Fragment de cobertor de cenotafi amb inscripcions de la Shahada, en escriptura thuluth, dins de bandes de diferent amplada disposades en ziga-zaga acompanyades de formes arrodonides que evoquen les llànties d’una mesquita. 

Teixits amb aquest tipus de disseny sobre fons verd, amb frases que fan referència a Mahoma, s’han atribuït a fragments de les sedes que cobrien la tomba del profeta a la ciutat de Medina, especialment durant el regnat de la dinastia otomana. Al renovar-se el cobertor el teixit es fragmentava i es distrubïa entre els fidels com a reliquia. 

La kiswa o vel sagrat de la Ka’ba a la Meca tenia el mateix tipus de disseny però en color vermell. 

Nombrossos fragments de teixits similars es conserven a diferents museus arreu del món.

A study of paintings from Iran indicates that in the early sixteenth century the typical waist girdle was a leather strap with metal plaques, which then gave way to a narrow textile band with gold fasteners.¹ By the seventeenth century, a long and wide sash wrapped and knotted around the waist was customary.² These sashes had a central field of narrow stripes with decorative panels of flowering plants at either end; they were tied so that these floral panels were visible. The sash was an indispensable accessory and a tool for projecting the status of the wearer. Thomas Herbert, part of an English embassy to Iran in the late 1620s, remarked on both the length of these sashes and the meaningful variation in their materials: "Their waists are girt with fine towels [a plain fabric band worn under the sash] of silk and gold about 8 yards long; those and the sashes distinguish the quality of those that wear them; dukes and other of the noble sort have them woven with gold, merchants and qezelbash with silver; of silk and wool those of inferior rank."³ By this measure, an Iranian sash in the Museum's collection (see MMA 33.80.18), with its gold ground extending the whole of its almost fourteen-foot length, must have been worn by a rich and important personage.⁴ A further mark of its quality is the fact that the back of the sash is well finished. Similar sashes were also worn in the Ottoman and Mughal realms on either side of the Safavid cultural sphere. By the late seventeenth century this fashion had spread to parts of eastern Europe such as Poland and Russia, where textiles imported from Iran and Turkey had become status symbols worn by courtiers. Persian sashes became a requisite part of the wardrobe for noblemen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the crossroads between the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the European Holy Roman Empire. The aristocracy’s entire style of dress was influenced by fashions from the Safavid and Ottoman courts, but the sash retained its popularity long after other features became more Westernized. By the eighteenth century the demand for silk sashes, or kontusz (and thus known as kontusz sashes) worn over an outer coat, became so great in Poland that domestic manufactories, called persiarnie, were established.⁵ One of the finest eighteenth-century producers was the establishment founded in the city of Sluck, east of Warsaw, by an Armenian named Jan Madjarski and his son Leo⁶ The Madjarskis clearly took great pride in their work and "signed" their sashes with woven inscriptions on the end panels (see MMA 49.32.48), where they were certain to be seen. These sashes were normally worn folded in half lengthwise and then wound around the waist. An innovation introduced by the Polish manufacturers was the production of a two-color, double-sided main field that enabled the wearer to extend his wardrobe by folding and tying his sash up to four different ways.⁷ From the mid-seventeenth century European observers used the word shawl, derived from the Persian sha¯l, to describe the oblong textiles woven of very fine wool that were used by Iranian men as waist sashes and by Indian men as shoulder coverings. By the late eighteenth century the white "Kashmir" shawls with colorful pinecone or paisley motifs at each end became the de rigueur fashion accessory for European women (for an unusual and creative use of a shawl as headgear, see MMA 45.59.3). An early reference to shawls imported to England from the Kashmir region appears in 1767, in the correspondence of British author Laurence Sterne.⁸ French Empress Josephine is often credited with popularizing the trend at the turn of the nineteenth century and is said to have owned more than fifty expensive imported shawls. During the early nineteenth century Kashmiri shawl makers began to replace the plain white field of these textiles with bold colors or stripes. At the same time, Europeans started weaving shawls in an attempt to meet the increased demand for the fashionable accessories. Traditional Kashmir shawls were patterned using a twill tapestry technique, which was extremely time consuming. Driven to make shawls more quickly, European makers normally employed faster weaving techniques, but a few Russian makers retained the tapestry method.⁹ Several of the Russian workshops were run by female members of the landed gentry, who took advantage of the inexpensive serf labor available to them to produce these amazingly fine textiles as in this example¹⁰ In this case, the flowers in the pinecone shapes at each end of the shawl can be identified as European species such as poppies, roses, and cornflowers; there even appears to be a type of tuber vegetable anchoring the individual motifs. The vivid stripes of this shawl may have been inspired in part by the colorful men’s sashes being produced in Poland, Russia, and France, which themselves had been inspired by Iranian and Indian precursors. [Melinda Watt, adapted from Interwoven Globe, The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800/ edited by Amelia Peck; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: distributed by Yale University Press, 2013] 1. Goetz, "The History of Persian Costume," p. 2247.  2. Scarce, "Vesture and Dress: Fashion, Function, and Impact," pp. 36, 42.  3. Herbert, Travels in Persia, 1627–1629, p. 232.  4. Sir Jean Chardin, writing in the 1660s, noted the large costs incurred by courtiers to maintain their wardrobes. Quoted in Floor, "Economy and Society: Fibers, Fabrics, Factories," p. 22. 5. Poskrobko-Strze˛ciwilk, "Polish Kontusz Sashes in the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art," pp. 19, 23. I am grateful to Ms. Poskrobko-Strze˛ciwilk for her generosity in sharing her time to discuss this research.  6. Ibid., p. 24.  7. Ibid., p. 32.  8. See Irwin, The Kashmir Shawl, p. 19.  9. Catalogue number 101C is composed of twill-woven solid-color stripes and tapestry-woven patterned areas; these components were woven separately and then skillfully joined.  10. The two most prominent female-owned manufactories in Russia were those of Nadezhda Merlina (active in Nizhny Novgorod, 1806–34) and Vera Andreevna Eliseeva; see Cooper, "Luxury Textiles from Feudal Workshops: 19th Century Russian Tapestry-Woven Shawls," pp. 224–35. For a shawl signed by the Merlina workshop (very similar to this shawl), see Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 1972.175.

In 1785 Louis XVI purchased the Château de Saint Cloud (fig. 49) in Marie Antoinette's name from the duc d'Orléans. The château, situated on a hillside overlooking the Seine not far from Paris, became the queen's favorite summer residence. Built in the sixteenth century and rebuilt during the seventeenth, the palacewas in need of renovation. The architect Richard Mique (1728-1794) enlarged and altered it, and appropriate furnishings were ordered for the queen's apartment.Many pieces of furniture were commissioned from Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sene (1748-1803), a member of an important dynasty of Parisian chair makers who received a royal appointment in 1784. Sene provided a set of seat furniture for the queen's dressing room, called her cabinet particulier ox cabinet de toilette that is described in the 1789 inventory of Saint Cloud. The daybed, the bergère (a comfortable chair upholstered between the arms and the seat), and the fire screen from the set are now in the Museum's collections (figs. 50?57). They were the gift of Ann Payne Blumenthal, the second wife of George Blumenthal. The painted and gilt frame of the low daybed (fig. 50) is embellished with floral motifs. Six short tapering and fluted legs surmounted by Ionic capitals support the piece. The front stiles of the head- and footboard, which are of equal height, are carved with female half-figures wearing Egyptian headdresses (fig. 51). The berg?re (fig. 52), which has a medallion with Marie Antoinette's initials on its top rail (fig. 53), is decorated in a similar manner. A decade before Napoleon's North African campaign was to inspire the fashion known as égyptomanie, the queen appears to have had a taste for ornament derived from ancient Egyptian art. Seated classical female figures, rather than Egyptian caryatids, decorate the feet of the fire screen (figs. 54, 55), and a woman who once held a cornucopia reclines on its top. The carver is not known, but Louis-François Chatard (ca. 1749-1819) was responsible for painting and gilding the frames.According to the 1789 inventory the set was originally upholstered in a white-twilledcotton with rows of individual flowers embroidered by the queen herself. When the three pieces came to the Museum in 1941 only the fire screen's show cover (fig. 56)had survived. Although the cotton ground is much discolored, Marie Antoinette'sinterlaced initials, composed of blossoms embroidered in satin stitch, are in remarkably good condition (see fig. 57).

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