An Oushak 'Lotto' rug, West Anatolia, 17th Century

Davide Halevim: Magnificent Carpets and Tapestries, Christie's London, February 14, 2001, lot 117

Denny, W., The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets, Washington D.C., 2002, p. 88, no. 26

The typical ‘Lotto’ rug is rendered with a near ubiquitous yellow lattice with blue highlights. Kurt Erdmann noted in Seven Hundred Years of Oriental Carpets, (London, 1970, p. 60) how remarkable it was that, amongst the over five hundred examples he had looked at, less than ten had employed alternative colourways.  Of these there are those which could be termed ‘multi-coloured’, where the dominant colour of the lattice is still yellow and alternative colours are used to create sophisticated subsidiary dynamics in the design, for example the magnificent ‘Lotto’ carpet fragment, XVI century in the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, inventory no: 1882.707 and the ‘Lotto’ rug, mid XVI century, formerly in the Evangelical Church of Sanpetru (Petersberg), now in the Black Church, Brasov, Inv.13.  Others incorporating blue and yellow motifs on a red field are illustrated Concaro, Edouardo and Levi, Alberto, Sovrani Tappeti exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1999, no.11, p. 35 and one in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Accession number 70.926. Other examples of variants are usefully illustrated in John Taylor’s blog of 3 January 2014 on rugtracker.com.  A further small group, of which the present example is one, keep the primacy of two main colours - one for the field and another for the lattice. These include the example in the Vakiflar Museum, Istanbul, with an abrashed blue-green lattice on a brown field, see Yetkin, Serare, Historical Turkish Carpets, Istanbul, 1981, pl. 36; the fragment illustrated in Hali 105, July-August 1999, p. 156, The Carpet Studio, Florence, with a dark green lattice on red field; another similar in the Keir collection, possibly from the same carpet and the rug from the Alexander Collection, with dark blue lattice on a madder field, see Alexander, Christopher, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, New York and Oxford, 1993, pp. 216-220. The ‘ragged palmette and hooked bar’ border is here rendered in a possibly unique fashion with the palmettes on the side borders all pointing upwards, with the bars placed vertically, rather than the usual form with the bars and palmettes all pointing in and out to the field.