A silk weft faced textile fragment, Central Asia,

probably from a coat

The lot offered here shows one of the most popular motifs in the history of textile design; the facing birds. Couples of birds, and sometimes rams, dragons, stags and other animals, either facing towards or away from each other, appear in textiles from China to Persia to Sweden throughout the centuries. These pairs were often placed in roundels or framed by rectangular shapes made up of simply drawn lines or stylised flowers and leaves. The roundel design itself originates in Persia, where during the Sassanian period such motifs were often used in stuccos and metalwork, see Roland McKinney et al, 2000 Years of Silk Weaving, New York, 1944, pl.16. As the roundel itself evolved throughout the years it came to include various animals in different formations. Birds in roundels first appeared in sixth-century China where, during the Sui and Tang dynasties, these motifs were particularly favored. As the current lot shows, in spite of the popularity of framing animals with roundels or other kinds of framework, figural designs were also used as freestanding elements. Birds, along with the aforementioned animals, appeared on textiles in the form of an overall pattern. Silks with similar decoration were also much desired in the nomadic societies of Central Asia, where possessions were few and had to be portable. To both nomads and settled peoples in the region objects, like the lot offered here, made of delicate and expensive materials, such as silk and gold thread or foil, were obvious status symbols. A Central Asian cloth and gold robe with an overall design of falcons embellished with the rosette-like wheel-forms at their shoulders drawn similarly to the ones found in the current piece is in the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, see Jon Thompson, Silk, Doha, 2004, pp. 72. Another comparable example is a textile fragment worked in gold and silk, decorated with a very similar overall bird design, in the Cleveland Museum of Art, see James C. Y. Watt et al, When Silk was Gold, New York, 1997, pg. 144. Similarly to these examples, the lot offered here exhibits a mixture of Chinese and Persian design elements, such as the blooming palmette leaves, the vine scrolls and the curling cloud motif, making this piece distinctly Central Asian, see Watt et al, ibid., pg. 144. For a variety of textiles with various interpretations of the animal-fret pattern see McKinney et al, ibid., plates 4-6 and 26-32.  For a detailed discussion on silk weaving in Central Asia please refer to Watt, ibid. pp. 3-30.