Indo-Portuguese embroidered blanket (colcha), Bengal, first half of the 17th century

Since ancient times, Indian textile products have been among the main trade goods exported from this land: the production of the largest centers specialized in textile manufacturing, located in Bengal and Gujarat, was able to satisfy the demands of the southern markets. -East Asia, China, the Roman Empire and, later, also in the nascent Islamic states (Egypt, East Africa, Middle East). With the arrival of the Portuguese and later the Germans and the British, the rich textile manufactures were also exploited, so that the production of the latter had to adapt to the demands of the European market. The first mention of a colcha is found in Gaspar Correia’s Lendas da India, in which the typical Bengali blanket is presented inside a trousseau used for a diplomatic gift, in consideration of the commercial and artistic value that this product had.

Subsequent documentation, such as letters and travel reports, testify that the textiles produced in Bengal, precisely called colchas, began to be part of the European royal collections starting from the late sixteenth century. The colchas were in fact among the first artistic works commissioned by Europeans and sold in the courts as a novelty and by virtue of the preciousness of the embroidery, often in silk or with a cotton base. If initially the decoration of the cholchas was characterized by Bengali iconography, with the intervention of the Portuguese, who have the merit of having understood the true potential of these works, the theme of the embroideries also varied with adaptations that made the colchas very complements requested in European courts.

The iconography of the embroideries thus expanded with motifs from both the Indian and European traditions, often with a fusion between the two; in particular, episodes belonging to Western culture were chosen, such as those belonging to Greek-Roman mythology (for example the triad of Athena, Juno and Venus) or to the Old Testament, reread and presented through the Bengali artistic vocabulary. Among the well-known buyers of the Bengali colcha is also Cardinal Ferdinando de ‘Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who in 1585 commissioned his Asian correspondent Filippo Sassetti to purchase Indian curiosities, including two embroidered Bengal quilts (documentation preserved in the State Archives of Florence); it was not the only occasion for the Florentine Cardinal, who also commissioned the merchant Francesco Carletti to procure him the products of the Indian textile manufacture.

A Bengal colcha and a cloak, formerly belonging to the imperial collections, are now kept at the Kunsthistorisches Musem of Shloss Ambras, and are probably those sent in 1594 from Madrid to the court of Vienna. These exotic artifacts were kept inside the Kunstkammer or in the Wardrobe, and only shown on rare and special occasions: they were hardly used in everyday life, much more as a demonstration of the erudition and power of those who could boast them in their collections. Indian colchas are a generic term that encompasses different types of textiles, such as blankets, carpets, tablecloths and cloaks and which therefore could have different uses. An example is demonstrated by the Annunciation by an anonymous artist of 1549, a painting preserved at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, where the Virgin is seated on an extrado, a type of colcha used as a carpet also in the Lisbon court itself. In Florence it is attested that numerous colchas were kept in the warehouses and workshops of the Casino di San Marco, probably as textile samples for the Florentine artists who worked there. Our colcha is plausibly placed in the Bengali production destined for export, as evidenced by the scenes embroidered above in Tussar silk (naturally yellow in color, it grew spontaneously in the eastern territories of India. Judgment of Paris) with biblical scenes, including the Judgment of Solomon. It is rare to find such well-preserved artifacts as ours, even in the museum collections. The colcha described here, in fact, has only a small intervention on the border and is still adorned with two silk tassels that decorate the edges. Several other museums boast works similar to the blanket in their collections. Among these, noteworthy are those preserved at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon (n.3692, no.3413), the British Museum in London (n.2000,1213,0.1), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1970.173 , 1975.4 and 34.104.1), and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (T20e4).