The carpet is decorated with animals fighting in a garden full of trees laden with blossoms and fruit, in which small birds are perched. Typical of the Persian art of the 16th-century Safavid period and often found in large court carpets, the scene is adapted here to a smaller article of commercial character. Known as “animal” carpets, these articles constitute the peak of Persian production under the Safavid dynasty. The scenes are often symbolic, and the combat between a large feline (a lion, a tiger, a leopard or even a mythological beast like the Chinese qilin, a sort of lion with antlers) and a bovine animal or one with long antlers, like an antelope, would represent the eternal struggle between the sun (lion) and the moon (antelope), and hence between light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, and ultimately good and evil. 

The rigid mirror-image symmetry, both vertical and horizontal, is evidence that the carpet was woven on the base of a cartoon constituting a quarter of the overall design. The very fine and unusual border presents three levels of forked and arched leaves in three colours (white, green and dark blue) arranged in intersecting circles to form a sort of chain. 

The cotton structure is characteristic of Persian manufacture of the period, as is the use of asymmetrical or Persian knots. The weaving displays close similarities with many Isfahan carpets with palmettes and cloudbands on a red ground produced as from the end of the 16th century and exported to the West on a large scale. It is, however, markedly different from that of the more precious 16th-century court carpets, where silk is often used for the warp and weft. The carpet was therefore probably woven in the 17th century and by a commercial manufactory, albeit one of very high quality. 

Alberto Boralevi