The World in your Hands

Thanks to their siliceous stonepaste bodies, the ceramics potted at Kashan have solid, yet remarkably thin and light walls and are easily held in two hands. Gazing into the well of these vessels, the viewer is presented with glimmering, lustrous surface ornament imbued with cosmological and astrological significance. The scenes at the centre of Kashan lustre-painted bowls often represent a microcosm of the earthly and heavenly spheres, and are accompanied by poetic and benedictory inscriptions in Persian and Arabic.

Observing and handling these luxurious, finished wares, it can be difficult to imagine the hot, dusty, and oftentimes dangerous environment of the workshop; the constant heating and cooling of various specialised kilns for firing, and the grinding down of metals, minerals, and pigments before they were made into or applied to ceramic bodies. According to the Kashan potter Abu’l-Qasim's treatise of 1301 AD, the sound of molten frit being cooled in water rang out like a clap of roaring thunder that could bring a man to his knees. Nevertheless, after the lustred ceramics emerged from the kiln, they would be polished with wet cloths to reveal their shimmering lustrous glaze, which, in these five remarkable examples, survives much as it must have appeared right out of the kiln.

 ‘What have the gazelles to boast of while you have such eyes?’ reads part of the inscription on this cobalt- and lustre-painted bowl.

At its centre, a long-legged gazelle grazes in a lustrous golden meadow of incised spirals. In Persian literary tradition, the gazelle represents an elusive beloved. The canopy of the heavens and the waters of the earth appear above and below. This elegant vessel was painted after an important signed bowl by the potter Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Nishapuri, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (inv. C.162-1977).  It is probably the only known example of a fine Kashan lustre-painted ware made as a direct copy of another bowl by a master in the same workshop.

This idiosyncratic lustre-painted vessel with addorsed birds has a number of distinctive features that suggest it was made during a transitional period in the development of Kashan styles. The broad, shallow form of the bowl with slightly flattened rim, raised on a short foot, is related to the earliest groups of Kashan lustre-painted wares that relied on Egyptian lustre prototypes. It is a rare and idiosyncratic example of a transitional Kashan lustre vessel that combines design elements of the earliest Kashan wares with the new styles of the early thirteenth century. 

Made under the aegis of the Mongol Ilkhanate a generation after the decimation of the region around 1220, the bowl pictured to the left is decorated with confronted dragon heads emerging from a concentric decorative ring filled with a 'scale' motif. It dates to the later period of Kashan lustreware production between c. 1260-1285. This is evidenced in part by the tiny 'ear-muff'-like dots incised through the lustre on the dragons' heads, which are typical of the period. The fearsome form of the dragon probably served an apotropaic function, and also has associations with kingship and divine rule from the Seljuq period (r. in Iran c. 1040-1157) through to the Ilkhanid Period (r. 1256-1335), when this dish was made in the workshops of the Kashan potters.