The “Portuguese” Carpets and the Trade from Persia to Europe
Roberta Marin
Affiliated Researcher, Centre for History, Lisbon University – School of Arts and Humanities
Assistant Curator, Khalili Collection of Islamic Art in London
Among the beautiful works of art held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, there is a special piece that attracts the attention of visitors and art lovers alike. It is known as the “Portuguese” carpet and it belongs to a small groups of rugs, made up of twelve pieces and some fragments, which are today kept in important private collections and public institutions around the world. As with the rest of the group, the Gulbenkian “Portuguese” carpet was not made in Portugal, as the name might suggest, but it was produced in seventeenth century Persia, most likely in the Khorasan region.
Persia at the time was dominated by the powerful and highly sophisticated Safavid dynasty, which ruled Persia and neighbouring countries from 1501 to 1722. During those centuries, the Safavid Shahs opened up the empire to Europeans, who travelled to Persia in large number and in different capacities. Traders, adventurers, intellectuals, artists, diplomats and monks moved to the so-called East and brought back with them precious goods (raw silk, cotton, spices, lapis lazuli, precious and semi-precious stones, manuscripts, carpets, textiles, etc.) and new ideas and technologies.
In my paper I want to investigate the history of “Portuguese” carpets, taking as a starting point the rug held at the Gulbenkian Museum. My goal is therefore twofold: on one hand, I want to trace the origins of the group and understand why it came to be known as “Portuguese”; on the other, I want to analyse the economical role played by the carpet trade in the seventeenth century and as a consequence the commercial links between Portugal and the East.
Roberta Marin. Holds a BA in History of Art in Italy and a Master in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London). In 2005 she was an intern at the Department of Islamic Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in the same year she began collaborating with the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art in London. Since 2007, she has taught courses on various aspects of Islamic art and architecture and modern and contemporary art from the Arab, Iranian and Turkish world in public and private institutions in the United Kingdom and in Italy. In September 2019 she was a visiting scholar at the Museum of Modern Art of the Gulbenkian Museums in Lisbon and conducted a research on the artistic relationships between Egyptian and Portuguese Modernism. She has travelled extensively in the Mediterranean area and her research interests include: Islamic art and architecture with a special focus on Arab Spain and Fatimid and Mamluk Egypt, modern and contemporary art from the Arab world, Iran and Turkey and carpet and textile production in the Islamic world.