Oliver White
Head of Department
Lot 50*
A Mamluk sgraffiato pottery Dish Egypt, 14th Century
8 April 2014, 10:30 BST
London, New Bond Street£7,000 - £9,000
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A Mamluk sgraffiato pottery Dish
Egypt, 14th Century
Egypt, 14th Century
on a flat base with short foot, the ochre ground decorated in manganese brown, yellow and black with a large central interlacing rosette, the border with a band of zig-zag motif, the exterior with a large roundel containing a stylised tripartide blazon
19.1 cm. diam.
19.1 cm. diam.
Footnotes
Provenance:
Private collection;
Acquired Christie's, Art of the Islamic and Indian World, 23rd October 2007, lot 77.
This dish is remarkable for the scale of the blazon on the underside, which takes up the entire foot-ring space. It resembles a blazon which was popular during the late Burji period and was known to have been used by numerous emirs. Made up of three different parts it incorporated the arms of the jamdar or Master-of Robes, the arms of the saqi or Cupbearer and the arms of the dawadar or Secretary all flanked by what have been identified as powder horns. Its first usage can be traced back to Sultan Qaytbay (r. 1468-96) and it was employed up to 1517 as what can be seen as a Mamluk State blazon.
The blazon on the present lot can be seen on a number of known sgraffiato pottery fragments: an example in the Islamic Museum, Cairo (La Ceramique Egyptienne de l'epoque musulmane, Basel, 1922, pl. 142); the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (Oliver Watson, Ceramics from Islamic Lands, London, 2004, pp. 413-14, LNS 964 C a); the Keir Collection (Ernst J. Grube, Islamic Pottery of the Eighth to Fifteenth Century in the Keir Collection, London, 1976, p. 285, no. 234); two in Berlin (David Alexander, Furisiyya, Vol. 2, Riyadh, 1996, p. 81); and further examples in the Islamic Museum in Cairo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (L.A. Mayer, Saracenic Heraldry, Oxford, 1999, repr., pl. XII).