Gold Argues the Cause: Textiles, Materials and Technologies in Eurasia, 1200-1400
The study of historic textiles has long been dominated by a focus on style, and in particular on the ways in which styles moved between geographic areas. This is especially true for objects made during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a period in which trade routes across Eurasia were radically reshaped by series of conquests, new alliances, and treaties. This panel moves beyond long-held but hazy notions of style transmission to insist on the importance of the study of the materials and techniques used in textile crafts. Three papers center respectively on Ukraine, Anatolia, and the Mongol territories; together they consider the impact of transfers of technology, and how they were effected by re-settlement, artisan migration, and exchange. Using evidence from recent excavations, Warren Woodfin argues against prevailing notions of the conservatism of Byzantine embroidery techniques, combining formal and technical analysis. Eiren Shea considers the rise in the making and use of gold thread on an animal substrate, linking it to a new rage for gold-woven textiles, which was in turn enabled by the spread of weaving technologies under the Mongols. Amanda Phillips links a previously unstudied Ottoman textile—inscribed with the name of a Sultan—with commercial workshops staffed with artisans who moved between centers in the Islamic world, willingly and unwillingly. As a whole, the panel makes two greater historiographical arguments: one for immense potential of close-looking and technical art history, and the second for the role of human migration in technological and artistic innovation.
Field of Study:
Chair:
Amanda Phillips,University of Virginia - ahp2n@virginia.edu
Discussant:
Melinda Watt,Art Institute of Chicago - mwatt@artic.edu
