Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols.

Western fascination with oriental carpets dates from the fifteenth century, when European painters began to celebrate the artistry of pile carpets imported from the Islamic world. The Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1441) was the first to emphasize the beauty of exotic carpets, but his descriptions of them are unreliable. (1) Beginning in the 1450s, numerous Italian artists depicted Turkish and other identifiable eastern Mediterranean carpets with painstaking accuracy, and this practice spread to other European painters during the sixteenth century. When late…