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Silk Decorative Tunic Band with a Hunter
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
This prestigious silk band displays a stylized palmette leaf above a hunter who holds a sword and a shield and pursues a lion and a rabbit. Another fragment with Arabic script indicates Islamic manufacture. Green and ivory silk wefts (horizontal threads) dominate, interlaced by warps (vertical threads) in a diagonal twill weave. A second inner warp does not come to the surface. Such compound structures were woven on large looms with automatic pattern repetition, called drawlooms.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s own descriptionCredit lineSilk Decorative Tunic Band with a Hunter, 700s. Egypt or Syria, Umayyad period (661–750) or Abbasid period (750–1258). Silk: complementary weft-faced twill with inner warps (samit); overall: 27.3 x 6.7 cm (10 3/4 x 2 5/8 in.); mounted: 34.9 x 14.3 cm (13 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1939.505
