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One of the most enduring and frequently cited themes of Persian carpets is the garden. It happens that, more often than not, carpets from the Safavid period (1501–1722) feature floral ornament, thus recalling the imagery of gardens, particularly the garden of Paradise. When used as furnishings, they cover the floor like a verdant ground. Upon being moved, they function as portable green spaces. If one moves beyond such truisms to consider the garden carpet in more period specific and conceptually rigorous terms, the comparison between carpets and gardens can elicit generative directions for future scholarship.

This talk explores some of these directions—inquiring how the garden carpet came to be defined in Persian poetry, analyzing the compositions and motifs of a subset of garden rugs attributed to the early modern period, and considering the spatial dimensions of the carpets and their relationship to contemporary gardens in Safavid Iran.

Sarah Molina is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture program at Harvard University. Her dissertation The Poetics of Space: How Safavid Carpets Shaped the Early Modern Persianate World (1539-1671) explores how carpets fundamentally shaped experiences of space in the Safavid world. She is currently based in New York as a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.