2-724-848 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Brocaded velvet with falconer and attendant in animated lattice, from a robe, mid 1500s. This signature Safavid velvet displaying a falconry scene is celebrated for its refined beauty, meticulous draftsmanship, and exemplary technique with eight colours of velvet pile. A falconer and attendant flank a tall blossoming plant on a golden ground of lobed medallions. Animated foliate vines display leaves bearing lion’s masks and dragons coiled around larger leaves on the rich crimson velvet ground. Instead of two or three colours of velvet pile, ingenious Iranian weavers wove velvets with as many as 14 colours of velvet pile, the most colourful velvets ever woven. They substituted one colour of pile warp with another one. This created fringes of the cut pile warps on the back, called pile-warp substitution.