Motifs in Motion

Flowing tendrils and rigid geometries trace intricate patterns across the surface of a wide belt encircling the waist of a Moroccan bride. Worn by women during special ceremonies, the Fes hizam (plural: ahzima) was a heavily patterned silk belt historically woven by Jewish male artisans whom scholars assume to have roots in al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Few primary sources on the belts exist outside of French colonial era ethnographic texts (Gallotti 1939; Le Tourneau and Vicaire 1937; Vogel 1926). Contemporary literature on ahzima is limited to exhibition catalogues and survey texts that draw from an overlapping body of secondary sources and often repeat claims about the “origins” of the belts’ motifs, ranging from European (especially French) floral brocades (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106), Ottoman and Persian floral fabrics (Spring and Hudson 1995: 57, 2002: 37), and even Chinese cloud designs and Japanese fan patterns (Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106).However, the prevailing account is that the designs primarily derive from Andalusian artistic heritage (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Schroeter and Mann 2000: 176; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). This assertion aligns with the prominent “myth of al-Andalus” which permeates scholarship on Moroccan artistic production and which has recently come under criticism (Calderwood 2018; Shannon 2015; Rosser-Owen 2012). Lauding the artistic prestige of al-Andalus, this narrative of Moroccan history perpetuates the idea that, following the collapse of Islamic Iberia in 1492, the culture of al-Andalus was simply transplanted to Morocco along with its Jewish and Muslim exiles. Thus, as Jean Gallotti asserts, “in Morocco art is identical with that of the Mohammedans of Andalusia” (1939: 738). This belief lingers in contemporary scholarship on Moroccan artistic production, and in the case of the belts, it endorses a narrative of directly copying from Andalusian prototypes without consideration of design ingenuity by Moroccan artisans.Outside of Andalusian antecedents, few scholars have seriously contemplated other factors in the development of the belts’ distinct design aesthetic. Specifically, these scholars have overlooked the possible role of embroidery pattern books, which originated in central Europe in the 1520s and which exhibit clear design similarities to ahzima, highlighting Morocco's involvement in networks of exchange beyond al-Andalus. Developed with the aid of the printing press, pattern books were published throughout the sixteenth century in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, and France (Fig. 1). They consisted of dozens of folios of pattern inspirations of diverse geographical associations to be incorporated into the embroidery and weaving of domestic and industrial textile workers (Speelberg 2015: 19). Since the books widely circulated throughout the Mediterranean world, they offer a potential design tool for Fassi (adjectival form of Fes) weavers.Adopting a trans-Mediterranean approach,1 this essay tracks the movement and transformation of the artisans, designs, materials, and technologies inherent to the belts’ creation to contribute to a more comprehensive historiography of the production and design of Fes belts. This study comprises part of my dissertation research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century silk textile production in Fes, which aims to complicate the myth of al-Andalus in Fassi artistic production. It does this by situating the silk textile production of the northern Moroccan city within larger artistic and material flows within both the Mediterranean Sea to the north and Saharan desert to the south.While this study adopts the term “trans-Mediterranean,” the consideration of global cultural flows and cultural mobility (Greenblatt 2010) in art historical studies is not exclusive to the region. Other art historians have underscored the innate mobility of cultural objects in a range of geographies and time periods. For example, the essays of Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (Bleichmar and Martin 2016) explore how the movement of objects between disparate regions shaped both their materiality and meaning as they accumulated new significance and function in each new context. The exhibitions Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (2020) and Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara (2020) place mobility at the center of their examination of objects exchanged in or born out of trade networks flowing between Africa, Europe, and Asia. Similarly, the exhibition Interwoven Globe (2013) illuminates exchanges in textile designs and materials between the regions of Europe, Asia, and the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century (Peck and Bogansky 2013).This essay embarks on a similar project to highlight instances of cross-pollination in textile design between Europe and Morocco. By closely cross-analyzing the motifs of intact German and Italian pattern books and extant examples of Azemmour embroidery and Fes belts, this study considers the potential engagement of Moroccan textile workers with these design repositories to combat insular histories of the textiles, which privilege Andalusian artistic precedence and espouse a passive, unilateral process of artistic influence. The discussion begins with an overview of the historiography of Fes belts and their entanglement with Morocco's Andalusian heritage. This is followed by design comparisons, beginning with Azemmour embroidery, dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in relation to sixteenth-century folios from embroidery pattern books. While more design parallels can be seen across the embroidery and books, my analysis focuses on two key motifs—that of two birds flanking a vase or tree of life and S-scrolls—to establish a basis for the primary visual comparison of the Fes belts and pattern books. Given Azemmour's historical connections to Mediterranean trade networks and the clear European Renaissance textile design borrowings in its embroidery, my analysis reinforces the likelihood that Azemmour embroiderers encountered pattern books to justify a hypothesis that they would have been available to other Moroccan textile workers, like Fassi belt weavers, in later centuries.Expanding from this, a visual comparison of Fes belts and pattern book motifs evaluates instances of migration within Morocco that mobilized the voyage of pattern books from Azemmour to Fes. The movement of Jewish artisans among these cities during the sixteenth century provides one possible mode of transportation for the books or knowledge of their patterns. I identified four prominent categories recurring across the belts and books: the fleur-de-lis and heraldic forms; geometric and repeating designs; composite floral-geometric designs; and floral motifs. Next, the surface-level connections between the designs of the pattern books and Moroccan textiles are contextualized within an overview of material exchanges primarily between Europe and Morocco across the Mediterranean from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. Finally, the essay closes with research conclusions and plans for future dissertation research.Because of the temporal difference between the sixteenth-century advent of embroidery pattern books and nineteenth-through early twentieth-century dates of most extant belts, the visual comparisons assume the recycling of woven designs over the centuries.2 This has made exact dating of the belts difficult or nearly impossible, as there is little specificity for when motifs entered the design repertoire. One early example of a Moroccan sash, possibly a Fes belt, dating to the sixteenth or seventeenth century perhaps evidences earlier crafting of silk belts in lampas weave (Fig. 2).3 However, the majority of extant belts and those surveyed in this study date to later than the embroidery pattern books to which they are compared. For this reason, the earlier embroidered textiles created in Azemmour serve to establish Moroccan engagement in systems of Mediterranean trade in the early modern period to make sense of evidence of design borrowing in the belts in the later colonial period.Acting as rich visual repositories, these pattern books illustrated an array of motifs for weavers to assemble unique design compositions for each belt. While the European motifs reproduced in the books were potentially novel to Moroccan weavers, other patterns may have been familiar or even already included in their design repertoires. Part of the appeal of pattern books to European consumers were their display of “exotic” motifs from faraway regions, including the Levant, al-Andalus, and North Africa. Such ornaments, often labelled as “moresque” in the introductions and pages of pattern books, attest to increasing economic and artistic exchange between Europe and the Islamic world at the end of the fifteenth century that facilitated reciprocal design borrowing (Speelberg 2015: 26). Since the books themselves already contained motifs associated with North African art production, this visual exploration completes a loop of pattern exchange across the Mediterranean Sea that impacted textile design along both shores.In short, this analysis internalizes the inherent mobility and mutability of artistic objects that propelled cross-pollination evident in the design and material of both the belts and books. This investigation seeks to address the query: “What happens when materials, techniques, and technologies from one place are replicated elsewhere?” (Fraser 2019: 4). Using an object-centered approach to address this question evokes broader historical considerations, which in turn encourage a deeper understanding of the object's cultural biography (Kopytoff 1986). The subsequent analysis grapples with some unanswered questions regarding the development of Fes belts and the historical processes informing their design aesthetic to disrupt Andalus-centric narratives of Moroccan textile production and complicate notions of unilateral artistic “influence.”As the primary center of education, art, and commerce in Morocco beginning in the thirteenth century under Marinid rule (1244–1465), Fes is often considered the seat of elite culture in Morocco (Shatzmiller 2019). This is in part due to its historical entanglement with al-Andalus. In Colonial Al-Andalus, Eric Calderwood explains that the “Andalus-centric” narrative of Morocco asserts that “the culture of al-Andalus did not disappear in 1492, with the Christian Reconquest of Muslim Granada; rather, Andalusi culture migrated from the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco, where it has continued to thrive until the present day” (Calderwood 2018: 6). According to this narrative, the influx of Andalusian artisans into Morocco especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought cultural knowledge and practices that would become inextricably linked with that of Morocco. It argues that this Andalusian “inheritance” remains to this day, forms the foundation of contemporary Moroccan artistic production, and imbues it with the prestigious spirit of al-Andalus.Lauded for its crafts production, Fes played a major role in the development of urban styles through the wide exportation of its coveted artistic objects across Morocco. Because the city received waves of Andalusian immigrants beginning in the ninth century and a significant influx of Andalusian artisans during the Spanish Reconquista, Fes's prestigious craft objects are often characterized as with Andalusian and an of and 2002: In al-Andalus, Shannon explains that al-Andalus as an the project of a modern which the a prestigious a and a 2015: This and prestige in an Andalusian the cultural where Moroccan and artisans Andalusian that to an of and to their or craft 2015: primarily with the city of the hizam was a and Fassi by women in urban at special during the and early twentieth centuries. The belt was in and the waist of the over a to in the waist like a (Paydar and Grammet 2002: The belt was in and between as it was to (Fig. In its the belt of patterns This and the wide array of motifs the to the belt in to display designs to or the of the The motifs range from geometric floral and motifs, heraldic motifs, and like the of and in silk in the lampas weave on a the of Fes belts is by scholars to weaving and technologies brought by Andalusian artisans (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Schroeter and Mann 2000: 176; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). While of these Andalusian artisans to Fes at the end of the fifteenth century and early sixteenth century and 2002: it is Fes belts were woven and at this early examples of belts primarily date to the and early twentieth century when as art the weaving and of ahzima in Fes by the early twentieth century with the advent of the French in the early 1520s in central Europe, embroidery pattern books the Mediterranean world, diverse motifs that were incorporated into textile designs across The pattern book was published in by the a German book and the for pattern books (Speelberg 2015: designs associated with Europe, “exotic” from were across the through pattern books that they to new and from (Speelberg 2015: The of these designs to embroiderers by narratives or of pattern books display European to they as or motifs. For example, German pattern books examples of to a for a pattern that was on in Europe by the sixteenth as among motifs in the of book surveyed for this study Italian the in pattern books in were by heavily by those across the Islamic world (Speelberg 2015: This process of that European of the motifs than a Moroccan weavers and embroiderers to the pattern book folios for design they may have motifs through a European into their In this the meaning of these and a of artistic is following design analysis from the of material culture to evidence from the object's form and to evidence from the object's historical The case for design parallels between Fes belts and embroidery pattern books from the design similarities between Azemmour embroidered textiles and Italian to simply as this textile was by Jewish embroiderers to be as until the century, when the of embroidery the scholars have to motifs in Azemmour embroidery, ranging from and 2009: to forms and to and which from Renaissance and (Spring and Hudson 1995: Azemmour embroidery as a of the exchanges that place the Paydar and Grammet even the example of pattern book as a of the embroidery motifs from and northern Europe, and the that would have for Azemmour to book as from those of that is to embroidery pattern to discussion on the between Moroccan textiles and European I of the of Jewish from the in migrated to Morocco and in cities like Azemmour and where they into the and economic urban a similar role as that they in the Jewish as of trade both within Morocco and across the Mediterranean In the fifteenth century, Azemmour was as a by the in of trade in exchange for northern European (Paydar and Grammet 2002: later the city from to Azemmour's trade connections with this with the advent of pattern the beginning of the sixteenth century, the new Jewish of Azemmour were as between Morocco and and in their role this some Jewish and in cities to their Moroccan to their to cities like In this materials through Mediterranean like embroidery pattern books, have with the to of two birds flanking a form of a Jewish or a tree of life a in Azemmour embroidery and one in Italian This design in both the Italian silk on (Fig. and the Azemmour silk on similarities in design that the embroiderers European textiles or of their patterns. For example, a German pattern book birds with and (Fig. identical to those of Azemmour embroidery, as illustrated in the or in both Azemmour embroidery and pattern books. While this embroidered does not display the motifs seen in are of the pattern book Such forms may have into the motifs in pattern books and nearly identical to the Azemmour one from pattern on this form are for Azemmour embroiderers (Fig. the design parallels in Azemmour embroidery are more those in the Fes belts to on or of motifs included in the pattern books. I on four categories across the belts and books: the and heraldic forms; geometric and repeating designs; composite floral-geometric designs; and floral motifs. The designs between the Fes belts and Italian and German pattern books not be as of European designs reproduced by Moroccan they to borrowing of designs by both Fassi weavers and European book that mobilized the pattern across the Mediterranean by scholars and Hudson Gillow belts fleur-de-lis and heraldic form motifs perhaps or from French or Andalusian textiles and Such motifs in pattern books. on the belt (Fig. the is reproduced in the pattern books I surveyed (Fig. of the pattern book examples are more than those the belts, due to the of the from the of embroidery to that of While in the has over the of in weaving on a the is to in the forms and repeating designs in belts are by scholars to Andalusian textiles, and or to a Islamic of patterns. However, similar patterns in and pattern books, as some to textiles and design from Islamic regions for 2015: of a Islamic in both belts and pattern books. For example, the form on the end of a belt (Fig. can be to that in a pattern book (Fig. of in the is in artistic and design across the Islamic world including in North Africa. in the pages of the pattern books European design from Islamic art forms at the time that Moroccan weavers incorporated motifs from the of composite floral-geometric designs in the Fes pattern exact in the pattern books. In the examples of the composite motifs in the pages of the pattern books the The of comparisons between belt and book the artistic ingenuity of weavers in Fes in novel composite on examples in the books. For example, a by a (Fig. the on the of the central in or the of (Fig. is of the more and design (Fig. and perhaps most of the comparisons is the floral motifs of the belts. from floral patterns in other Moroccan textiles, these motifs were identified as from and Persian floral textile designs by scholars (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 57, 2002: Paydar and Grammet 2002: Gillow 2009: The belts’ floral designs of and more closely European examples than Andalusian or other Moroccan floral seen in a (Fig. provides a for the more of the belt 6). the belt designs, this floral out of forms and the in pattern books more the belt 6). The belt each a similar or and of forms the were on European they and over the analysis of the belt and book designs pattern this cultural mobility beyond the surface of the to the materiality of Fes belts illuminates the diverse sources and of its materials, techniques, and the thirteenth and fifteenth and French trade connections with Moroccan the of European This continued through the turn of the sixteenth century, as Andalusian immigrants a role within Fassi textile trade with Europe, in the of with the influx of textile production continued as the of Fes and from in Fes and the city of to trade between Morocco and the Italian of of silk from in North Africa, in to and the the the played a role in trade as the of the of Morocco during this were in Morocco by the and to Africa by and exchanged for and sixteenth-century primary of attest to the special of silk textiles in the of Fes. The Andalusian that two of the of the Fes of the early sixteenth century silk and the crafting of silk belts The of the silk in Fassi textiles during this period is it is evident that silk was both and by artisans to be in the sixteenth and seventeenth to silk and other textile was with of exchange Morocco with the of Europe, Asia, and Africa. throughout this silk and were from the Levant, Britain, and the Netherlands, facilitated by which the from European to Mediterranean The and and textiles from Fes to Africa Europe and Africa with North Africa as into the and twentieth centuries when Fes belts are to be silk production was in the of in to material to the silk and weavers of Fes. It was later in the century, that silk production a of which Fes on silk from and by to silk textile production Morocco's engagement in Mediterranean textile Azemmour embroiderers and Fassi weavers to textile from regions, like embroidery pattern books. It may to to through pattern books which to present examples of and cultural However, the patterned folios of the books in with the patterned weave of the belts the and of these a Italian Renaissance design in a pattern book on an embroidered in a Moroccan does this a belt woven by Jewish artisans, European motifs, and by Muslim is the meaning of these and the design can be reproduced in a and the patterns they are and and The earlier visual analysis how when cultural objects that have to be in textiles and European embroidery pattern are in visual comparisons parallels between two artistic which to larger at both during the historical and within contemporary The clear between the designs of the belts and pattern books to a and between textile This process of pattern borrowing and design the on and and those of culture and in that into question the in the of art the of the European pattern book scholars have to distinct to the motifs incorporated into Fes belts. the pattern book the or “moresque” of their designs, contemporary textile scholars have and for the belt these to and this essay has to and rigid to explore the of pattern and in a of and this the notions of distinct artistic and artistic are to complicate analysis of an object's aesthetic the case of Fes belts, this for novel connections beyond the of Moroccan textile This essay has how sources for of design beyond al-Andalus and to of and material In German and Italian pattern books, this study has one for the of study for Moroccan textile production that to the and of Mediterranean exchange networks during the early modern and colonial my dissertation I the of pattern books in Morocco to draw more conclusions on their role in textile production. This in and or with textile weavers in Morocco to or evidence of pattern books within the with the have been textile weavers in Fes the early century, especially aid in of the process of In the of I in Fes the Moroccan of during which time I the and of the in the Fes where weavers craft lampas textiles on (Fig. 19). I was a of the of patterns for weaving designs on the which to the pattern book folios (Fig. In future I both this and the of histories by the and present weavers to understanding of historical textile design and silk textile production in Fes more this study has with the Mediterranean I in my dissertation research to to the Saharan to Fes to patterns of mobility both outside of and within the African One of in the of in the production of by Jewish artisans, which are often woven into or embroidered silk textiles, like the belts 2018; Le Tourneau and Vicaire the patterns of trade between North and Africa during the century contribute to a understanding of the material sources Fassi textile this study has primarily on Fes belts from their in my dissertation I to the role of women as consumers of Fes belts and other silk textile Since belts were by for women to at significant ceremonies, the of this process highlight the of the in the design of unique belt. with women in the city would have the belts may their and and the significance of these textiles, perhaps as sources of or of While of the history of Fes belts remains through and study and a more to research on the belts within Morocco, the biography of these can come into

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