Rug

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Oriental rug weavers have never been primarily concerned with naturalistic perspective. The flat surface of the rug remains flat, and rarely presents a convincing illusion of depth. The most important objects are big and the unimportant ones are small, no matter their size in life or their location in space. Most war rugs are like this, too. Grenades and Kalashnikov rifles, which are personal weapons symbolizing resistance, are shown as big as helicopters. But over the past 10 or 15 years, a new way of showing scenes – particularly city scenes – has been developing among Afghan rug weavers. Cities are now being presented in full “western” perspective, sometimes even in complex three-point perspective where the point of view is raised well above ground level, In Europe, linear perspective techniques that originated with the ancient Greeks became highly developed during and after the Renaissance when the humanistic focus of Greek art reappeared. Naturalistic representation gradually became more important than simple religious expression – in other words, how people and objects actually looked and how they occupied three-dimensional space was more significant than the religious ideas and symbols they embodied. Evidently something similar is happening with the Afghan rugs.