Bronzino

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White villas, like thickly iced wedding cakes, stand along the broad, leafy avenues in the quietly posh London district of Maida Vale. Behind the placid façade of one of them, John Eskenazi and his family live enveloped by the color red. A private dealer in Indian sculpture, Eskenazi is also a curator, author and publisher (as founding partner of the Art Newspaper). And he is a collector of early silk velvets, of which deep, rich crimson is a prominent feature. A quick tour of the house, with Lila, the family’s boxer-Labrador cross, leading the way, reveals that rare Ottoman and Italian silk velvets dating from the 15th to the 18th century hang in every room. In fact, these three-dimensional works of art, of which Eskenazi owns nearly two dozen, are the only decorations on the walls, from the foot-and-a-half-high panel featuring tulips on a square column in the basil-scented kitchen below to the 44-by-20-inch, 16th-century Italian velvet hanging covered with swirling vines and stylized flowers—originally the bodice of a dress and a dead ringer for Eleanor of Toledo’s gown in Bronzino’s famous portrait—in the master bedroom on the third floor.

When made, these velvets belonged only to princes and bankers, sultans and popes, and those close to them in rank. They hung in palaces or in important churches or were turned into sacred or the most extravagant secular clothing. This was such precious, costly fabric that any leftover scraps were made into shoes, purses or caps. When part of a garment wore out, the remainder would immediately become something else.

Returning to the spare yet opulent ground-floor sitting room, 58-year-old Eskenazi, wearing a pullover, corduroys and snappy striped socks, sits on a beige sofa. A pair of low 17th-century Chinese wood tables flank the fireplace, in front of which lies a fine, pale Caucasian carpet. Five luminous velvets hang in the room, and Eskenazi regularly rotates the displays throughout the house. All the lights and windows have ultraviolet filters to protect the delicate fabrics, which, visible or stored, are framed behind UV-protective glass.

While many of the velvets have rich red patterns on pale grounds, the pair of 15th-century Venetian panels (about four-by-eight-feet) hanging above the sofa are almost solid crimson. And while most of the collection consists of fragments, albeit sometimes quite large ones, these pieces, framed together, constitute an almost complete cope, a luminous ecclesiastical cloak that would have been worn in important religious processions.

Eskenazi gets up, pulls down the blinds and switches on the lights. The cope is transformed into a rippling ruby lake on which sail arabesques and pomegranates; the pattern is cut into the pile with a line so thin it isn’t visible in bright daylight. Across the room, to the right of the fireplace, hangs a 15th-century Ottoman velvet about a foot and a half long and not quite a foot across. To a novice, its design looks like several large, plump bubbles drifting aimlessly across sand. Gently, Eskenazi begins to clear up this misconception—the astonishingly modern-looking bubbles, often accompanied by wavy lines, Eskenazi says of his younger self. “The emperors’ robes represented a whole system that had disappeared.”

Although by the 15th century fine silk velvet was being woven in Turkey, sultans preferred the Italian product, foreign goods having greater cachet. Italians, to satisfy what became their biggest, most lucrative market, used Ottoman designs and wove in the widths the Ottomans preferred. Most of the robes in the Topkapi Museum that captivated Eskenazi were, in fact, made of Italian silk velvet. “You can’t be sure what was made where,” he says. These days top-quality Ottoman pieces, which are ranked with the highest-level Islamic art, are extremely rare and can sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Ironically, examples of Italian silk velvet, the cloth preferred by the Ottomans themselves, fetch considerably less from textile collectors.