"Memling Bergama" Carpet

This is the "Memling Bergama" from Frank Cooper's Oriental Carpets in Miniature. This chart and finished carpet echo very strongly my feelings about the Shirvan 1 I worked this past summer from the same book -- the chart is tiny and does not include the very-helpful bold on every tenth line that many do nowadays, and some of the symbols are easily confused for a similar symbol which refers to a similar shade (e.g. small dot = dark red, large dot equals light red -- and this seems backwards to me, too, wouldn't dark red have a bigger dot?? gaaah) -- but the finished piece is so charming that I can only shrug and say, "but it's worth it".

I did make some changes in the materials -- it is worked in Appleton's crewel wool on 28-count Monaco, to be in scale with the Holbein carpet I worked last summer, instead of Paternayan wool on 18-count as in the original.  It is not a particularly simple matter to convert one brand of crewel wool to another -- various conversion charts I found online and in books gave me usually two and sometimes three possible choices, wh. really goes to show that each brand has fairly unique colors! and you can't quite get a true match if you convert to another brand.  But Paternayan is heavier enough than Appleton's to be impossible to work at 28-count, whereas I already knew, of course, that Appleton's would.

These are the shades I chose, though after working it I would recommend a different choice for the P643 than Ap343, as it doesn't quite contrast enough with the dark gold of the 911, and "disappears" quite a bit from the center crosses in the four outer medallions --

P500 = Ap326
P756 = Ap992
P950 = Ap226
P643 = Ap343
P751 = Ap911
P641 = Ap245
P930 = Ap147

The alternate conversion in the image below uses Ap566, Ap882, Ap226, Ap342, Ap911, Ap315, and Ap224, which looked much more "faded" to me and I wanted a newer-looking carpet.

I was also a bit perplexed by the quantities of wool specified in the materials list: although it list calls for equal amounts of the two reds, the results are obviously skewed to using much more of the so-called "dark" red -- so I used the other one for the overcast edging.  I ended up running out of this one by the time I got to the fringe, as it happened, so a good portion of that is the two reds mixed together, which you can see in a strong light but is otherwise more-or-less unnoticeable (she said hopefully).

This is how much wool I had left -- the 911 is what is left from the second skein --

Cooper writes of his version, "There is no assurance that [the carpet in the painting] is a Bergama rug, but it meets the description given in several books, and rugs from this area [in Turkey] were being exported to Europe as early as the fourteenth century. Because the rug appears in a Memling painting, it is, perhaps, safer to call it a Memling Bergama"!  He is not the first one, I think, to notice Memling's fondness for a certain type of Bergama, as there is a long article here about Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting which devotes an entire section to Memling.

Hans Memling "Flowers in a Jug" (ca.1485) now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.  I think Cooper's is a very handsome re-creation, in fact!

Comments

[Toffeeapple]

I do admire your patience, this kind of thing would drive me batty in minutes. It looks so good.

[Dawn in NL]

Once again I am amazed at the scale of your work. Well done. This is beautiful! I am glad you included the second photo, I didn't notice the thimble in the first. The Memling painting is also stunning.