Beige Crucifixion Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted, with silk fringe at both ends and a plain red outer band. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

This is a picture rug, and it should be treated as one. The pale areas — the ivory border and the flesh tones of the figure — will show marks first, and the turquoise sky is the colour most likely to shift in strong light. Hung on a wall away from a window, it will keep its colour for a very long time; on a floor, the figure at the centre would take the wear.

Look at the top of the picture before the picture itself. The turquoise sky is not a rectangle: it is cut into a cusped, pointed arch, with spandrels filled in above it and a column standing on either side. That is the layout of a Persian prayer rug — the niche, the columns that hold it up, the decorated corners — and the weaver has used it here as a frame for a Christian subject. The columns carry the idea further. Read either one from bottom to top and it is assembled from European ornament rather than Persian: paired deer, a putto in a shield, an urn, sphinx heads, a grotesque mask and a winged head at the capital, the kind of vocabulary found in printed engravings. Then compare the two. They match piece for piece, while the landscape between them is free — a river on one side, pine trees on the other. The borders and columns follow carpet logic, symmetrical and repeatable; the scene inside follows picture logic, and is allowed to be different on each side.