Textile fragment with interlace and diamond-shapes
Details
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Title
Textile fragment with interlace and diamond-shapes
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Associated place
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Date
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Material and technique
linen, woven with silk warp at selvedge, and embroidered with red and dark-blue silk
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Material index
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Technique index
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Object type
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Dimensions
6.5 x 37.5 cm (warp x weft)
24 / 24 threads/cm (thread count)
red embroidery bands 1.4 cm (width)
blue embroidery rectangle 9.5 x 4.5 cm (length x width)
ground fabric (flax) 0.05 cm max. (thread diameter)
ground fabric (flax) 0.02 cm min. (thread diameter)
ground fabric (silk) 0.08 cm (thread diameter)
additional fibre, embroidery 0.05 cm (thread diameter) -
No. of items
1
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Credit line
Presented by Professor Percy Newberry, 1941.
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Museum location
Museum department
Eastern Art
Accession no.
EA1984.184
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Catalogue text
One long band of red interlacing has two short bands attached at right angles at either end, also filled with interlacing. The interlace design changes slightly in the long band. The band is also interrupted by a dark blue embroidered rectangle, filled with diamonds and comb shapes, and with a narrow blue border of S-shapes.
The red bands are 1.4 cm wide and 34 cm and twice 2.5 cm long. The dark blue rectangle has a length of 9.5 cm and width of 4.5 cm. There is a selvedge, with warp threads of silk to a width of 0.8 cm.In: Barnes, Ruth and Marianne Ellis, ‘The Newberry Collection of Islamic Embroideries’, 4 vols, 2001, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum
This detail is both a record and a practice piece: the embroiderer has made a mistake on one of the three slightly different crimson patterns and lost the twisted ribbon effect. He or she then broke off the sequence completely and restarted. The three narrow bands show the way the designers of the Mamluk period turned a guilloche pattern, dating back into antiquity, into a geometric one and then developed two more variations on the theme. The seemingly endless number of different geometric patterns worked on Mamluk embroidery can only be described as amazing.
In: Ellis, Marianne, Embroideries and Samplers from Islamic Egypt (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, in association with Greenville: Curious Works Press, 2001)
Further reading
Barnes, Ruth and Marianne Ellis, ‘The Newberry Collection of Islamic Embroideries’, 4 vols, 2001, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, vol. ii, vol. i
Ellis, Marianne, Embroideries and Samplers from Islamic Egypt (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, in association with Greenville: Curious Works Press, 2001), no. 14 on p. 27, illus. p. 27
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