That the volume is a limited success in terms of stated aims is less a criticism of it than an acknowledgment of the complexity of the subject, the enormity of the task undertaken, and unforeseeable limitations in the available textile materials. In other words, editor Carol Bier can consider her hopes realized insofar as the volume's shortcomings, which this review addresses, do not so much vitiate its usefulness as offer implicit instruction as to what needs doing and taking into account in future follow-ups to what she terms "an initial effort" (p. 6).
The chief shortcoming of the volume was beyond the control of its editor and her collaborators. To wit, if the illustrated Iranian historical textiles are representative of The Textile Museum's collection, that collection is visually inadequate as a primary source basis for serious definition or appreciation of the Safavid Era, much less for the Afshar Zand, and Qajar periods. Such an appreciation requires the range in carpet design exhibited in the plates in E. G. Ruedin's The Splendor of Persian Carpets (1978); whereas for example, in Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart, not a single Safavid textile item prompts commentary treating any aspect of the most significant cultural and social event during the Safavid period: the imposition of Twelver Shi'i Islam upon the populace as a state religion and the conversion from Sunnism to Shi'ism. In fact, the textiles presented aid only in a very partial appreciation of the Iranian groups: some 20th century nomads, some villages with tribal origins, and pre-modern royal courts. Although these are real and valid Iranians, upon reading such statements in the text as "Fascination with falconry...has long characterized Iranian culture" (p. 154), any carpet dealer or collector who has traveled or lived in Iran will recognize that the Iran known from such travels and from the Persian carpets marketed and prized in America for a century is something else altogether. But even had the volume's focus been defined explicitly as "Pre-Modern Iranian Royal and Nomadic Textile Arts," at least four sorts of conceptual and editorial problems would have remained.
One is the use of anthropological research on post-World War II Iran as a descriptive tool for rural life there during the l9th century and earlier. As interesting as Mary Martin's "City and Country: Rural Textile Production in Northeastern Iran" (pp. 121-133) may be to anthropologists, other readers may have difficulty accepting her prefatory assertion that: "While we cannot equate current times with the Safavid through Qajar periods, there are certain patterns and processes which operated then and now" (pp. 121-122) precisely because Martin does not later identify such processes.
A second problem is hinted at in the volume's very title which is taken from textile images in a poem by a famous Persian court poet named Farrokhi. The allusion to that poem is part of an attempt to parallel Persian literary evidence with the textiles under scrutiny. But no literary evidence is offered contemporary with the textiles. Farrokhi lived five centuries before the Safavids, and it is doubtful that a pre-Mongol, Sunni, Persian poet from Sistan might say something relevant to the aesthetics of carpets produced by Turkic, Shi'i rulers in Isfahan in the 16th century. Moreover and more importantly, the metaphor Farrokhi uses describing his poetry as a "robe...spun within the heart/and woven in the soul" appeals to lovers of Persian panegyric poetry because of its rhetorical actually composed poems. For there is little about the poem in which these lines occur that seems heartfelt or soulful. As a court poet, Farrokhi was an expert craftsman who knew the rules and conventions of his trade and produced competent verse accordingly and in accordance with his patrons' wishes and taste. One need not agree with Thoreau's observation in Walden that "A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any Emperor." But to romanticize traditional Iranian court crafts distorts insights into culture. Many of the textiles depicted and described in this volume are not art from the heart or soul, but rather bloodless, expertly crafted fabrics produced in the service of ruling elites with calculating, deliberate planning, often involving self-conscious adaption from painting. They are no more or less appealing because of their mode of production or function. But they deserve appreciation in their own terms with criteria not primarily related to the fact that they are distant from us in time and place.
In addition, although one need not accept Donald Wilber's argument in "The Triumph of Bad Taste: Persian Pictorial Rugs," Hali 2 (1979): 192-197, such views are a matter of critical record and call for responses whenever those Iranian textiles are praised which depict human figures, as nearly a third of the non-"tribal" items in this study do. Catalog 23 is a case in point. What can recommend a textile in which because of exigencies of the medium, the drawing of a human or animal figure is less effectively rendered than would have been the case in painting (of which the textile drawing is an imitation)? What is the point to a textile depiction of a scene involving multiple Laylas and Majnuns or Khosrow Shirins or, in this case, Josephs and Zolaykhas? In other words, although repetitions in a garden scene are called for and in a hunting scene can make sense (presumably providing that only one king is represented if he happens to be on the (hunt), something is lost in aesthetic terms as well as appeal to the imagination when such distortion of the fictional context occurs. Even village weavers recognized that a depiction of Noah about to save the world should have in it two and only two of each animal species and only one Noah (e.g., Robert de Calatchi, Oriental Carpets 1967, p. 21, plate 7).
The fourth and final conceptual-editorial problem has to do with bibliographical research, philology, history, religion and other areas beyond any editor's expected expected textiles. The bibliography includes nearly 300 items, and many of the nearly 600 footnotes in the volume are bibliographical. The very quantity of cited sources bespeaks a nearly unmanageability of the material or, in the light of the very varied nature of sources cited, the fact that the 400 years covered in the volume do not, as the editor assumes (e.g. "This period" p. xii, "this four-hundred-year period," p. 3) constitute a discrete Iranian period in the arts.
Items that could be added to the bibliography include Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Iran (1986), with salient articles on Safavid art and textiles by Friedrich Spuhler and Basil Gray; Maurice Dimand's Oriental Rugs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1973), which seems to have been utilized on pages 208 and 220 in citations of illustrations similar to plates in the volume; the Boston Museum Journal 69, nos.355-356 (1971), a special issue on the hunting carpet featuring a multidisciplinary approach; and Cyrus Parham's masterful Tribal and Village Rugs from Fars (1986), might have proved useful to the "Pasture and Product section of the catalog. My own Persian Carpets (1984) an argument for appreciation of post-World War II carpets with illustrations and cultural analyses only of contemporary carpets, is unfortunately recommended as a source of illustrations of nineteenth-century Persian carpets" (p. 97, note 1). In that book, I argue as well for greater use of Iranian literature on carpets by western writers. Its paucity in this volume is symptomatic of a lack of exactitude in dealing with the Persian language. Among a number of instances is the discussion of a line from a poem by the 14th century poet Hafez (famous in Persian carpet studies because a couplet of his is inscribed in the Ardabil Shrine Carpet woven into the central medallion of Catalog item 82, an embroidered velvet covering. McWilliams errs in the attribution, transcription, transliteration, and translation (p. 283 and p. 282, note 1) perhaps in part because of a bizarre combination of what appear to be typographical errors and transpositions, which would have immediately struck a Persianist editor, whose services are needed in any such multidisciplinary project at every stage, including proofreading.
In several cases, textiles are described as "perhaps imbued with mystical Sufi ideals" or as perhaps having "cosmological significance" (p. 212). Footnotes cite Schuyler Cammann's seminal "Symbolic Meanings in Oriental Rug Patterns: I, II, III," Textile Museum Journal 3, no. 3 (December 1972): 5-54, and other essays. But the discussion neither risks an assessment nor describes specific possibilities. The fact is that in the case of many Safavid pile carpets, it is not a question of possibilities; the symbolism is as demonstrably there as it is in Safavid religious architecture. In this regard and in contexts where readers are given the following sorts of understandable misinformation, the most significant gap in the project research group becomes obvious: the input of an Islamic art historian specializing in Safavid, Afshar, Zand, and Qajar art. Readers are told: "Within the field of Islamic art, there is perhaps no subject about which more has been written than Persian carpets" (p. 158, note 2). With reference to a fragment decorated with Shah Abbasi motifs and vines immediately reminiscent of religious architectural decoration in Isfahan, readers are told, "this velvet features a purely ornamental pattern" (p. l53). As if something else were to be expected in the Islamic art of Iran, readers are told this about the floral content of a metalground textile: "Leaves and blossoms are matched with little concern for botanical accuracy" (p. 162). Of a l7th century textile fragment, readers are told: "One of the rare inscriptions in Safavid textiles appears in this satin lampas" (p. l79).
As a final example, readers are advised: "Until more is known of the division of labor and workshop practices in the Safavid textile industries, the weaver and designer of textiles will be treated as one" (p. 184, note 2).
Oriental carpet dealers, collectors, and amateurs without an interest in Iranian history or culture will have guessed by this point that much about the first half of Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart may not be of particular interest to them. (Their favorite blooper is likely to be Willem Floor's definition of "kilim" as "a thinner variety of the felt carpet," p. 27). As for the catalog section, only about 20 items, most of them previously published, are pile or kilim floorcoverings. Yet the volume's stimulating theses, hypotheses, and expository essays are relevant pieces in the Iranian textile puzzle. Readers will find fascinating Jennifer M. Scarce's "Vesture and Dress: Fashion, Function, and Impact" (pp. 33- 56). Leonardo M. Helfgott's "Production and Trade: The Persian Carpet Industry" (pp. 107-120) offers a readable, commonsensical, and dispassionate sketch of facts and probabilities in the history and development of pile carpet weaving in Iran (although the point to his consistent use of the word "Persia" for "Iran" escapes me). Carol Bier's "Court and Commerce: Carpets of Safavid Iran" (pp. 97-106) voices an exciting thesis regarding pattern analysis as a key to commercialization of carpet designs (although the implications relating aesthetic appeal to complexity and commercialization to a diminution of beauty are moot at best).
