{"id":287,"date":"2012-01-15T13:57:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-15T21:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=287"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:33","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:33","slug":"iznik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/iznik\/","title":{"rendered":"Iznik"},"content":{"rendered":"

IZNIK <\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We are currently enjoying a mild winter, but even so, I miss my garden and the flowers that provide me with inspiration during the growing season.\u00a0 My front beds are full of clusters of emerging daffodil tips, but instead of giving me joy, their presence this early worries me.\u00a0 The holly trees are bright with berries and there are flashes of color from other fruiting species, but those flashes are only tantalizing pinpoints. \u00a0I need more.\u00a0 Last weekend I sought floral inspiration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly refurbished Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The galleries cover many countries, ethnic groups and time periods, but one of the common themes is a tradition of painstaking embellishment of all kinds of objects–from complex carpets to everyday vessels.\u00a0 Color and stylized images abound in head-spinning abundance.\u00a0 I focused on the floral motifs, which are everywhere in the galleries.\u00a0 My favorite flowers decorate the tiles and pottery vessels from Iznik in Turkey.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Iznik, known historically as Nicaea, was founded in the fourth century B.C.\u00a0 Perched by Lake Iznik in northwestern Turkey, it has been a walled city since ancient times. \u00a0Until recently it has been primarily an agricultural town, but in the 17th<\/sup> century Ottoman Empire it was an artistic center, producing vivid pottery used to decorate mosques, palaces, homes and public buildings.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You may not know the name “Iznik,”\u009d but you have probably seen reproductions or pictures of Iznik pottery, especially in the form of decorative tiles.\u00a0 The pieces are composed largely of quartz and quartzite, giving them a hard, bright quality.\u00a0 At the height of Iznik’s popularity, artisans took images, including familiar flowers, and translated them into decorative motifs.\u00a0 Jewel-like tones of blue, turquoise, green and red stood out against white backgrounds.\u00a0 Tulips abound on Iznik objects, as do carnations and hyacinths.\u00a0 Other flowers also dance over the tiles and vessels, but some are too stylized to identify definitively.\u00a0 Graceful leaves and curling vines repeat throughout the designs.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The elegant tulips of Iznik tiles are far removed from bulbous modern-day favorites.\u00a0 They most resemble contemporary lily form varieties like ‘Ballade’ and ‘White Triumphator,’ with tall, slender blossoms that narrow at the petal tips.\u00a0 Almost all the Iznik tulips are portrayed with the petals tightly closed.\u00a0 If those blooms were to leap from the tiles and open up, the slender petals would become reflexed or curved back, corrupting the elegant silhouette favored by Iznik artisans.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Iznik carnations or dianthus are easily recognizable because of their characteristic ragged or “pinked”\u009d petal edges.\u00a0 Popular in gardens for millennia, dianthus, in the forms of carnations, cottage pinks and sweet William, still shine in today’s cottage gardens.\u00a0 Cultivated varieties of the common carnation, Dianthus caryophyllus, were used by the Romans for medicine and improved by later breeders including the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.\u00a0 Now they are standard in florist’s shops and flower markets everywhere, beloved for their good looks, sweet scent and long-lasting natures.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The origins of the Iznik style lie in the blue and white Chinese Ming dynasty porcelain favored by Turkish sultans.\u00a0 Originally the decoration on Iznik pottery was strictly cobalt blue and white, like its Chinese forebearers.\u00a0 Over the course of the sixteenth century, turquoise was added to the designs, followed by shades of green and finally, red.\u00a0 The colors still shine in the Iznik pottery on display at the Metropolitan Museum.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Iznik pottery reached a peak of popularity in the sixteenth century era of Sulyeman the Magnificent.\u00a0 A traveler in the seventeenth century reported that there were 300 pottery workshops in the town.\u00a0 According to the website run by the Republic of Turkey, the Iznik products were exported via the island of Rhodes, which was, at the time, controlled by the Turks.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the Ottoman Empire declined, so did the popularity of Iznik pottery.\u00a0 By the twentieth century, the town had become a shadow of what it was during the height of its fame.\u00a0 It was burned to the ground in 1920 during the Turkish war of independence, but was later rebuilt and resettled.\u00a0 In 1989, a cultural revival began and in 1993, the Iznik Foundation was launched to facilitate research into Iznik history, sponsor archeological digs, recreate traditional pottery-making methods and spearhead a rebirth of the pottery industry.\u00a0 Now the flowers dance once again on pottery manufactured in Iznik and students are mastering ancient techniques.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My daughter brought two modern Iznik tiles–one with tulips and the other with carnations–back from a trip to Turkey.\u00a0 I prop them up on my desk now to remind me that beautiful things, like tulips and Iznik tiles, may fade away for a time, but they always return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IZNIK \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We are currently enjoying a mild winter, but even so, I miss my garden and the flowers that provide me with inspiration during the growing season.\u00a0 My front beds are full of clusters of emerging daffodil tips, but instead of giving me joy, their presence this early worries me.\u00a0 The holly trees are … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-winter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1504,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions\/1504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}