ARDABIL CARPETS Tahmasp also ele-
vated carpet weaving to a national industry
and set up royal factories at Isfahan, Kashan,
Kirman, and Tabriz. Two of the masterworks
of carpet weaving that date to his reign are
the pair of carpets from the two-centuries
older funerary mosque of Shaykh Safi al-Din
(1252–1334), the founder of the Safavid line.
The name Maqsud of Kashanis woven into
the design of the carpet illustrated here (FIG.
13-28). He must have been the designer
who supplied the master pattern to two teams
of royal weavers (one for each of the two car-
pets). The carpet, almost 35 18 feet, consists
of roughly 25 million knots, some 340 to the
square inch. (Its twin has even more knots.)
The design consists of a central sunburst
medallion, representing the inside of a dome,
surrounded by 16 pendants. Mosque lamps
(appropriate motifs for the Ardabil funerary
mosque) are suspended from two pendants on
the long axis of the carpet. The lamps are of
different sizes. This may be an optical device to
make the two appear equal in size when viewed
from the end of the carpet at the room’s thresh-
old (the bottom end in FIG. 13-28). The rich
blue background is covered with leaves and
flowers attached to delicate stems that spread
over the whole field. The entire composition
presents the illusion of a heavenly dome with
lamps reflected in a pool of water full of float-
ing lotus blossoms. No human or animal fig-
ures appear, as befits a carpet intended for a
mosque, although they can be found on other
Islamic textiles used in secular contexts, both
earlier (FIG. 13-14) and later.
MOSQUE LAMPSMosque lamps were often made of glass and
highly decorated. Islamic artists perfected this art form and fortu-
nately, despite their exceptionally fragile nature, many examples sur-
vive, in large part because the lamps were revered by those who han-
360 Chapter 13 THE ISLAMIC WORLD13-28Maqsud of Kashan,carpet from
the funerary mosque of Shaykh Safi al-Din,
Ardabil, Iran, 1540. Knotted pile of wool and
silk, 34 6 17 7 . Victoria & Albert Museum,
London.
Maqsud of Kashan’s enormous Ardabil carpet
required roughly 25 million knots. It presents
the illusion of a heavenly dome with mosque
lamps reflected in a pool of water with floating
lotus blossoms.
dled them. One of the finest is the mosque lamp (FIG. 13-29) made
for Sayf al-Din Tuquztimur (d. 1345), an official in the court of the
Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad. The glass lamps hung on
chains from the mosque’s ceilings. The shape of Tuquztimur’s lamp1 ft.