Rabbits, Birds & Vines in 'Social Fabrics'—Art Talk with Katherine Taronas

Hi, my name is Catherine Terrones and I'll be talking to you about a theme that runs through the special exhibition Social Fabrics Inscribed Textiles from Medieval Egyptian Tombs curated by Mary McWilliams at the Harvard Art Museums. I was fortunate to assist with this exhibition during my time as a doctoral student at Harvard studying history of art and architecture. My area of specialty is the art of the Mediterranean world in late antiquity, and I worked on conceptualizing the role of Byzantine and Coptic material in the show. The exhibition focuses on inscribed Islamic textiles, a category known as tiraz. You can see an example of a tiraz on the screen with its Arabic inscription woven in gold lettering running below the double-purled band right here. One of the Social Fabrics exhibition's major contributions is that it situates these tiraz productions against the backdrop of the pre-existing weaving and artistic traditions in Egypt that had developed during the previous century of Greco-Roman occupation. In this way, the show uses the textile art form as a lens for exploring larger themes of social change and heritage in art, as Egypt transitioned from being a province in the majority Christian Byzantine Empire to Islamic control after the mid-7th century. The Byzantine legacy explains many of the iconographic features of medieval textiles in the Islamic period in Egypt, and it's one of the main reasons that Egypt's Islamic textiles look different than those produced elsewhere in the Islamic world. In this talk, we'll see how certain images of animals and plants favored in Byzantine designs persist and are reinterpreted in Islamic work in Egypt. We'll observe the continued importance of natural imagery as signifiers of ideals of abundance and prosperity. In particular, we'll see how the favorite Byzantine motifs of the bird, the rabbit or hare, and the scrolling vine continue to inform the iconography of inscribed Islamic textiles for centuries. Tiraz are textiles woven or embroidered with Arabic inscriptions. Proper tiraz are created in courtly workshops, often named the ruling caliph or other officials, and commonly invoke a divine blessing for the owner or for the caliph. Tiraz style weavings also developed outside these networks of patronage as imitations of this prestigious form of material culture. Many tiraz, like this example, whose inscription names a mid-9th century Abbasid caliph, present their inscriptions with calligraphic simplicity, with a line of restrained and precise letter forms standing out against an undyed background. Others in Egypt, though, locate their inscriptions among bands and fields full of figural imagery, many features of which draw upon motifs prominent in the Byzantine iconographic lexicon. The example tiraz textile you see here, very different in style to the one we just saw, incorporates its inscription into a grouping of gold and silk bands that depict animal and vegetal life in decorative compositions. The inscription is one component of a lush design that makes use of traditional Byzantine decorative vocabulary and reflects Egypt's role as a place of cultural intermingling. We'll return to this textile a little later in the talk to look at its content in more detail. Before doing that, however, it's helpful to think about the environmental setting in Egypt to understand the enduring appeal of certain nature-derived motifs. Before the completion of the Aswan Dam in the 20th century, the existence of large, complex societies in Egypt's arid climate was entirely dependent on the flooding of the Nile River, which annually washed its banks in fertile silt ideal for the growing of crops. Successful inundations of the river brought great wealth and stability to the pharaonic kingdoms, while low floods, on the other hand, led to famine and the breakdown of the political and social order. The fate of the population remained precariously tied to the vicissitudes of the river throughout the Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic eras. Given the absolute importance of the Nile to agriculture and basic survival, imagery of the river and its marshes signified life and regeneration to viewers in Egypt. Many works of art celebrated the rich array of flora and fauna that inhabited its waters and marshes. Birds that lived along the river, especially water birds, were a primary symbol of the abundance and vital energy of nature. New Kingdom tomb paintings often depicted the tomb owner hunting birds along the river in the afterlife. This wall painting fragment from the Theban tomb of Neferhotep, now in the Louvre, shows papyrus flowers radiating out over a blue half circle that represents water. A profusion of birds flies above and within the marshy landscape. Carefully observed details convey the great variety of species that tend to nest with eggs and young chicks in the reeds, conveying ideals of fertility and the symbolic rebirth and regeneration in the afterlife. Signifying in a similar way, this early Byzantine cushion cover in Harvard's collection chooses a plump bird to fill the golden ringed roundel at the center of its tapestry design. The crest of feathers on its head are a marker of its species, just as the details of the Theban tomb painting evoke specific birds that lived in the landscape. This crest of feathers suggests a quail or a lapwing, pleasant bucolic types of birds that make an appropriate compositional anchor for an array of other animals and fruiting foliage. The bird and its companions enhance the sense of comfort and enjoyment conveyed by the softness and warmth of A fragment that appears in the Social Fabrics exhibition and comes from what was once a much larger textile, probably a wall hanging, uses text to explicitly communicate the propitious symbolism borne by natural imagery like birds. Woven here is stylized vegetation in purple wool that carries heart-shaped leaves or fruits. The Greek inscription running down the stem of the stylized plant gives the bird flourish in its imperative form, creating a wish meant to conjure abundance and prosperity for the home whose walls the textile embellished. Tucked into the purple leaves is a symmetrical pair of birds that brings the purple tree and its message to life. Another favorite animal symbol of abundance in Byzantine Egypt is the rabbit or hare. This animal may be the most common of all to feature on Byzantine textiles. Then, as now, the rabbit's ability to rapidly produce large numbers of offspring made it symbolic of fertility. Its image on clothing and furnishing textiles brought plenty in good fortune. The rabbit was also admired in antiquity for its quickness and great speed in running, and because of this the rabbits on textiles are often shown in motion. The rabbit on this fragment leaps in a twisting gallop and its energetic movement reinforces the connotations of vitality that come with this animal. The third iconographic motif I want to highlight is the coiling vine. Grape and ivy vines are major design elements in Byzantine textiles and in Greco-Roman decorative arts in general. These two plants were attributes of the Dionysus, a deity of wine, revelry, and rebirth. Scrolling vines, like those you see on the cup bands on the screen, were some of the earliest figural elements to appear in tapestry weaving in the late Roman archaeological record in Egypt. Often in simple forms, as on these two fragments from Harbert's collection, and vines remained extremely popular motifs throughout the Christian period, where they continued to symbolize enjoyment and the good life and were reinterpreted as representing Christ as the vine and the salvation that could be attained through Christ. A lovely cuff band in the exhibition illustrates how the vine could come together with animal symbols to give a rich picture of nature's bounty. The formal characteristics of this piece generate a sense of abundance and energetic life as a profusion of animals race through a double scrolling grapevine. The repeating unit of the vine loop frames sprinting pairs of animals of different species. Note that the rabbit occurs here. The animal's tongues are highlighted with bits of bright red yarn against the blue pattern, emphasizing their exertion and active poses. The rightmost pairs of animals in both scrolls face in opposite direction to the rest, reversing the flow of movement across the band. This type of so-called inhabited vine motif, where a vine contains animals inside its scrolls, combines together the most potent symbols of prosperity, life, and earthly abundance into an effective and highly decorative motif and will form the foundation of the iconographic schemes adopted by later Islamic tiraz fabrics in Egypt, a few of which we'll consider now. This piece, loaned from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, demonstrates how Byzantine Egypt's artistic traditions were incorporated into tiraz style textiles. Although it dates to the late Fatimid period in the 11th century, this large fabric employs motifs that had already been in vogue for more than half a millennium, the rabbit, the bird, and the vine. Its Arabic text, visible as white letters outlined in black, is integrated into decorative bands of figural imagery to such an extent that it becomes nearly illegible. Comparing the design on this tiraz with that of the cuff band from several centuries earlier, it is obvious that the scrolling interlace on the tiraz has its ancestors in Byzantine textiles. The tiraz, however, has lost many of its overtly vegetal aspects, morphing into a thick gold and segmented band. The earlier Byzantine vine sprouts sprays of trilobed leaves at regular intervals along its path, making clear to the viewer that it represents the grapevine, a plant that signaled the positive connotations of good fortune and revelry and of Dionysus and Christ. Such leaves are absent from the tiraz vines, perhaps primarily because of the Islamic ideal of abstinence from alcohol and therefore wine. We see here both a commitment to continuing the use of an enjoyable, time-honored motif, but also its subtle modification for a changing religious climate. Animal aspects, too, are present on the tiraz. White rabbits against red backgrounds alternate with gold birds against green backgrounds inside their scrolling vines. The animals are simpler and less naturalistic in style than their predecessors, and they are almost difficult to identify, pointing towards a new way of visualizing the old motifs. While the Byzantine weaver was more interested in showing details of the animals and conveying the essence of their energy and interactions, the Fatimid weaver explores the potential of the animals and vines as small-scale elements of an overall decorative pattern. This effect is apparent from stepping back and taking an overview of the extant textile, where the combination of gold, blue, red, and green elements come together in a jewel-like pattern. The symbols of natural abundance, inherited from the earlier Byzantine artistic tradition, have been preserved but are handled differently in composition, reflecting the later style's new preference for geometry and patterning. A similar approach is taken on a tiraz loaned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, whose inscription names a Fatimid caliph. The Byzantine legacy is apparent here, too, in the use of several variations on the scrolling vine motif in successive horizontal bands that stretch across the fabric. Small vines with green and red leaves form the outer borders of this particular decorative band, and a large double-scrolling vine structures the design at its center. As in the previous example, the vine here is gold and embellished with a sort of segmented pattern. Inside its loops are variations on a white bird motif with highly abstracted birds, paired in alternating and reflected compositions. The focus is entirely on birds and vegetal imagery. Demonstrating the easy appeal, traditional motifs that embodied relatively neutral messages of natural riches and prosperity could have to patrons across religious boundaries, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the majority Christian era under the Byzantines, and into medieval Islamic rule. Although several key traditional motifs were retained, the final example from the exhibition I want to introduce showcases the innovation that also took place in the usage of these motifs. In this case, in particular, in the repertoire of animal symbols that could signify these ideals of good fortune. A tiraz-style woolen shawl created for use in the Coptic Christian community, which remained sizable in Egypt throughout the medieval period, presents some of these new symbols. The animals parading across what would have been its top and bottom ends have clear precedence in the iconography of Byzantine textiles, especially the creatures that may be rabbits and gazelles. These tapestry bands, though, are embedded in a slightly different format. The shawl is a rare bilingual document woven with long lines of Arabic and Coptic script. Also new is the fact that camels, shown in white and gold with spotted humps, are the most numerous animals represented in the tapestry frieze. This is noteworthy as the camel is a species not seen on Byzantine textiles. There, the focus had been on wild animals like the rabbit and the bird. The camel, on the other hand, is a domesticated species not native to Egypt, whose use increased there throughout late antiquity. Its introduction in these later images would likely have brought to mind the cross-desert trade that was a major source of wealth and the stronger ties to Western Asia that linked Egypt into the Islamic cultural sphere. These camels, new motifs shown in a traditional format, may be a new way of picturing prosperity that continues the legacy of animal symbols of abundance and good fortune and the textile medium as an appropriate and effective vehicle for conveying these ideals. Thank you for watching.