Matthew Thomas
Senior Specialist
Lot 38
A rare Umayyad bronze Candlestick Spain, 10th Century
6 October 2015, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £25,000 inc. premium
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A rare Umayyad bronze Candlestick
Spain, 10th Century
Spain, 10th Century
of cylindric form on a stepped splayed foot with two raised bands to the lower section and two raised bands to the upper section, terminating in a flaring drip-tray, the central section engraved with a repeat design of interlaced palmettes and split-palmette motifs
46 cm. high
46 cm. high
Footnotes
Provenance
Private Spanish collection.
This lot is accompanied by an export license from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (no. 2015/00228) and was registered in 1986 with the Comunidad de Madrid archive (inventory number A-I-M-10-0000069).
Very few items of metal work remain from this early period of Muslim Spain. For a more elaborate lampstand in the David Collection, Copenhagen, see Al-Andalus The Art of Islamic Spain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1992, p. 212, no. 11. Another lampstand with an upper spike was found in Madinat Ilbira and is now in the Archaeological Museum in Granada (Arte islamico en Granada, exhibition catalogue, Granada 1995, no.36, p.232).
Engraved palmettes to the body of the candlestick can be seen on a series of animals which functioned as fountains (two deer; one from Madinat al-Zahra in the Archaeological Museum, Cordoba, another in the National Museum of Qatar). Madinat al-Zahra was pillaged in 1010, the site was exploited as a source of stone and was forgotten. By 1236 after the conquest of Cordoba by Ferdinand III it was a vast field of ruins. It wasn't until the 17th century that the site was recognized as being Arab and the mid-19th century when it was definitively identified. A lustre-decorated pottery plate with palmette decoration dated to the 11th century is in the Museo Huesca published in Les Andalousies De Damas a Cordoue, Institut du Monde Arabe, 2000, no. 194.