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Lot Essay
The inscription around the edge of this bowl include verses in Persian and benedictions in Arabic.
This elegant bowl is decorated in a way that clearly owes a considerable amount to the miniature painting of the period. Not only is the subject one lifted straight from Firdawsi's famous epic, the Shahnama, but the style of the decoration is also indebted to painting. All of the figures are drawn in outline in pigment painted directly onto the glaze, with only small elements of the design reserved against a lustre ground. These observations caused Oliver Watson to suggest a "miniature" style within the early periods of Kashan lustre pottery (Oliver Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, pp.68-85). The checker-board trees, plants with dotted stems and complexly decorated garments found on the present dish, are incidental hallmarks of the miniature style (Oliver Watson, Ceramics from Islamic Lands, London, 2004, p.353). He subdivides this group into a rare group of bowls painted in the "large scale miniature style", many of which depict historical scenes and indeed relate, in terms of composition, to mina'i enameled bowls with similar characteristics (Watson, op. cit., pls.48-51, p.70).
Depictions from the Shahnama of Firdawsi are known in a number of examples of Persian lusterware of the period. A representation of Bahram Gur and Azada was even found on a tile from the Takht-i Sulaiman, dateable to 1270-75. That example was in the Victoria and Albert Museum, stolen in 1984 (Oliver Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, colour pl. La). A depiction of the same scene on a dish decorated in mina'i is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (part gift of the Schiff Foundation, Charles K. Wilkinson, Iranian Ceramics, New York, 1963, no. 62). Another was formerly in the Engel-Gros collection (Gaston Migeon, Les Arts Musulmans, Paris, 1926, pl. LVI). For a miniature of the same subject in this sale, see lot 228.
This elegant bowl is decorated in a way that clearly owes a considerable amount to the miniature painting of the period. Not only is the subject one lifted straight from Firdawsi's famous epic, the Shahnama, but the style of the decoration is also indebted to painting. All of the figures are drawn in outline in pigment painted directly onto the glaze, with only small elements of the design reserved against a lustre ground. These observations caused Oliver Watson to suggest a "miniature" style within the early periods of Kashan lustre pottery (Oliver Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, pp.68-85). The checker-board trees, plants with dotted stems and complexly decorated garments found on the present dish, are incidental hallmarks of the miniature style (Oliver Watson, Ceramics from Islamic Lands, London, 2004, p.353). He subdivides this group into a rare group of bowls painted in the "large scale miniature style", many of which depict historical scenes and indeed relate, in terms of composition, to mina'i enameled bowls with similar characteristics (Watson, op. cit., pls.48-51, p.70).
Depictions from the Shahnama of Firdawsi are known in a number of examples of Persian lusterware of the period. A representation of Bahram Gur and Azada was even found on a tile from the Takht-i Sulaiman, dateable to 1270-75. That example was in the Victoria and Albert Museum, stolen in 1984 (Oliver Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, colour pl. La). A depiction of the same scene on a dish decorated in mina'i is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (part gift of the Schiff Foundation, Charles K. Wilkinson, Iranian Ceramics, New York, 1963, no. 62). Another was formerly in the Engel-Gros collection (Gaston Migeon, Les Arts Musulmans, Paris, 1926, pl. LVI). For a miniature of the same subject in this sale, see lot 228.