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Мetmuseum (за посиланням)
The pattern, which appears continuous, has been adapted to the system of ‘repeats’
needed to produce a textile. Each design unit contains an eight-pointed star, a quatrefoil
and two roundels. The compartments they form are filled with a variety of smaller motifs, from interlace patterns in green or blue to tiny knots and fleurs-de-lis.
Textiles with geometrical interlace of this type were mainly produced in southern Spain and North Africa. This example was probably made in south-west Spain in the 14th century, perhaps in Granada, which was the capital of the Muslim Nasrid dynasty from about 1232 to 1492.
Such silks were not only used in Spain. They seem also to have been popular in Italy. This piece formed part of a hanging behind a large wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in Florence. It was bought there in the 19th century.
The interlocking motifs of fifteenth-century Hispano-Moresque textiles in which the idea of the eternal order is evoked by infinite pattern, by return and reworking, by form, lines, angles, and colors, patterning that outlived the caliphates of Al-Andalus, qualities for which even the Christian kings of the Reconquista reached when they wanted to evoke luxury, refinement, and the persistence of higher things in base material, is associated in my mind from time to time with the angular mode that now dominates Spanish football, the intersecting polygons of Xavi and Iniesta, or rather of the collective emergent mind one might name Xaviniesta, in which, quite apart from the creation of goals, footballing victories, and delirium in the minds of opponents, one senses a sensitivity to abstractions and a command of intricate geometries that is like a succession of rooms for the imagination and that, were it to be mapped by the placement of a spooled shuttle on the ball, might restore in visible form the intermixed Mudéjar heritage of Spain herself.
Also, Xavi looks like an Arab.
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