After Holbein

Turkish carpets woven with fascinating yet ambiguous histories.

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Renaissance paintings often show grand interiors with lavish furnishings, sometimes including beautifully patterned Turkish carpets. While few carpets survive from that era, historians can study them in paintings by artists like Hans Holbein the Younger. The German-born 16th-century artist popularized the ornate carpets, desirable symbols of wealth and power in Europe. Some styles are even known as “Holbein carpets.”

This fascinating but little-known aspect of art history is explored in After Holbein: Turkish Carpets and the Tudors, an exhibition on view until April 22 at the University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries. The gallery has a collection of Holbein carpets, some large enough to span a wall. For the show, each is accompanied by a small reproduction of a painting that features a similar carpet.

Holbein depicted British nobility in several paintings, including his 1537 portrait of Henry VIII and his late parents, Mural Portrait of Tudor Dynasty. While that painting was destroyed in a fire, it had been copied, as in Portrait of Henry VIII, by an unknown artist. The carpet the king stands on resembles the gallery’s four-lobed medallion Uşak carpet. 

Woven in Uşak, a town in Turkey, it features repetitions that seem to continue beyond its edges. In the painting, the carpet’s boundlessness suggests the reach of the Tudor king is similarly without end. A carpet with the same design can be seen in The Ambassadors, painted by Holbein in 1533 and known for its distinctive yet mysterious representation of a distorted skull. 

The gallery’s small-pattern Holbein carpet is almost identical to the one in The Somerset House Conference, a painting by an unknown artist that shows Spanish and English representatives seated at a long table in 1604 as they negotiate an end to the Anglo-Spanish War, which had dragged on for almost 20 years. In the painting, the carpet is draped over the table.

Octagonal medallions and interlaced knots sprawl in geometric fractals across the gallery’s carpet, which is of unknown provenance. It could be a Turkish carpet from the 17th century, or a Romanian copy from the 19th century. Its border shows a Kufic style of Arabic calligraphy that features angular, rectilinear letterforms. It is refreshing to see such ambiguities noted. 

Although the exhibition emphasizes the symbolic value of these carpets in a European context, American art historian Lauren Arnold has noted they can also be seen as demographic markers that illustrate the migration of Eastern Christians to the West during the rise of the vast Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. While the origins of several carpets are debatable, it speaks to the complexities of the time, when distinctions between “east” and “west” were still being forged. 

Curator Michele Hardy has made excellent decisions to centre the entangled histories of these carpets while highlighting the context of European representation. The ambiguity is powerful. It precedes the rationalization of the colonial era, which introduced classification conventions, such as taxonomy and dating practices. 

In the gallery’s hushed upper floor, the lush carpets – with their sprawling influences and interlinked histories – seem to rebel, evading disciplinary systems and categorizations that continue to inform collections today. ■

After Holbein: Turkish Carpets and the Tudors at the Nickle Galleries in Calgary from Feb. 2 to April 22, 2023. 

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Nickle Galleries

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