroque Ottoman art of the eighteenth century was a real departure from the past; it was not merely an imitation of a foreign style but a merging of new techniques and motifs with an existing tradition to create something genuinely novel with a lasting development of its own.2 Indeed, it is this definition of the baroque that is justly applicable to the study of fabric architecture in the late Ottoman period, at a time when new and experimental styles of architectural forms and decorative modes abounded, and dynamic and illusionistic representations of fabric appeared in various forms. Representations of draped curtains became a popular motif—whether painted on stucco, carved out of marble, or stitched in silk. Concave surfaces of dome interiors and recessed niches were painted with trompe l’oeil canopies. The eaves of various small-scale structures appear to undulate and their façades fold and unfurl

DOI: 10.4324/9781003281276-15

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as though in perpetual motion. Taken together, these features imitating fabric—particularly its materiality and movement—bespeak a subgenre of Ottoman imperial architecture that may be considered a kind of tented baroque.

Fabric (and) Architecture The architectural endeavors of the Ottoman sultans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been garnering more attention in scholarship in the last decade—a trend which in part has served to correct earlier biases and also recast architecture of this period in rather more favorable terms of international styles, and innovation, and experimentation, as opposed to being derivative of European architectural styles, including the baroque. In her analysis of eighteenth-century architectural trends, Shirine Hamadeh cites contemporary Ottoman written sources that laud new constructions for their novelty or “new style” (nev-icad), wherein styles from both east and west were amalgamated.3 Ünver Rüstem, on the other hand, reaffirms the empire’s strategic use of westernizing stylistic modes in eighteenth-century imperial mosque complexes, as a declaration of identity and power that speaks to both local and international audiences alike: “Always creatively recast according to local concerns, such borrowings allowed patrons and artists to refashion Istanbul as a modern city boasting a globally resonant yet recognizably Ottoman mode of architecture.”4 Analogously, the tented baroque adapts novel motifs and visual modes that may have originated in Europe, but so thoroughly incorporates them into Ottoman architecture that they become characteristically Ottoman—most especially through the language of fabric and fabric architecture. As with contemporary architecture, novelty is lauded and even explicitly requested for imperial tents. Archival sources dating from the first half of the nineteenth century record requests for tents to be made for the sultan in a “new style” (using the same terminology used to describe contemporary permanent architecture). For example, a document dated 1215 AH (1800 CE) records a request (ruk‘a) for the construction (inşa) of 200 new-style tents (nev-icad çerge) among other types (e.g., sekban çerge).5 The language is quite formulaic, as similar requests employing the same terminology and syntax also survive that date to the first half of the nineteenth century. The term nev-icad is employed so loosely that at first one might be inclined to think that the term denotes a new structural type of tent. However, in the material and visual records, there is no indication of a new form of tent invented in this period. Rather, new decorative modes, materials, and techniques proliferated. What constitutes this “new style” is not even vaguely articulated in these documents. Therefore, the extant objects constitute the primary body of evidence for understanding the phenomenon of innovation in fabric architecture.6 One of the novel trends that appear across various architectural media in this period are illusionistic representations of textile furnishings and draped fabric. It is this intersection of fabric and architecture that epitomizes the tented baroque. Many scholars have discussed the primacy of textiles as an art form and their relationship with architecture in the Islamic world and beyond.7 Lisa Golombek has argued that the art and architecture of Islamic cultures reflect a “textile mentality.” She argues not only that textiles themselves were integral to society and court life, but that the properties of textiles informed visual culture more broadly. She demonstrates this notion by outlining the ways in which textile motifs and woven structures were transported to other media, as in the

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prevalence of bands of inscription across media that simulate tiraz textiles, or, the cladding of structures in ornamental brickwork known as hazarbaf (literally, “thousand weaves”) that mimics the intersections of warp and weft.8 However, while Golombek refers to this textile-centricity as the “draped universe of Islam,” she does not address the movement and materiality of fabric—that is, its drape—as represented in other media. Yet, this characteristic of fabric was key to its versatility and ubiquity. In the Ottoman long nineteenth century, it is precisely the drape of textiles that take pride of place as a motif in imperial architecture. In light of this, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “ fold” he uses to explain the visual and spatial characteristics of the baroque such as dynamic movement is particularly apt in the Ottoman case and the tented baroque in particular. According to Deleuze: The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. …the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them into infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque unfurls all the way to infinity.9 The fold, in Deleuzian terms, combines materiality and movement in space. The textile medium, through its malleability, movement, and drape, has the ability to create and manipulate space and as such, epitomizes Deleuze’s notion of the fold. Moreover, Tristan Weddigen offers a perspective that recognizes the inherent ambiguity of the textile medium as both planar and spatial, further supporting the link between fabric (and) architecture and characteristics of the baroque. Weddigen notes that “the textile medium, which is flat, material, and ornamental… creates a physical, aesthetic, and social space by means of folding and unfurling.”10 In other words, the materiality and movement of textiles allows them to activate and sculpt space, a characteristic central to baroque architecture. Through reconsideration of the prominence and efflorescence of fabric architecture in the late Ottoman built environment, this chapter provides new insight into Ottoman imperial architecture writ large. Close examination of extant tents in conjunction with permanent structures reveals a melding of architectural media in the long nineteenth century with fabric at center stage. The ways in which this ambiguation of fabric and architecture manifests varies, depending on the location and function of the building.11 Interior decoration that features representations of opened curtains and pitched canopies dissolves the boundary between interior and exterior, at a time when monumental neoclassical structures dominated palatial architecture. Through illusionistic murals, the experience of being outdoors in a tent was brought inside. This shift may be seen as an adaptation of the garden-centric layout of Topkapı Palace that in turn was likened to an encampment.12 Beyond the centuries-long dialogue between palaces and imperial tents that evinces mutual forms, functions, environs, and styles, the novel illusionistic depictions in architectural interiors of the nineteenth century that create virtual space also build on the longstanding significance of the gaze in Ottoman imperial architecture.13 In other words, in the new forms of imperial architecture built in the long nineteenth century, the virtual veranda supplanted or paralleled the literal ones characteristic of earlier palaces, particularly Topkapı. Fabric in the form of curtains, doorway covers, as well as canopies and awnings mark the liminal or transitional zones between indoors and outdoors in various architectural cultures, yet in the case of Ottoman architecture in this period, representations of draped fabric were similarly utilized to indicate that precipice in virtual space as well.

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At the same time, other kinds of small-scale permanent structures situated around the capital city of Istanbul mimicked tent forms. These structures also paralleled the conventional functions of fabric architecture, consciously building on the historical and cultural signification of tents, whose meanings were as malleable as the material out of which they were fashioned. Calling upon the deep histories of textile arts and architecture in Ottoman lands, these new motifs in architectural form and decoration served to localize international styles such as the baroque, and in so doing, rooted these new styles in distinctly Ottoman architectural idioms and imperial identity.

Draped Interiors and Canopied Domes In the Ottoman court, textiles and soft furnishings had always been a significant part of the built environment—from the abundant use of cushions and curtains in permanent architecture to the otağ-ı hümayun (royal tent encampment) serving as an entire palace made of fabric. Early modern depictions of tents in manuscript paintings as well as surviving tents from this period demonstrate a connection between fabric and permanent architecture in the decoration adorning the fabric interiors. Tents were embellished almost exclusively with architectonic compositions comprising appliquéd arcades populated by lobed medallions (şemses) and covered in flat, stylized floral motifs.14 At the same time, the suggestion of volume in the form of textiles in motion altered the real and virtual space of the tent wall. For example, illusionistic draped curtains adorn formerly bare appliquéd archways, dancing ribbons and buoyant tassels create dynamic movement, and heavy swags of garland seem to pull away from the surface, as though floating on the precipice of the fabric picture plane. While still beholden to an architectonic program, representations of fabric and soft furnishings abound in imperial tents. The draped curtain motif features prominently on a number of extant tents dating from the long nineteenth century. Two silk double-columned tents now in the Topkapı Palace Museum were made of brightly colored silk with a crimson ground and golden yellow columns dressed with voluminous draped curtains (Figure 11.1). Both the walls and roofs of the matching tents feature the same overall design as each arch features a traditional şemse lobed medallion, except for the few hazines (sections) that are pierced with windows or doors.15 Struts are placed in vertical sleeves along the length of the wall in equal intervals, at the juncture of hazines. The decorative program conforms to the hazine, by masking the seams with appliquéd columns, and strategically employing the functional struts to give form and volume to the otherwise flat, ornamental columns. Thus, the decorative program of Ottoman imperial tents does not merely mimic or represent permanent architecture in appliquéd form: it melds structure and decoration, surface and form. The curtains, executed in the same yellow silk as the appliquéd columns, likewise are adorned in stylized vegetal and floral motifs, which makes them stand out in contrast against the bold crimson, but otherwise unadorned silk ground. Because the curtain is “pulled aside” and affixed to the column on either edge of each hazine, even without volumetric illusion in the form of highlights and shadows, the drawn curtain seemingly reveals a space beyond the tent wall. The framing of negative space with columns and curtains suggests an openness, hinting at a pictorial depth, and in so doing, suggests a breaking of the boundary defined by the tent wall itself.

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FIGURE 11.1

Tent wall with “draped curtain” motifs, eighteenth or nineteenth century, silk, appliqué and embroidery, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, inv. no. 29–8, © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National Palace Administration.

The inclusion of appliquéd draped curtains creates a virtual space that was not a part of the conventional visual repertoire of imperial tents of previous centuries. Since the Imperial Tent Corps was also responsible for outfitting royal structures and vehicles (e.g., pavilions, caïques, and carriages) with curtains and other soft furnishings, the inclusion of depictions of these kinds of objects evinces an awareness of the meta-representation of textiles in a textile medium.16 Textiles represented in fabric architecture defy or even deconstruct textiles’ seemingly paradoxical modes of being, as proposed by Tristan Weddigen—that is, textiles are at once both planar and spatial.17 The tent literally creates space each time it is erected, but the interior decoration also has the ability to alter the perception of that space. This ambiguation of real and virtual space stands in contrast to the assertion often repeated in twentieth-century scholarship on Ottoman architecture of this period that the spatial qualities of European baroque architecture were not understood or were ineptly copied in Ottoman contexts.18 The motif of drawn curtains appears in the decorative programs of permanent architecture as well. For instance, the dome of the Büyük Mecidiye Camii (Ortaköy Mosque) features illusionistic arches draped in painted curtains. Commissioned by Sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61) and constructed by Nikoğos Balyan in 1854–55, the Ortaköy Mosque’s recently restored painted decoration opens the space to the sea and sky beyond (Figure 11.2).19 In addition to their perspectival rendering, the murals’ illusion is dependent upon their placement within the structure—that is, they are oriented skyward—lending a degree of

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believability to the painted artifice and allowing for the viewer’s gaze to penetrate the walls. The murals suggest not only the ability to see-in, but also see through the solid architecture.20 The effect is further enhanced by the building’s locale on the waterfront.21 Large windows look out onto the lapping waves of the Bosphorus, while the dome’s murals allow the viewer to imagine seeing through the ceiling as well. The interior ornamentation applied in tents achieves this ambiguity between real and virtual space in a relatively similar manner. In Ottoman imperial tents, the curtains “draped” along the serialized appliquéd arches at times frame pierced windows as in Figure 1, or, in other instances, frame embroidered depictions of nature seemingly in the distance, as will be seen in the next example. A suite of canary yellow silk tents dating to the first half of the nineteenth century exhibit a variant on this theme of appliquéd arches with drawn curtains wherein the architectural and fabric motifs merge into a single form. The largest among the group was erected with two columns and is oblong in footprint with a large trapezoidal frontal eave, but a wall section from the smaller matching marquee more clearly illustrates the pictorial program (Figure 11.3). Around the interior circumference, the traditional series of arches has transformed into an amalgam of fabric-centric baroque ornament. The length of the wall is divided by appliquéd and embroidered columns that sit upon ornate bases but terminate abruptly at the upper frieze. The architectonic forms that dominated tent interiors of

FIGURE 11.2

Büyük Mecidiye Camii and its interior decoration and illusionistic draped curtains, commissioned by Abdülmecid, architects Garabet Balyan and Nikoğos Balyan, 1853–1856, Ortaköy, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig.

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previous centuries here have metamorphosed into undulating ribbon-like curtains that are affixed to a central point and to either side of the would-be arch. The columns’ serpentine forms are similarly set in motion, resembling those of baroque structures such as St. Peter’s Baldachin, designed by Bernini in the seventeenth century, not to mention the ancient Serpent Column in the Hippodrome in Istanbul. In fact, the tent poles used to erect this fabric structure may also have exhibited such visual motion, several of which survive in the Military Museum in Istanbul collections. They are carved from wood with areas of paint and gilding patterning the serpentine form. The twisting motion of the appliquéd columns is carried over to the decorative elements populating the negative space created by the fabric arches. At each point of fixity, the curtain is tied in a knot that resembles a rose. These points are further adorned with embroidered representations of golden bouncing cords terminating in tassels. Their directionality corresponds to the orientation of the composition when the tent was erected, and yet, like the serpentine columns and buoyant curtains, the tassels seem to move freely in space. While still rather schematic in their unnatural symmetry, the form and movement of these motifs create a sense of volume and depth. The undulating columns and fabric curtains alike exist in the liminal space between the shallow pictorial recess and pushing out into the viewer’s own space. The floral and arboreal motifs situated beneath these ribbon-arches add another layer to the sense of pictorial depth.22 In this space stands a delicately rendered cypress tree,

FIGURE 11.3

Four-columned marquee, first half nineteenth century, silk and metallic threads, appliqué and embroidery, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, inv. no. TSM 29–33, 29–34, 29–58, © Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Presidency of National Palace Administration.

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recognizable by its distinct tapered silhouette (see Figure 11.3). Growing out of a mound of earth composed of a patchwork of embroidered earth tones, the tree is flanked by two smaller shrubs. The cypress takes the place of the traditional şemse, existing in almost the exact footprint of a classical stylized lobed medallion, pervasive in earlier tents. Unlike a şemse, though, the tree is grounded in the picture plane. Its scale suggests it exists in the distance and is spied by the viewer though the fabric-framed picture plane. In this way, the arboreal motifs add a layer of pictorial depth to the panoramic composition. The aforementioned illusionistic fabric motifs—including draped curtains, dancing ribbons, and buoyant golden tassels—are merely one manifestation of the aesthetic dialogue between fabric furnishings, tents, and imperial architecture in this period of Ottoman architectural history. While tents bear large-scale architectural motifs such as appliquéd arcades, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, permanent architecture also at times was painted to resemble tents. A potential precedent for this trend can be found on the interior of the domed türbe of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17), built 1609–16. The dome’s interior is covered in a radial chevron pattern that closely resembles the same pattern that marked the sultan’s imperial tent, and which can be seen on a number of surviving tents.23 Furthermore, the chevron türbe dome mirrors the pattern woven in silk and draped over the pitched form of royal cenotaphs within the structure.24 Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth century, however, pictorial techniques such as trompe l’oeil were employed to create the illusion of a tent or canopy within permanent architecture. Rather than simply reflecting a shared visual repertoire of patterns and motifs, such as the chevron, here the properties of fabric are imitated in other architectural media. For example, the Çapanoğlu mosque built in 1779 in the central Anatolian city of Yozgat and which was restored in the Hamidian period (1876–1909), features two ceilings, one domed, painted to resemble a tented interior (Figure 11.4).25 The wedges that comprise the canopy are adorned with small floral patterns, narrow bands, and calligraphic medallions. The visual effect that transforms the domed interior into a fabric canopy relies on the use of light and shade, especially around the base of the dome. Here, the otherwise relatively stylized ornament transforms into a tent as the radial lines become struts between which fabric is stretched. The hazines seem to billow as though caught by a gust of wind, revealing a sliver of deep space behind. The artists played with the curved picture plane of the dome to create an illusion of being inside an ornate tent.26 The illusionism does not create deep space, but instead transforms the stone and plaster into fabric architecture, thus blurring architectural media through mimesis and illusionistic representation in a localized Ottoman iteration of di sotto in su ceiling in the Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace in Mantua, Italy, by Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1431–1506). Rather than the painted artifice suggesting the opening of the dome, though, in rooms painted with illusionistic canopies, the solid surface dissolves into a billowing canopy made of fabric. Fabric played a key role in the architectural decoration of both imperial tents and permanent structures built or renovated in the long nineteenth century. Illusionistic techniques such as trompe l’oeil were employed not only to create a sense of pictorial depth, but to transform space into a new kind of “draped universe.” In this way, Weddigen’s assertion that textiles create an “immersive concept and experience of space” may be applied to fabric and permanent architecture that mimic tents or represent various kinds of textile furnishings through optical effects in this period of Ottoman architectural history.27 More than the process of transporting patterns from fabric to architecture or adopting and adapting motifs

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FIGURE 11.4

Tent-painted ceiling (Hamidian period), Çapanoğlu mosque, 1779, Yozgat. Photo: Emily Neumeier.

from European baroque sources of inspiration, images of draped fabric in Ottoman imperial architecture in the long nineteenth century played with real and virtual space to create an embodied, all-encompassing pictorial space that builds on longstanding architectural traditions and questions the very nature and materiality of architecture. Thus, the interplays between fabric, tents, and architecture moved beyond merely parallel functions and similar spatial configurations. Their interior surfaces called to one another: tents are adorned with architectonic decorative programs and permanent structures are painted to resemble fabric canopies. In this way, the visual vocabulary of the baroque was emphatically Ottomanized.

Undulating Eaves and Folding Roofs It is not only in the interior decoration of permanent and fabric architecture where intersections of media occur. The exterior forms of permanent structures such as fountains, pavilions, kiosks, and imperial thresholds also mimicked fabric architecture. In some cases, they even physically melded fabric and hard architecture, as in the Perdeli (“Curtained”) Kiosk adjacent to the no longer extant Sadabad Palace in the valley of Kağıthane. Both the eighteenth-century kiosk and its nineteenth-century replacement were partly composed of fabric, and thus literally combined different media in order to create an adaptable yet semi-permanent architectural form.28 The convertible, malleable nature of the Perdeli Kiosk—also called “Çadır Köşkü” (Tent Kiosk)—is illustrated in a nineteenth-century photograph surviving in the Abdülhamid II albums (Figure 11.5). The large curtains were rolled up and down to create varying levels of light and shade, as well as visibility and

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privacy. Moreover, they are placed between thin columns in much the same way as hazines are formed by the space between the upright struts in imperial tents.29 Nebahat Avcıoğlu discusses this kiosk in her study of turquerie architecture in the gardens of western Europe, noting its “wavy ornamental roof,” and remarking that “perhaps this time it was meant to recall not Topkapı but the even earlier Ottoman encampment tradition, which had in effect given birth to the architectural style of Topkapı itself!”30 It is important to consider, though, that this dialogue between architectural media that indeed continued for centuries, was not an unconscious cycle. Rather, the appearance of tent-like kiosks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evinces a conscious deployment of past and present architectural styles and forms. In addition to the practice of looking to external architectural inspirations, which were then adopted, adapted, and amalgamated in this period, tents and textiles were a part of the local, Ottoman architectural repertoire that therefore claimed them these new styles as their own. Further examples allow for a delving into the significance of imperial tents and their strategic imitation in more permanent architectural structures. The Alay Pavilion (Procession Kiosk) is situated adjacent to Topkapı Palace, at the corner of the exterior wall of Gülhane Park and positioned aloft vis-à-vis the passerby (Figure 11.6). Commissioned by Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), this pavilion replaced a sixteenth-century structure. The roof ’s exaggerated

FIGURE 11.5

Perdeli Kiosk with curtains in Kağıthane, “Vue du Perdeli-Kiosque”, nineteenth century, İstanbul Üniversitesi Rare Works Library Yıldız Albums, inv. no. 90489-0004.

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ogival form, swells and slopes as though made of fabric. In fact, the elevated vantage point and bulbous roof have parallels in fabric architecture, as depicted in the Surname-i Vehbi of 1720, a manuscript detailing the magnificent festival held in honor of the circumcision of the sons of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–30), which was masterfully illustrated by the court painter Abdulcelil Levni (d. 1732).31 Here the platform with a billowing canopy depicted by Levni elevated the sultan and other important personages in a manner that simultaneously allowed them a privileged vantage point and strategically framed them for viewing by the masses in attendance. Indeed, such reciprocal viewing through fabric architecture is one of the prime uses for tents in the Ottoman Empire, built upon earlier and also contemporary Islamic fabric architecture, such as the Timurids and Mughals, as well as Byzantine court traditions. For example, Edward Daniel Clarke, traveling in the early nineteenth century gives an account of the opening ceremonies of the Bayram holiday, when he sees the sultan on the shore, framed by a tent or kiosk—an architectural ambiguity that should be noted. When the ceremony concluded, the Grand Signior, accompanied by the principal officers of state went to exhibit himself in a kiosk, or tent, near to the Seraglio Point, sitting on a sofa of silver. We were enabled to view this singular instance of parade, from a boat stationed near the place; and, after the Sultan retired, were permitted to examine the splendid pageant brought out for the occasion.32 The sultan sitting enthroned in his ornate tent on the shore of the historic peninsula allowed the sovereign an uninterrupted view of his immediate domain. But surveying the city from this privileged spot also put him on display, so that passersby in boats could return his gaze, observing the sultan framed by his tent. The fabric structure, then, simultaneously marked a physical and social boundary, and also enabled reciprocal viewing that crossed that invisible yet palpable barrier, akin to the optical effects achieved in illusionistic representations of fabric, situated on the precipice of the picture plane, that allowed for an imagined but not literal seeing through of solid walls. These novel motifs built on the forms and functions of fabric architecture and soft furnishings, particularly the ways in which textiles were able manipulate vision and visibility through alteration of both real and virtual space. Like the lofty fabric structure depicted in Levni’s paintings, and like Clarke’s description of the sultan in his tent at Bayram festivities, the Alay Pavilion allowed the sultan to see and be seen through staged architecture, whether made of fabric or made to resemble fabric. The interior decoration of the Alay Pavilion also resembles a tent or canopy with its radial ribs and stylized ornament. Thin columns surmounted by lobed arches that frame pierced windows heighten the resemblance to an imperial tent, with its appliquéd arcades and grilled windows. Also akin to the kiosk(s) at Sadabad, the tent-like pavilion exists in a liminal space between the palatial gardens and the world beyond, a boundary which is then crossed by the reciprocal gaze of the pavilion’s inhabitants and the people below.33 Similarly, Milinda Banerjee terms the exchange of gazes between subjects and sultan “ocular sovereignty.” In his discussion of a visit paid to Bengal by the Prince of Wales in the nineteenth century, Banerjee notes that “the sight of the prince would bind ruler and ruled,” which in the Ottoman case was often mediated by architecture and in particular, imperial tents or structures meant to imitate tents.34 Away from the historic peninsula on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus are two more kiosks that resemble tents turned to stone. Situated directly on the water’s edge, two pavilions

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FIGURE 11.6

A lay Pavilion (Procession Kiosk), commissioned by Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), at Gülhane Park, adjacent to Topkapı Palace, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig.

mirror each other on either side of Beylerbeyi Palace. The complex was commissioned by Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) and completed in 1861 by Armenian Christians Hagop Balyan and Sarkis Balyan. The palace itself is imposing yet reserved in scale when compared with the sprawling edifices on the opposite shore such as Dolmabahçe and Çırağan. The two kiosks strongly contrast the main building’s commanding neoclassicism in their silhouettes. Their steep sloping roofs appear like gathered fabric, where each stiff fold frames an arch pierced by a grilled window (Figure 11.7). An American traveler, Anna Bowman Dodd, on her visit to Ottoman Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century, was particularly struck by Beylerbeyi Palace and its kiosks, lauding the Balyan architects for their aptitude in elegantly amalgamating many architectural styles and modes.35 She goes on to describe the palace complex and its environs of a verdant landscape and rippling waves on the shore: [The architect] must have looked, also, at the rippling water, and said ‘Their brightness shall not be shadowed!’ for walls, kiosks, gateways, and palace surface glistened as white as a bride’s robe. In the golden lattices of the kiosk windows, in the carved parapet of his roof edge, he seemed to have netted the sunbeams he saw webbed across the moving blue. …Arches upon arches—simple pillars, foliaged, rippled with webbed carvings—arcaded windows, recessed porticos, and, along the water’s edge, kiosks, the roofs of which lay crinkled beneath the sun like leaves unfolding.36

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FIGURE 11.7

Beylerbeyi seaside kiosk with crimped sloping roof, Hagop Balyan and Sarkis Balyan, commissioned by Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76), 1861, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig.

Not only does Dodd bring the structures to life by comparing them to their vibrant natural surroundings, she uses many active verbs, especially those related to movement, to describe the scene, and the kiosks’ roofs in particular: rippling, netted, webbed, crinkled, unfolding, glistening, and so on. Such descriptors knit together the folds of fabric and the crests of waves along the Bosphorus, thereby localizing the motif in a way parallel to the illusionistic murals in the Ortaköy mosque on the opposite shore. Gilles Deleuze likewise employs similar terminology of movement (folding, unfurling) in his discussion of the traits that epitomize the baroque.37 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Bosphorus became a kind of processional thoroughfare wherein the sultan could survey his domain and be seen on the move, as demonstrated in Clark’s narrative.38 In the case of late Ottoman imperial architecture, the movement and especially the folds characteristic of baroque edifices recall the materiality of fabric, and in particular, the character of fabric architecture. At the same time, the form of the kiosks also mimics the movement of the water below, as they sit on the precipice between land and sea. In this way, the amalgamated styles are grounded in local architectural idioms—specifically the imperial tent—as well as the natural environs of the imperial city, and as such serve to Ottomanize the whole. In addition to kiosks and pavilions, the baroque fold manifests in late Ottoman architecture in the forms of imperial thresholds. The threshold held great significance in both Ottoman imperial architecture as well as royal ceremonial. Indeed, a common metonym for the Ottoman court was the “Sublime Porte.” While a metonym, the term “Sublime Porte” (Bab-ı Ali) also referred to an actual gate or threshold. The early nineteenth-century iteration of the Sublime Porte, which frames the entrance to the administrative office of the

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Grand Vizier, takes on the form of a magnificent tent (Figure 11.8).39 The slope of the roof is not as steep as those of the Beylerbeyi kiosks and is much subtler in its undulating form, though both presumably were a challenge to achieve in hard architecture. The seemingly malleable roof is a lath-and-plaster construction, combining a radial wooden sub-structure covered with a lead sheet. The visual if not material architecture parallel between this structure and tents must certainly have been a conscious choice, as tents served as ceremonial and symbolic thresholds, replicating the use of permanent thresholds such as the Gate of Felicity (Bab-ı Saadet), for example. The shared functions of tents and permanent structures like ceremonial thresholds, as well as their similar scales, allows for a certain amount of interchangeability or ambiguity between permanent and fabric architecture. Thus, the emergence of curving façades and folding roofs in solid architecture demonstrate the Ottomanization of international baroque architecture style(s) that were localized through their references to the longstanding, and more importantly contemporary, tradition of Islamic princely tentage, which was integral to the performance of Ottoman sovereignty and imperial identity in the late Ottoman period.40 A final example draws yet another parallel between imperial tents and their permanent counterparts in the manifestation of the tented baroque. The Nizamiye Gate (Bab-ı Serasker), or gate of the Office of War Minister, bears a rather striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century Sublime Porte in is form, function, and signification. Now destroyed, the gate was constructed in 1836–1837, approximately a decade after Sultan Mahmud II founded the ministry.41 It was subsequently destroyed a few decades later and replaced in 1864–1866 under the auspices of Sultan Abdülaziz with a structure that still survives today, located in the neighborhood of Fatih, between the Beyazid Mosque and Istanbul University.

FIGURE 11.8

Bab-ı Âli “Sublime Porte” (Gate of the Grand Vizier’s Office) at Gülhane Park, adjacent to Topkapı Palace, 1844, Istanbul. Photo: Ashley Dimmig.

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The short-lived “tented” Nizamiye Gate does not feature a pointed, steeped roof as in previously discussed examples. Rather, it is topped with a small ribbed dome. Beneath the dome, however, is a large undulating eave, curved as though swirling and unfurling in space, reminiscent of the form and movement of the Sublime Porte. Unlike the Sublime Porte, though, the eave wraps around the entirety of the gate’s roof. In this way, the eave even further recalls a tent, whose “walls” are actually called “skirts” (etek) in Turkish. In the case of the Nizamiye Gate, the correlation with imperial tents is further underpinned by its association with the War Ministry. As the seat of the ministry, this gate served as the façade of the Ottoman state’s military power. Tents were an integral part of any army on the move and were used as interim shelter for soldiers and sultans alike throughout the Ottoman Empire. Military encampments, naturally, comprised mostly small, unadorned, utilitarian tents. However, the sultan and his closest advisors traveled with large, decorated tents that stood out among the sea of plain canvas.42 Whether spartan or luxurious, military tents were the architecture that built the empire. With its tent-like silhouette and ornamented façade, the Gate of the War Ministry may be seen as a permanent (albeit rather short-lived) version of the imperial tents that dominated an Ottoman military encampment in centuries past.

A Tented Baroque While fabric and permanent Ottoman imperial architecture shared an aesthetic vocabulary for centuries, in the long nineteenth century fabric and architecture merged and informed the other in various new ways. In particular, the materiality and movement of the textile medium was imitated in illusionistic mural painting and appliquéd tent walls alike. Eaves and roofs were made to appear rippling in motion, as though fabric and caught in a breeze. When viewed in light of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, but more importantly, when considering these structures as novel variations on the longstanding traditions of imperial tentage that were central to Ottoman court life for centuries, this subgenre of late Ottoman imperial architecture can be considered a tented baroque. The corpus of material discussed in this chapter demonstrates one of the ways in which the relatively eclectic architectural modes of the long nineteenth century were decidedly Ottomanized. Beyond mere importation of external motifs or looking outward for inspiration to adopt and adapt, an understanding of the importance of tents as imperial architecture with layered and malleable meanings shows that Ottoman architects and tentmakers alike also looked to local traditions to innovate and expand their repertoire. The evocation of imperial tents in both hard and soft architecture of the long nineteenth century suggests that the tent itself was seen as an architectural icon and metonym for the sultan and his empire. The transformation of palatial pavilions, seaside kiosks, and imperial thresholds into tented structures indicates that the Ottomans viewed their tentage traditions as integral to their imperial identity, well into the modern period, consciously calling upon age-old traditions to reinvent their image via architecture. Through consideration of the visual dialogue between fabric and permanent architecture, this paper demonstrates that one of the various “new styles” of Ottoman imperial architecture in the long nineteenth century was a tented baroque. In a period characterized by transformation, the architectural endeavors of the court were rife with innovation, experimentation, ambiguation, amalgamation, which looked to both internal and external sources of inspiration.43 Illusionistic representations of fabric in both domestic settings and

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in tents shows visual experimentation with optical effects that built on conventions of the gaze operating in Ottoman imperial architecture—whether it facilitated seeing through the wall to a virtual arboreal scene in the distance or framed the reciprocal viewing of the sultan. The pavilions, kiosks, and thresholds that took on the appearance of fabric architecture evoked historical uses and symbolism of the royal tent in ceremonial, festive, and military contexts, and in so doing transferred the tent’s meaning(s) to the more permanent structure, and creating an architectural icon anchored in Ottoman history and identity. As the baroque fold rippled across the continent onto the shores of the Bosphorus, a new style of architecture emerged from the waves, in the form of an Ottoman imperial tent.

Notes 1 Linda Darling, “Another Look at Periodization in Ottoman History,” Turkish Studies Association Journal 26, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 24. 2 Darling, “Another Look at Periodization,” 25. 3 Shirine Hamadeh. The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008; Shirine Hamadeh, “Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the ‘Inevitable’ Questions of Westernization,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no.1 (2004): 32–51, esp. 33–36. 4 Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 4. 5 BOA C.SM.9.A.460. 6 Amanda Phillips has made a convincing argument for textiles as primary evidence in Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 7 One of the first scholars to correlate hard architecture and its fabric antecedent—the tent—was Gottfried Semper (d. 1879). Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gottfried Semper and Harry Francis Mallgrave, Style: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). 8 Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World, Papers from A Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, ed. Priscilla Soucek (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press for the College Art Association of America, 1988), 25–50; Richard Piran McClary, “Hazar Baf,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published April 19, 2022. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ khamseen/glossary/2022/hazar-baf/. 9 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3. 10 Tristan Weddigen, “Unfolding Textile Spaces: Antiquity/Modern Period,” in Art & Textiles: Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art from Klimt to the Present, ed. Harmut Böhme et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2014), 90. 11 Peter Christensen employs the concept of ambiguation as “an artistic and morphological duality where two sides are locked in a partnership in which the level of reciprocity of their relationship is continually in flux.” Peter Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railway: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 8. 12 Gülru Necipoğlu paraphrases Tursun Beg, noting of Topkapı Palace: The relationship of one building to another was based on the traditional order of the Ottoman imperial encampment, in which individual tents fulfilling specific functions were lined up according to a predetermined scheme, paralleled in the two-part layout of the palace. This special ordering of the imperial tents (otag-i humayun) is referred to by Tursun Beg as the ‘Ottoman order’ (tertib-i ‘osmani), or the ‘order of the Ottoman tradition’ (tertib-i ‘osmani). Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1991), 31; Tursun Beg fols. 40a, 64b.

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13 Gülru Necipoğlu, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 303–42. 14 Nurhan Atasoy, Otağ-ı Hümayun: The Ottoman Imperial Tent Complex (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2000), see especially 79–80. 15 The term hazine is used to describe a single section or panel that is serialized to create a tent wall. The number of hazines a tent has also serves as a unit of measure, though a rather unstandardized one, given that hazines appear in many sizes and proportions. 16 Cenap Çürük, Örnekleriyle Türk Çadırları (Istanbul: Askeri Müze Yayınları, 1983), 5–6; Atasoy, Otağ-ı Hümayun, 23. For example, a document dated 1233 AH (1817–18 CE) enumerates the costs for the tents and furniture dispatched by the Tent Corps for the sultan’s migrations. BOA C.SM.169.8467. See also a similar document dated 1220 AH (1805–06 CE) on such expenses. 17 Weddigen, “Unfolding Textile Spaces,” 90. 18 For example, Godfrey Goodwin mentions that the noted exception to this is the horseshoe courtyard of the Nuruosmaniye Mosque: “This horseshoe court is a bold but isolated attempt to introduce baroque form, and not just decoration, into Ottoman architecture. But intellectual acceptance of the baroque could not be complete in a society where superstition remained paramount.” Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 84. 19 Ahmet Uçar, Nakş-ı İstanbul: Ortaköy Büyük Mecidiye Camii (Istanbul: Gürsoy Grup, 2015); Alyson Wharton, The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Pars Tuğlacı, The Role of the Balian Family in Ottoman Architecture (Istanbul: Yeni Çığır Bookstore, 1990). 20 Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-As, Seeing-In, and Pictorial Representation,” in Art and its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 137–51. 21 Tülay Artan notes that this architectural engagement with the Bosphorus Strait had its roots in the eighteenth century but became a common characteristic of imperial architecture that followed. Tülay Artan, “Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth Century Bosphorus,” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989), 69–70. 22 Bernard O’Kane, “The Arboreal Aesthetic: Landscape, Painting and Architecture from Mongol Iran to Mamluk Egypt,” in The Iconography of Islamic Art: Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, edited by Bernard O’Kane, 223–51 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). 23 In fact, when the dome was completed, ceremonial tents were erected for the occasion—thus setting the stage for a direct comparison between architectural media. Ünver Rüstem, “The Spectacle of Legitimacy: The Dome-Closing Ceremony of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque,” Muqarnas 33 (2016): 253–344. 24 For examples, see: Fragmentary Ottoman Cenotaph Cover with Qur’anic Verses, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, inv. no. 83.7; Fragmentary Cenotaph Cover with Qur’anic Calligraphy, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 32.100.460. 25 Emily Neumeier, “Building the Baroque in Anatolia: The Çapanoğlu Family and the Architectural Transformation of Yozgat.” Talk presented at the American Research Institute in Turkey, Istanbul, December 2, 2013. 26 Other examples of painted tent ceilings appear elsewhere, including the Köprülü Mehmet Paşa Camii in Safranbolu, the Ulu Camii in Corum (see Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, 402, 425) and the Valide Sultan apartments’ domed interior, the mural dating to the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid I, r. 1773–1789: see Sedad Hakkı Eldem. Köşkler ve kasırlar (Istanbul: Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yüksek Mimarlık Bölümü Rölöve Kürsüsü, 1973), fig. 241. 27 Weddigen, “Unfolding Textile Spaces,” 88. 28 Charles Perry, A View of the Levant: Particularly of Constantinople, Syria, Egypt, and Greece ­(London: T. Woodward, 1743), 24–25; Nebahat Avcioğlu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728 – 1876 (London: Routledge, 2016), 78. 29 Nurhan Atasoy, referring to this kiosk as the Çadır Köşkü, notes that it must have been intended to resemble a tent because of the use of fabric curtains and the structure’s convertibility. Nurha n ̇ Atasoy, Gül Irepoğlu, Mary IŞın, Robert Bragner, and Angela Roome, A Garden for the Sultan: Gardens and Flowers in the Ottoman Culture (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2011), 282. 30 Beyond her personal observation, Avcioğlu also provides excerpts from European travelers who likewise fall into a chicken-and-egg conundrum regarding palatial kiosks and imperial tents. Avcioğlu, Turquerie, 80, 107–8.

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31 Esin Atıl, Levni and the Surname: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1999). 32 Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries…, ed. Robert Walpole (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1814), 42–45. 33 Necipoğlu, “Framing the Gaze.” 34 Milinda Banerjee, “‘Ocular Sovereignty, Acclamatory Rulership and Political Communication: Visits of Princes of Wales to Bengal,” in Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (London: Palgrave, 2016), 86, 81–100. 35 Anna Bowman Dodd, In the Palaces of the Sultan (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903), 205–6. 36 Dodd, In the Palaces of the Sultan (1903), 182. 37 Deleuze, The Fold. 38 Artan, Architecture as a Theatre of Life. 39 On the development of the Sublime Porte as an administrative center: Tülay Artan, “The Making of the Sublime Porte Near the Alay Köşkü and a Tour of a Grand Vizierial Palace at Süleymaniye,” Turcica 43 (2011): 145–206. 40 I thoroughly explore this concept in my dissertation: Making Modernity in Fabric Architecture: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2019. 41 There is some discrepancy for the dates of this short-lived structure. It seems it was built no earlier than 1826 when the ministry was founded by Mahmud II. But some sources note that Krikor Balyan was the architect, who died in 1831, which would predate the 1836–1837 date of ̇ construction. For an image of the structure, see: Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Istanbul Anıları (İstanbul: Aletaş Alarko Eğitim Tesisleri, 1979), fig. 88, pp. 140–41, 143. ̇ 42 Zdzisław Zygulski, Ottoman Art in the Service of the Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 43 Darling, “Another Look.”

Bibliography Anna Bowman Dodd. The Palaces of the Sultan. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903. Artan, Tülay. “Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth Century Bosphorus.” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989. Artan, Tülay. “The Making of the Sublime Porte Near the Alay Köşkü and a Tour of a Grand Vizierial Palace at Süleymaniye.” Turcica 43 (2011): 145–206. Atasoy, Nurhan. Otağ-ı Hümayun: The Ottoman Imperial Tent Complex. Istanbul: Aygaz, 2000. ̇ Atasoy, Nurhan, Gül Irepoğlu, Mary Işın, Robert Bragner, and Angela Roome. A Garden for the Sultan: Gardens and Flowers in the Ottoman Culture. Istanbul: Aygaz, 2011. Atıl, Esin. Levni and the Surname: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival. Istanbul: Koçbank, 1999. Avcioğlu, Nebahat. Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728–1876. London: Routledge, 2016. Banerjee, Milinda. “Ocular Sovereignty, Acclamatory Rulership and Political Communication: Visits of Princes of Wales to Bengal.” In Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens, 81–100. London: Palgrave, 2016. Christensen, Peter. Germany and the Ottoman Railway: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Clarke, Edward Daniel. Travels in Various Countries…. Edited by Robert Walpole. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1814. Çürük, Cenap. Örnekleriyle Türk Çadırları. Istanbul: Askeri Müze Yayınları, 1983. Darling, Linda. “Another Look at Periodization in Ottoman History.” Turkish Studies Association Journal 26, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 19–28. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Dimmig, Ashley. “Making Modernity in Fabric Architecture: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period.” PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2019.

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Eldem, Sedad Hakkı. Köşkler ve Kasırlar. Istanbul: Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yüksek Mimarlık Bölümü Rölöve Kürsüsü, 1973. ̇ Eldem, Sedad Hakkı. Istanbul Anıları. Istanbul: Aletaş Alarko Eğitim Tesisleri, 1979. Golombek, Lisa. “The Draped Universe of Islam.” In Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World, Papers from A Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2–4 April 1980, edited by Priscilla Soucek, 25–50. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Goodwin, Godfrey. A History of Ottoman Architecture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. Hamadeh, Shirine. “Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the ‘Inevitable’ Questions of Westernization.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 1 (2004): 32–51. Hamadeh, Shirine. The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. McClary, Richard Piran. “Hazar Baf.” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published April 19, 2022. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/khamseen/glossary/2022/hazar-baf/ Necipoğlu, Gülru. Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1991. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces.” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 303–42. Neumeier, Emily. “Building the Baroque in Anatolia: The Çapanoğlu Family and the Architectural Transformation of Yozgat.” American Research Institute in Turkey. Istanbul, December 2, 2013. O’Kane, Bernard. “The Arboreal Aesthetic: Landscape, Painting and Architecture from Mongol Iran to Mamluk Egypt.” In The Iconography of Islamic Art: Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, edited by Bernard O’Kane, 223–51. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Perry, Charles. A View of the Levant: Particularly of Constantinople, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. London: T. Woodward, 1743. Phillips, Amanda. Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. ­Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Rüstem, Ünver. “The Spectacle of Legitimacy: The Dome-Closing Ceremony of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.” Muqarnas 33 (2016): 253–344. Rüstem, Ünver. Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Semper, Gottfried, and Harry Francis Mallgrave. Style: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, ­Practical Aesthetics. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2007. Tristan Weddigen, “Unfolding Textile Spaces: Antiquity/Modern Period.” In Art & Textiles: Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art from Klimt to the Present, edited by Harmut Böhme et al., 88–95. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2014. Tuğlacı, Pars. The Role of the Balian Family in Ottoman Architecture. Istanbul: Yeni Çığır Bookstore, 1990. Uçar, Ahmet. Nakş-ı İstanbul: Ortaköy Büyük Mecidiye Camii. Istanbul: Gürsoy Grup, 2015. Wharton, Alyson. The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Wollheim, Richard. “Seeing-As, Seeing-In, and Pictorial Representation.” In Art and Its Objects, 137–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ̇ Zygulski, Zdzisław. Ottoman Art in the Service of the Empire. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Archival documents Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi Külliyesi, Istanbul (formerly Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, hereafter BOA), C.SM.9.A.460. BOA C.SM.169.8467.

INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. ‘Abd al-Mu’min 12, 17, 18, 23, 24n22 Ahmed, Sheikh 179 Alay Pavilion (Alay Köşkü), Istanbul 203, 204, 205, 211n39 Alberti, Leon Battista 3, 5n2, 139 Alhambra: Court of the Lions 151; Cuarto Dorado 141; Fountain of the Lions 150, 152; Hall of the Abencerrajes 150; Hall of the Ambassadors 148; Hall of Two Sisters 144, 145, 150, 152; Mirador de Lindaraja 145, 150; Palace of the Lions 145, 150, 150, 151, 152, 152; textility of 138–54 Almohad caliphate 12–25; community 10, 12, 21; identity 10, 17, 23; military 10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 23; program 10, 12, 18, 23; qubba 10, 12–25; reformism 23 Andalusi Umayyads 17, 21 Arbore, Luca 184, 185 Art Institute of Chicago 158, 159, 161 Arts and Crafts in Britain 3, 104 Avcıoğlu, Nebahat 203, 210n28, 210n30 Aymara communities 166 Bachelard, Gaston 66, 79n6 Bacon, Francis 106, 108, 108, 116n22 Balyan, Garabet 199 Balyan, Hagop 205, 206 Balyan, Nikoğos 198, 199 Balyan, Sarkis 205, 206 banner 10, 18, 20, 21, 21, 22, 24n24, 172, 173, 178, 179, 186, 189n28, 189n29, 189n31, 189n37, 189n40; filials 178, 189n28; holy 173, 178, 179

Banner of Las Navas de Tolosa 18, 19 Barbaros Hayrettin Pasha 178, 179 barkcloth 48, 49, 50, 53, 57 Bauhaus 3, 5n7, 6n12, 103 Bayezid II 179, 189n25 beau désordre 73 bed 60n41, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 76, 80n19, 86 Bedouin nomads 14 Bekleidung (dressing) 3, 5n9 Bell,Vanessa 109, 111, 112 Berke Khan 179 Beylerbeyi: Palace, Istanbul 205; seaside kiosk 205, 206, 207 Bible 29, 31, 32, 35, 37 Bimont, Jean-François 68–70, 80n18, 80n23, 80n27, 80n32, 80n37, 81n63 Birmingham School of Art 104 blind-arcade design 142, 143, 146, 178 Blondel, Jacques-François 69, 70, 80n31 Boucher, François 73, 74, 75, 81n59 boudoir 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 79, 79n3 Brethren of Purity 140–41, 146, 153n22 Bühl, Gudrun 10n3, 119 bungalow 64, 84–87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97n8, 97n10 Büyük Mecidiye Camii (Ortaköy Mosque), Istanbul 198, 199, 206 Çadır Köşkü see Perdeli Kiosk Le Camus De Mézières, Nicolas 69, 70, 71, 76, 79, 80n33, 80n40, 80n41, 80n42, 81n61, 81n68 Cantigas de Santa Maria 21, 22, 22 Çapanoğlu mosque,Yozgat City 201, 202

214 Index

carpet 4, 46, 64, 83, 84, 92, 103, 107, 113, 114, 117n47, 119, 120n7, 129, 133, 134n5, 169 Caruso, Adam 1, 2 Casey, Edward 51, 60n34 Chan Chan, Moche Valley 162, 164–67, 165 chawls 85, 86, 97n13 chiks 84, 87, 89, 90, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95 Chimu society 163, 164, 165, 165, 166, 166; palaces 162, 164 chullpas 166, 167 ciudadelas 162, 165 Clarke, Arundell 102, 106–8, 108, 110 Clarke, Edward Daniel 204, 211n32 Coates, Wells 102, 105, 105, 106, 116n18, 116n21 Comaroff, Jean 9, 10n2 Comaroff, John 9, 10n2 commodité 65, 70, 74 Cook, James 49, 60n26 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 50, 107, 116n34 Cordoba, Great Mosque 148, 149 Cresta Silks Shop 104, 105, 105, 106, 116n18 Crimean: khan 172–90; mausoleum 172, 176, 177–79, 177, 181, 183, 185–87, 187n1, 187n2 curtain 41n31, 49, 65, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 79n1, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 95, 98n40, 101, 103, 111, 131, 132, 177, 178, 184, 189n30, 189n33, 196, 200, 202, 203, 210n29; bed 66, 69, 70; draped 69, 194, 197, 198, 198, 199, 199, 201; painted 76, 198; window 66–70, 72, 76, 92, 93, 96 Damascus, Great Mosque 148 Deleuze, Gilles 139, 153n8, 153n12, 196, 206, 208, 209n9, 211n37 Delon, Michel 71, 79n3, 80n44 Deutscher Werkbund 102 Devlet Geray Sultan 181 Dobson, Frank 112, 115 Dodd, Anna Bowman 205, 206, 211n35 Dorn, Marion V. 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 113, 114, 114, 115 draped interiors 197–202, 198–200, 202 Dufferin and Ava, Hariot Georgina HamiltonTemple-Blackwood, Marchioness of, vicereine of India 86, 92, 97n14, 98n39 Emminghaus, Johannes 28, 39n2, 39n4, 39n5, 39n8, 39n9, 39n10, 39n12, 40n18, 40n20, 40n31, 41n33, 41n35, 41n39, 41n52, 41n55 Ephraim, George Squier 162, 163 Ettinghausen, Richard 6n15, 123, 124, 133n1, 134n2–5 fale 10, 48, 51–59, 59n13, 60n36 Fastentüch 27, 37, 39n2, 39n4, 39n5, 39n8, 39n9, 39n10, 40n20, 40n31, 41n33, 41n35, 41n39, 41n52, 41n55

“fast of the vision” 27, 37 Fleming, Ronald 108–11, 116n30, 116n33 Frankish-style fabrics 184, 185, 190n52 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor 185 Gate: Bab-ı Ali 206, 207; Bab-ı Serasker 207; of Felicity 207; Nizamiye 207, 208 Gesamtkunstwerk 184 Golden Horde 172, 176, 179 Golombek, Lisa 15n6, 119, 120n1, 120n6, 134n6, 140, 153n20, 188n11, 195, 196, 209n8 Gordon, Beverly 9, 10n1 Grabar, Oleg 127, 134n6, 134n17 Grand Vizier 207, 207 Grant, Duncan 109, 111, 112, 112, 115 Guattari, Félix 139, 153n8, 153n12 Gurk, cathedral 28, 32, 33, 34, 39n1, 39n8, 40n31, 41n35, 41n36, 41n38, 41n40 Habermas, Jürgen 63 Habib Court, Bombay 90 hadith 132, 133, 136n37 Haji Geray I 172, 174, 175, 177, 182, 183 al-Haytham, Ibn 141, 154n49 hayti 143, 147, 149 hazarbaf 196 hazines 197, 201, 203, 210n15 Heidegger, Martin 138–40, 152n5, 152n6 Hellman, Mimi 66, 74, 79n8, 81n58 Hill, Oliver 114, 114, 115, 117n46, 117n47 Holstein, Otto 162 Holy Week 27, 31, 36, 37, 41n63 horror vacui 158, 164 housekeeping principles 87 Huaca Cao Viejo 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167 Hugh of St Victor 3, 5n1 Hungertüch 27, 28, 39n1 ‘ie toga 45, 46–48, 47, 48, 49, 57, 58, 59n7, 60n18, 60n41 Imperial Tent Corps, Ottoman empire 198, 210n16 Ingold, Tim 1, 4, 5n2, 6n23, 6n24, 138–41, 146, 147, 149, 152n1, 152n2, 152n6, 152n7, 153n9, 153n10, 153n13, 153n14, 153n16, 153n17, 153n19, 153n25, 153n29, 154n41, 154n46–47 intermediality 146, 148 Interstitial space 23, 149, 164 Iron Gate, mausoleum of Mengli Geray I 179, 190n41 irsāliye 183 Islamic 12–14, 16, 18, 20, 141, 148, 169, 172, 187, 204, 207; art history 4, 119, 123; holy sites 173, 177, 178, 179; textile culture 4, 119, 120, 122–36, 140, 141, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184–87, 185, 186, 187n1, 188n14, 195, 196;

Index  215

world 119, 125, 140, 173, 176, 177, 179, 181, 184–86, 185, 186, 188n11, 188n14, 195 Istanbul 148, 177, 179, 181, 188n8, 190n46, 195, 200, 207, 210n25; Alay Pavilion (Alay Köşkü) 203, 204, 205, 211n39; Beylerbeyi Palace 205; Beylerbeyi seaside kiosk 205, 206, 207; Büyük Mecidiye Camii (Ortaköy Mosque) 198, 199, 206; Laleli Mosque 148; Perdeli Kiosk 202, 203; Topkapı Palace Museum 178, 178, 180, 189n28, 190n43, 196, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205, 207, 209n12 iwan 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 jarretières 66, 79 jihad 179 Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects 93 Jung, Jacqueline 36, 41n56, 41n57, 41n58, 41n59 Ka‘ba 131 Kalila wa Dimna 130 Kauffer, E. McKnight 103, 105, 105, 106, 108–10, 109, 110, 113, 116n34 Keesing, Felix M. and Marie M. 57, 61n51 Kempe, Margaery 36, 41n32 Khaldun, Ibn 16, 17, 24n15, 24n18 al-Khatīb, Ibn Nasrid vizier 142–44, 146, 149, 154n38 Khirbat al-Mafjar 122, 122, 124, 124, 125, 127, 128, 128, 132, 133, 133n1, 134n5, 134n19, 135n23, 135n32 Khote, Durga 83, 97n5 Kipling, Rudyard 86, 94 kiswa 131, 177 Kitab al-Aghani 131, 132, 135n33 Kırımlı, Hakan 179, 187n3, 187n4, 188n23, 189n24, 189n38, 189n39 Kloster Lüne 29, 29, 30, 37, 39n9, 39n11, 40n27 Krody, Sumru Belger 119 labor 3, 4, 9, 20, 30, 31, 86, 89, 90, 92–95, 105, 146, 157, 167, 168 Lafon, Henri 74, 79, 81n52, 81n54, 81n70 Laleli Mosque, Istanbul 148 Lamtuna tribe 16, 17 lashing techniques 45, 52–54, 54, 55, 59n2, 162 Lenten veil 10, 27–42; Gurk 28, 32, 33, 34, 39n1, 39n8, 40n31, 41n35, 41n36, 41n38, 41n40; Zittau 28, 32, 34 Levni, Abdulcelil 204 lion-gazelle mosaic, Jericho 122, 122, 123, 125, 127–29, 132, 133, 134n5, 135n23 Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan 203, 205, 207, 211n41 Mahmud Geray 181 makhmil 178, 189n29

malae 10, 52, 54–59, 56 Mamluk sultan 176–79, 189n25 Mantegna, Andrea 201 “Marine Fauna Textile” wall hanging 165, 166 marquee 199; four-columned 200 Marrakesh 10, 12–25 Marwan ibn Muhammad, caliph 127 Marwan Tiraz 126, 127, 130, 134n14 Masmuda 13, 16–18, 24n17, 24n18 materiality 1, 4, 5, 6n19, 6n21, 14, 18, 29, 30, 63, 119–21, 124, 129, 132, 133, 134n5, 138, 139, 142, 146, 147, 149, 195, 196, 202, 206, 208 material translations 5, 119–21 mawlid 142, 143, 154n38 mechanical arts 3, 5n5 Mengli Geray I 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 182, 183, 189n38 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 71, 72, 75, 88, 162, 164, 210n24 mihrabiye 174 Mitchell,Victoria 138–40, 146, 147, 149, 152n1, 152n4, 153n16, 153n17, 153n18, 154n42 Moche civilization 159, 160, 161, 164; society 166; textiles 158, 162, 166, 170n7 Modern Architecture Research Group (MARS) 102, 115n5 modernism 1, 3, 63, 64, 101, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115 Moffat, Curtis 110, 111, 116n34 Morris, Cedric 105, 112 Morris, William 102, 106 Mshatta Façade 124, 125, 125, 129, 129, 130–33, 134n3, 135n24, 135n29 Muhammad 16, 20, 21, 127, 132, 142, 178 Mustafa, Şehzade 180, 187n2 muthanna 176 Nash, Paul 102–5, 104, 112, 113, 116n14, 116n16, 116n40 Nasrid 143, 150; artistic traditions 142; beholder 142, 146; dynasty 138, 142; pierced textiles 148, 149; silk textile 141, 142, 144, 144 Nehru, Jawaharlal 93, 98n42 nev-icad 195 Nicholson, Ben 102, 103 Nottingham Contemporary 1, 2 Omega Workshops 102, 103, 106, 110, 111 Otto, Frei 4, 6n16 Ottoman 119, 176, 177, 179, 187, 187n6, 188n9, 188n19, 188n23, 189n28, 189n31, 189n33, 189n34, 189n40; architecture 120, 148, 180, 188n11, 194–211; book paintings 174; court 142, 183, 184, 197, 206, 208, 210n18; Empire 172, 178, 194, 204, 208; imperial architecture 194–96, 201, 202, 206, 208, 209, 210n21; imperial tents 153n34, 195–99, 201, 203, 204, 206–9, 209n12, 210n30; tombstones 181

216 Index

Pătrăuți (1487) 184 Pékin 68, 69, 76, 80n26 Perdeli Kiosk, Istanbul 202, 203 Persianate aesthetics 174, 176 Pevsner, Nikolaus 5n4, 103, 115n8 Point, Seraglio 204 portières 65, 66, 68, 72, 73 privacy 63, 65, 71, 83–87, 89, 90, 92–94, 91, 203 punkah 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 98n23, 98n26

“soft architecture” 5, 173, 208 Squier, Ephraim George 162, 163 sua 49, 57, 58 “Sublime Porte” 206, 207, 207, 208, 211n39 Süleymaniye Mosque 148 Süleyman, Ottoman sultan 174, 188n8, 189n33, 189n38 Sura al-Fath 176, 178, 188n17, 188n20 Sura al-Saff 176, 178

Qaitbay, Mamluk sultan 176, 177 qubba 10, 12–25, 126 Qubba al-Barudiyyin 14, 15 Qur’anic inscriptions 18, 20, 22, 25n27, 173, 176, 177, 178; quotations 20, 23 Qusayr ‘Amra 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 134n8, 134n11

Tamarrakusht, Marrakesh 13 Tapa 45, 48, 49, 50, 50, 60n22 tapestry 3, 5n10, 64, 65, 67, 101, 106, 109, 109, 110, 124, 129, 132, 133, 135n25, 166, 167, 168 Taq-i Bustan 131 Taragan, Hana 127, 134n19 tent 6n15, 10, 12–25, 126, 127, 133, 142, 143, 143, 144, 146, 153n34, 173–77, 179, 186, 188n8, 194–204, 198, 202, 206–9, 209n7, 210n14, 210n26; red 12–25 textilic 138–41, 144, 147–52 textility 6n24, 120, 138–54; of making 4, 6n24, 120, 138, 141, 146, 147, 149, 152, 152n1, 152n2, 153n13, 153n17; of the Alhambra 138–54 thermantidote 90, 91 Tinmal, Morocco 12, 13, 23n2, 24n9 Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul 178, 178, 180, 190n43, 197, 198, 200 Tumart, Ibn 12, 13, 16–18, 21, 23, 24n18, 25n29 Turco-Islamic 172, 173, 174, 176–80, 185, 186, 187, 188n14; architecture 173, 176–79; funeral 173, 176–79, 185; mausolea 173, 174, 185; ritual 172; tradition 185; world 173

ra․hba 13, 17 Riegl, Alois 3, 5n10 ritual 1, 4, 5, 9–10, 12–14, 20, 21, 23, 23n2, 25n25, 28, 32, 35–37, 46, 56, 57, 135n36, 172, 189n40 robe à l’anglaise 76; à la polonaise 76; retroussée dans les poche 76 Rome, St. Peter’s basilica 200 Ruskin, John 1 Rüstem, Ünver 195, 209n4, 210n22 sā 51 Sahib Geray Khan I 176 St. John, Peter 1, 2 Salt Satyagraha movement 93 Samoa 10, 45, 46, 48–51, 55, 57, 58, 59, 59n11, 60n15, 60n20, 60n25, 60n35, 61n48 Samoan 10, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 59n3, 59n4, 59n9, 59n10, 59n13, 60n24, 60n29, 60n36, 60n41, 61n42, 61n49; ceremonial exchange 46, 48; hierarchy of Samoan society 51 Sarabhai, Anasuya 88, 89, 92, 94 Schneider, Jane 45, 57, 59, 60n17, 61n50, 61n53 Schoeffel, Penelope 46, 47, 59n8, 59n9, 60n16, 60n41 screen 35, 36, 41n56, 41n59, 65, 69, 71, 74, 89, 90, 92, 109, 112, 149; choir 35, 36, 41n59; Gothic 36, 41n56, 41n57; woven 89, 92 Selim I, Ottoman sultan 176–79, 178, 189n31, 189n38 Semper, Gottfried 3, 5n8, 5n9, 158, 160, 169, 170n4, 170n5, 209n7 Sēnmurw Silk 130 shicras 157, 158 Shore, Bradd 55, 61n49 shroud 30, 58, 172, 173, 177, 180, 182–86; of Maria of Mangup 185 siapo 45, 46, 48–51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60n30 sleeping mats 45, 46, 60n41

Umayyad 17, 18, 21, 23, 24n23, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134n6, 134n19, 135n25; Caliphate 123; elite 126, 134n8; era textiles 127; Greater Syria 123 Unit One 102, 115n5, 115n6 upeti 49 ‘Uthman 13, 17, 21, 24n23 vā 45, 46, 51–59, 60n32 Vasari, Giorgio 3 veil 10, 27–38, 64, 83, 178; Altenberg 29–30; Crucifixion 29, 40n27; Lenten (see Lenten veil); Maiestas Domini 29; painted 27, 28, 31–35, 41n32 Verlet, Pierre 69, 79n4, 80n14, 80n28, 81n66 Victoria and Albert Museum 98n41, 109, 126, 130, 130 Vogue 66, 70, 101, 110, 113, 115n2, 116n32, 117n45 volupté 65, 70, 79, 81n69 von Falke, Jacob 3, 5n10

Index  217

Voroneţ (1488) 184, 186 “Vue du Perdeli-Kiosque” 203 Walid bin Yazid, caliph 126, 131 wall upholstery 67 Walton, Allan 102, 111, 112, 112, 113, 115, 116n38 Warburg, Aby 3, 5n10 weaving processes 1, 3–5, 9, 10n5, 20, 46, 47, 60n15, 113, 121n10, 154n47, 156, 158, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168

Weddigen, Tristan 4, 6n22, 196, 198, 201, 209n10, 210n17, 210n27 Weiner, Annette 45, 48, 57, 59, 59n1, 60n17, 61n50, 61n53 Whitework 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 39n13, 40n27, 41n49 Williams, Elizabeth Dospěl 10n3, 119, 120n8, 127, 134n1, 134n13, 135n28, 136n37 Williams, John 46, 49, 55, 59n14 Zittau, Church of the Holy Cross 34