Malayer Sarouk carpet

This magnificent central Persian carpet on a rich madder red ground was woven during the heyday of a renaissance in Persian weaving almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The medallion format has a long tradition going back at least to the fifteenth century. This piece, however, interprets the classic design in the vocabulary of the later nineteenth. The masterfully drawn palmette border on a dark indigo ground exemplifies the neoclassical tastes of the epoch that permeated, not only Europe, but the Near East as well. Ivory corner pieces flank the central medallion with both containing an elegantly drawn jewel-like crystalline lattice. The relationship of these corner pieces to the medallion is striking as well, as the former not only flank the later but in many areas contain it as if to mimic the effects of a secondary border. Excellence of proportion is valued over strict symmetry, and in the drawing of the medallion with its two radiating pendentives a delicate balance is achieved by deliberately pairing the elongated bottom half of the medallion with the smaller of the two pendentives and vice versa. Irrespective of what criteria are considered: quality of material, drawing or color; this piece is a masterpiece of 19th-century Persian weaving.