Lotto. 16th century.

From Enc. Britt.: so called because it appears in several of the works of the 16th-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. They are characterized by a lacy arabesque repeated field pattern, usually in yellow upon a red ground. This pattern was a 16th- and 17th-century favourite for carpets apparently produced somewhere along the Aegean coast of Anatolia and repeated in much more geometric draftsmanship in small rugs from Transylvania or elsewhere in European Turkey.

Specialists generally assign the ‘Lotto’ carpets (also called ‘arabesque carpet’) to the group of ‘Uşak’ rugs.
Furthermore, they subdivide the ‘Lotto’ carpets into three styles: the ‘Anatolian’, the ‘decorated’ and the ‘kilim’ style. The rug on this picture is an example of the ‘kilim’ style, because of the jagged diagonals of the pattern.

Uşak (110 km west of Afyon) was one of the most important and renowned carpet centers in Ottoman times (late 15th to 18th century). Rug production is still going on today, but on a lesser level and with altered designs.
In the 17th century great quantities of Uşak carpets were made for the royal houses and the Christian churches of Europe. They are named according to their specific design: ‘star’, ‘medallion’, ‘bird’, ‘chintamani’ (or: leopard spot), ‘cloud band’ or after renaissance artists who included them in their paintings: ‘Holbein’ and ‘Lotto’.

Correspondent: J.M.Criel, Antwerpen.
Source: ‘Oriental Rugs, volume 4: Turkish’ (Zipper & Fritzsche) .