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The Pope Pius IX Hunting Carpet,
Tabriz 1522 or 1542 (detail)
Raiders of the Lost Fragment- Hali Magazine
Friday, June 06, 2008

For the first time since the 1999 ICOC, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan is
exhibiting its entire carpet collection. This private institution, one of the most
important house-museums in Europe, is widely known for its collection of
Medieval and Renaissance Art, but Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli was an avid
collector with a variety of interests. The decision to have the dozen carpets from
the collection occupy, once again, much of the ground floor exhibition space, is
most welcome, and has seen the reunion of a lost fragment from the most
famous of the museum’s carpets, the large Safavid Hunting Carpet dated 1522
or 1542, with its main body.

It is interesting that nobody knows how this important court carpet reached Italy,
though its presence was officially recorded on 20 September 1870, at the
Quirinale Palace in Rome, where Pope Pius IX resided when the Papal army
surrendered to occupying Italian royal troops. The carpet was found cut into
seven pieces and with parts of its borders missing, so Queen Margherita Savoia
arranged for it to be restored by a Florentine tapestry weaver, whose technique is
clearly visible today in various joins and patches. This Tabriz weaving was in the
royal holdings until 1923, when it was finally given to the Poldi Pezzoli Museum,
as the institution was believed to be the only contemporary structure that could
preserve and protect such a valuable item.

Nothing was known of  the missing parts until the 1980s, when a large border
section surfaced at auction labelled ‘anonymous carpet fragment’. Its last owner,
the Genoese collector Dr Alessandro Bruschettini, offered it as a gift to the
museum and, after careful conservation treatment, it was incorporated into the
main body of the carpet.

This is a great achievement, and a much more detailed report will appear in a
future issue of HALI. We will, however, point out a technical curiosity that has
come to light. In 1870, the carpet was missing two border corner sections from
the same end, and the restorers, for the sake of symmetry, replicated the design
of the opposite end borders. This last fragment, however, shows, rather
surprisingly, a so-called ‘corner solution', which is quite lovely in contrast to the
odd designs in the other corners. It is most likely that the carpet originally had
two pairs of ‘corner solutions’ with different designs.

This is not an uncommon feature in Safavid carpets, particularly large ones,
which often have paired border corner designs that vary slightly at each end. This
can be clearly seen in the the carpets illustrated in Michael Franses’s thorough
article of the Safavid carpets in the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, published in
HALI 155, an expanded, downloadable version of which is available on this
website.

Annalisa Zanni, director of the museum, told us she is “proud” of the work
carried out during these past years on the museum’s carpet holdings, and
“delighted” by the affection shown by many toward the Poldi Pezzoli. In addition to
a generous gift from Dr Bruschettini, the museum is – thanks to funding from
Gallery Moshe Tabibnia – now able to offer visitors a revised bilingual
(Italian/English) catalogue of the carpet collection, which includes a truly great
16th century Kashan Salting group carpet, bought in 1855 by Poldi Pezzoli
himself, the so-called ‘Darius of the Universe’, plus a lovely Karapinar medallion
rug.