Armenian Presence in the Production and Circulation of Ship-Decorated Early Modern Ceramics and Textiles

by Ani Margaryan

The depiction of sailing vessels on a diverse corpus of objects d’art—from Iznik and Kütahya ceramics produced in Asia Minor to Chinese export porcelains manufactured in Jingdezhen for international markets—serves as more than a decorative motif. The ship functions as a visual signifier of transregional maritime networks in which Armenian merchants and artisans operated as central agents. The recurrence of the ship across Ottoman and Chinese material culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries corresponds to the documented expansion of commercial routes connecting the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea, routes in which Armenian diaspora communities maintained a notable presence. An examination of multiple objects—including dishes from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bonhams, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, together with Kütahya ceramics, an Armenian silk curtain, and Chinese export porcelain—establishes specific links between the visual depiction of sailing ships on early modern ceramics and textiles and the artisanal and mercantile activities of Armenian diasporic groups.

In early modern material culture, the ship motif operates within a bivalent semiotic register derived from two distinct iconographic traditions rooted in the Abrahamic religious sphere: the Christian navis ecclesiae allegory and the Islamic calligraphic galleon. In Christian visual exegesis, the ship functions as a typological signifier of the Church as the vessel of salvation, navigating the mare saeculi under the helmsmanship of Christ or Saint Peter. This allegory is materially instantiated in the architectural nave of basilicas, in the fresco cycles of Roman catacombs (third–fourth centuries CE) where the ship appears as an ark or a barque, and in the late medieval and early modern practice of suspending votive ship models (ex-votos) from church vaults, commissioned by mariners as propitiatory offerings for safe passage. The ship in this context denotes pilgrimage, eschatological refuge, and ecclesiastical institutionality. In the Islamic tradition, particularly within Ottoman and Safavid Persian production, the ship motif assumes an apotropaic and epigraphic form known as the Amentü gemisi (Ship of the Creed). Here, the vessel’s hull, masts, and sails are constituted entirely by Arabic calligraphic inscriptions—typically the Throne Verse (Qur’an 2:255), the Amentü creed, and the names of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus—rendered in polychrome or gilded script on paper, ceramic, or textile supports. These calligraphic ships function as talismanic diagrams: the textual body of the vessel was believed to render the depicted ship unsinkable, transferring protective efficacy to the object’s owner. Concrete examples include seventeenth-century Ottoman calligraphic panels and Iznik ceramic dishes where the ship’s rigging is replaced by inscribed lines of naskh or thuluth script. The ship thus operates as a visual synecdoche for divine protection—in Christian contexts through institutional allegory, in Islamic contexts through epigraphic talisman. When the ship appears on hybrid objects such as Iznik polychrome dishes, Kütahya ceramics, or Chinese export porcelain, it synthesizes these Semitic symbolic layers with European maritime iconography (lateen-rigged, multi-masted vessels) and Chinese border ornament (wave-and-rock spirals). The result is a visual palimpsest in which the ship signifies simultaneously Ottoman naval power, Christian ecclesiological allegory, Islamic talismanic writing, and the transregional mercantile networks that physically circulated these objects from Iznik and Kütahya to Guangzhou and back.

The material evidence for Armenian participation in Ottoman ceramic production is anchored in both technological and epigraphic data. The distinctive bright red slip that appears on Iznik pottery from the mid-sixteenth century onward is identified in art-historical literature as “Armenian bole,” a thick clay slip rich in iron that potters applied under a transparent glaze to achieve a raised, sealing-wax red characteristic of the mature Iznik style. This technological contribution was fundamental: the addition of this red, along with turquoise and green, transformed the earlier Ottoman palette derived from Chinese blue-and-white prototypes into a distinctive polychrome ware that became the high point of Ottoman and Armenian ceramics. Beyond chemistry, documentary evidence survives in the form of Armenian inscriptions on Iznik vessels. The British Museum possesses a ewer of 1510 and a water bottle of 1529, both bearing Armenian inscriptions commemorating their owners, including one that reads: “In memory of Abraham of Quotai [Kütahya], servant of God, in the year 959 [1510 AD].” Such inscriptions, incised on the base rings of vessels, confirm that Armenian patrons commissioned Iznik wares and that Armenian artisans participated in their production.

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s deep dish from circa 1625 to 1650 exemplifies the ship motif within Iznik production. The dish is decorated with an underglaze-painted design showing a European-style sailing ship at sea, its sails billowing as it rides cresting waves, while three tadpole-like fish swim below. The rim bears simply drawn spirals ultimately derived from the Chinese ‘wave-and-rock’ border pattern, creating an iconographic hybrid in which Chinese border conventions frame a European maritime subject rendered in Ottoman technique. This dish belongs to a group of similar Iznik pieces depicting sailing ships of either European or North African build, produced around the second quarter of the seventeenth century, when the Iznik industry had declined from its earlier sixteenth-century heyday. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s dish from circa 1600 presents a comparable composition: a single multi-masted ship, described by the museum’s curatorial department as “more European than Turkish in appearance,” sailing on a schematic sea adorned with cloudlike shapes. The Met’s curatorial note observes that although multiple lateen-rigged ships were standard on jugs and tankards, on plates the design was normally a single multi-masted ship. A second Met dish from the seventeenth century similarly depicts a sailing vessel within an expanded decorative repertory that included figures, animals, pagoda-like pavilions, and domed churches, its border composed of alternating leaves and spirals derived from Chinese wave motifs.

The Bonhams ship dish from the first half of the seventeenth century provides additional detail. Of shallow rounded form with everted rim on a short foot, it is decorated underglaze in cobalt blue, green, raised-red, and black with a three-masted ship on a sea filled with fish, the masts topped with flags, the sky with partial flowers and foliate motifs, the border with a rock-wave design, and the reverse with a band of circle motifs. The presence of the raised-red slip—Armenian bole—links this dish directly to the technological innovation associated with Armenian potters. A comparable Iznik dish with a similar European lateen-rigged three-masted ship is preserved in the Benaki Museum in Athens, confirming that the ship motif constituted a recognizable subgenre within seventeenth-century Iznik production.

A further example, held by the Louvre Abu Dhabi and produced in Iznik circa 1625–1650, depicts a vessel identified by the museum as probably an English warship of the Elizabethan period. The dish belongs to a sustained series of seventeenth-century Iznik wares in which the decorative repertory featured ships of various types and origins that sailed the Mediterranean to Anatolian ports. The choice of an English warship on an Ottoman ceramic object demonstrates the extent of commercial and naval exchange between the Ottoman world and Europe during this period. The dish is executed in the standard Iznik palette of cobalt blue, turquoise, green, and raised red, with the ship rendered in a stylized manner: a multi-masted vessel with flags, sailing on a schematic sea, surrounded by foliate motifs and a border derived from Chinese wave patterns. This object, like its counterparts in London, New York, and Athens, testifies to the circulation of European maritime imagery through Ottoman ceramic workshops and the adaptation of such iconography to local technical and aesthetic conventions.

If Iznik ceramics reveal Armenian technological and epigraphic traces, Kütahya ware demonstrates more explicit Armenian artisanal dominance. From the seventeenth century onward, Kütahya emerged as a center of Armenian ceramic production in the Ottoman Empire, with Iznik and Kütahya functioning as rival ceramic centers. Armenian ceramicists in Kütahya operated major workshops, producing both architectural tiles for Ottoman governors and European notables, as well as pottery for export. The Clar Auction’s nineteenth-century Kütahya plate, decorated with a sailing ship in blue, turquoise, and coral red, with edges covered with black circles and four circles on the back, exemplifies the continuity of the ship motif in Kütahya production. The use of coral red—a color closely associated with Armenian bole technology—and the schematic depiction of the vessel on a stylized sea echo the earlier Iznik ship dishes while adapting them to nineteenth-century commercial markets. The survival of signed and dated Armenian pottery from Kütahya, catalogued extensively by scholars including John Carswell, provides an evidential basis for attributing such wares to Armenian hands.

The 1818 silk curtain produced by the Indian-Armenian community for the Armenian Patriarchy of Jerusalem functions as a primary document linking maritime imagery to Armenian commercial agency. The curtain memorializes the Iranian Armenian commercial navy that played a role on the Silk Road between India, China, and Europe in the seventeenth century, recording that Iranian Armenian merchants maintained a fleet of approximately 150 ships traveling between Manila, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Venice. This fleet belonged to the merchant community of New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, established following Shah Abbas I’s forced relocation of Armenians from Julfa (Nakhichevan) between 1604 and 1605. The New Julfan Armenians developed a commercial network extending from Manila to Amsterdam, with trading posts in Surat, Madras, Calcutta, Batavia, Lhasa, Venice, and Livorno. Their maritime operations included ship ownership, chartering, and insurance, functioning as primary intermediaries in the Eurasian silk trade. The curtain’s Armenian inscription thus preserves a collective memory of Armenian maritime enterprise that documentary sources confirm: New Julfan Armenians dominated the Persian raw silk trade from the seventeenth century until the 1740s and were prominently involved in international East-West trade of silk, textiles, precious stones, and other luxury goods.

In the medium of Chinese-made export armorial wares, objects bearing Armenian inscriptions and heraldic devices are preserved primarily in the Kalfayan private collection. Although no ship is depicted on these particular pieces, the connections they document among the meliks of Artsakh, Indian-Armenian, and Iranian-Armenian diasporic communities further evoke the Armenian presence in maritime trade and the embodiment of such commercial networks in ceramic commissions. The British Antique Dealers’ Association tea bowl and saucer from circa 1790 belongs to the broader corpus of Armenian-mediated Chinese export porcelain. The famille rose tea bowl is painted on each side with a three-masted British ship, while the saucer features a ship at its center, surrounded by a green ribbon swag around the border with four outer sections of pink diaper and European flowers. The interior rim of the tea bowl carries a diaper design and a red insect at the center. The presence of a British ship on a Chinese porcelain object destined for export indexes the cross-cultural trade visualization that Armenian intermediaries facilitated.

In conclusion, the ship motif on Iznik and Kütahya ceramics derives from Christian (navis ecclesiae), Islamic (calligraphic talisman), and European maritime iconography, as seen in the Metropolitan Museum dish (described as “more European than Turkish”) and the Louvre Abu Dhabi dish (probably an English Elizabethan warship). Armenian artisans contributed the raised red slip (“Armenian bole”) and left epigraphic traces, including a 1510 British Museum ewer inscribed to Abraham of Kütahya. By the seventeenth century, Kütahya had become a center of Armenian ceramic production with signed wares. The 1818 Jerusalem silk curtain records a New Julfan Armenian commercial fleet of approximately 150 ships operating between Manila, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Venice. Chinese export porcelain with European ships circulated through multiple commercial channels (Indian, Persian, Turkish, Jewish, European traders), with Armenian intermediaries forming one among several; around forty Armenian-commissioned porcelain items survive. The recurrence of the ship motif reflects Ottoman naval pride, European demand, and the circulation of prints, and indirectly, an index of Armenian agency. Armenian potters and merchants participated actively in production and circulation, with the strongest evidence in technology, epigraphy, and New Julfan networks. The ship remained a polyvalent signifier—Christian, Islamic, Ottoman, European—and the Louvre Abu Dhabi dish witnesses this layered exchange, in which Armenians played a facilitating role.