This lecture reconsiders tapis polonais (so-called “Polish carpets”), misattributed in the 19th century despite their Persian provenance. Drawing on archival and literary sources, it highlights their commissioning by Polish-Lithuanian elites and manufacturing in Ruthenia (modern Ukraine), challenging nation-centric notions of artistic origin. These carpets exemplify the fluidity of cultural forms, calling for a transcultural perspective that embraces their dynamic reinterpretations across geographies and histories.
Tomasz Grusiecki is Associate Professor of Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures at Boise State University. His research encompasses early modern cultural entanglements, European perceptions of the wider world, eco-critical examinations of artistic materials, and zoopolitics of art-making, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe from 1500 to 1700. He is the author of Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania (Manchester University Press, 2023). In Spring 2025, he is a Residential Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
Image: The Czartoryski Carpet, seventeenth century, “Polonaise,” made in Iran, probably Isfahan, cotton (warp), silk (weft and pile), metal-wrapped thread, asymmetrically knotted pile, brocaded, 486.4 × 217.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, by exchange, 1945, 45.106 (photograph provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
