Uses of oriental rugs in early modern Poland-Lithuania: social practices and public discourses
ENOld carpets attract our attention by their enigmatic ornaments as well as by their meandrous biographies. The carpets’ social biographies have knotted the histories of Eastern Europe and the Middle East into a dense network where art is entangled with commerce, consumption, politics, religious (in)differences, sumptuary laws, and moralist and mercantilist writings. When a group of silk rugsweaved with golden and silver threads was presented by Prince Władyslaw Czartoryski (1828–1894) in 1878 at the Paris World Exhibition in the salle Polonaise du Palais du Trocadéro, the fascinated public called them tapis Polonais or Polish carpets. This was due to the existence in eighteenthcentury Poland-Lithuania of silk-weaving manufacture using gold thread, and because nothing quite like these rugs had at the time been found in the Middle East. Furthermore, some of the rugs bore the coat-of-arms - a feature unknown in nineteenth-century oriental carpet-making. Soon it was discovered that the rugs were produced in Persia mostly in the first half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the term Polonaise (die sogenannten Polenteppiche) continues to be used by art historians.Despite the popular family legends, tracing the origins of the carpets to the booty taken by their noble ancestors from the defeated Ottomans at the victorious battles of Khotyn in 1621 and Vienna in 1683, most of the carpets were commissioned by Polish kings and aristocrats in the oriental workshops. In the late nineteenth century, after two unsuccessful uprisings, the members of the Polish national movement considered the sixteenth to seventeenth century as the lost golden age of Poland-Lithuania. They commissioned their portraits - including prince Czartoryski himself - as dressed in accordance with Polish early modern fashion. Polish orientalized “Sarmatian” attire, along with oriental carpets and arms, were immortalized in the paintings of Jan Matejko (1838–1893) and the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) and became part of the Polish national myth. When Polish aristocrat Adam Branicki (1892–1947) listed one of those carpets for sale in the summer of 1929, it was Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955),aBritish oilman and collector of art, who signed a contract to pay 20,000 pounds, or 864,000 zlotys, for the carpet. Because the carpet was preserved in Wilanów palace - a residence of King John III Sobieski (r. 1674–1696), who defeated the Ottoman army at Vienna in 1683 - the news of its possible sale provoked a heated discussion in Polish newspapers. Finally, the Polish government decided to buy the carpet from the owner for 866,800 zlotys. By way of comparison, the state budget of 1929 allowed for only 620,000 zlotys for the purchase and conservation of objects of art. Thus, the oriental carpets with their cultural biographies rooted in Poland’s “lost golden age” were accorded an important role in Polish national heritage. [Extract, p. 173-174]
