Art Institute of Chicago

Length of Woven Silk

Italy, possibly Milan

Date

c. 1575–1625

Medium

Silk, plain weave with plain interlacings of secondary binding warps and supplementary patterning wefts; two selvages present

Culture

Italy

Department

Textiles

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

This textile features leafy vines clasped by crowns encircling floral palmettes to create a continuous network. Notably, both the crowns and the palmettes reverse orientation from one row to the next, ensuring that the fabric would never appear upside-down, whether it was used as a wall covering, furniture upholstery, or even a garment. Italian merchants bought Iranian raw silk in Bursa, at the western edge of the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road (in present-day Turkey). They sold the resulting goods to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. During the 1500s and 1600s, Ottoman sultans were avid consumers of luxury textiles from the Italian peninsula, buying more than Western European monarchs and the Roman Catholic Church.

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