Left half of a lampas-woven textile, silk, gilded paper, and gilded animal substrate
China or the eastern Islamic area; 1st half of 14th century
H: 228; W: 63.5 cm
With its stylized columns, confronted cocks in medallions, smaller medallions with dragons and phoenixes, and a rich and complex background for it all, this is perhaps the most magnificent of the museum’s lampas-woven textiles from the Mongol period. The motifs come from both East and West, but the use of paper rather than animal substrate for the “gold thread” might indicate that the textile was woven in the eastern part of the Mongol empire.
Together with a number of other lengths of cloth that are found today in the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, this piece originally made up part of the walls of a tent or canopy.
Inv. no. 40/1997
Published in:
Kjeld von Folsach: Art from the World of Islam in The David Collection, Copenhagen 2001, cat.no. 641;
Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni (eds.): The legacy of Genghis Khan: courtly art and culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2002, fig. 42, p. 45, cat.no. 73, p. 261;
Caroline Kim: “The treasures of Genghis Khan” in Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2002, September/October, p. 12;
David Kamansky (ed.): Wooden wonders: Tibetan furniture in secular and religious life, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena 2004, fig. 19, p. 81;
Sheila S. Blair: “East meets West under the Mongols” in The Silk Road, 3:2, 2005, pp. 31-32;
Yuka Kadoi: “Aspects of frescoes in fourteenth-century Iranian architecture: the case of Yazd” in Iran, 43, 2005, fig. 20, p. 231;
Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom (eds.): Cosmophilia. Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Boston 2006, cat.no. 12; Yuka Kadoi: Islamic chinoiserie: the art of Mongol Iran, Edinburgh 2009, fig. 1.14, p. 31;
Kjeld von Folsach: “A set of silk panels from the Mongol period” in Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (eds.): God is beautiful and loves beauty: the object in Islamic art and culture, New Haven 2013, fig. 208, pp. 218-219 and figs. 213, 214, 215, and p. 229, fig. 218e;
Yuka Kadoi : “Chinese and Turko-Mongol elements in Ilkhanid and Timurid arts. Part 1: The Mongols (c. 1250-1350)” in Finbarr Barry Flood, Gülru Necipoglu (eds.): A companion to Islamic art and architecture, 2, From the Mongols to modernism, Hoboken 2017, p. 639, fig. 25.1;
Eiren Shea: “Textile as traveller: the transmission of inscribed robes across Asia in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries” in Arts asiatiques, 73, 2018, fig. 9, pp. 34-35;
Patricia Blessing, Elizabeth Dospel Williams, Eiren L. Shea: Medieval textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400, Cambridge 2023, fig. 60 and p. 71;
.jpg?locale=en)
