OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1575-85

The main band of decoration of the impressive tazza places it clearly in Atasoy and Raby's "wheatsheaf" style (Atasoy, Nurhan and Raby, Julian: Iznik, the Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, pp.239-240). One of the features that they note about the style is its versatility. This tazza has another version of the design which has each palmette motif covered by a pair of wheatsheaf leaves rather than the meandering design flanked by (pl.447), divided by (pl.451) scrolled around by (pl.452) or separate within a lattice of those leaves (pls.448 and 452).

The central roundel is most unusual. It occurs within a related but not actual wheatsheaf scroll on a dish in the Gulbenkian Collection (Ribeiro, Maria Queiroz: Iznik Pottery, Lisbon, 1996, no.80, p.233). It is also very similar to the roundel in the centre of the dish from the Binney Collection offered as lot 351 in this sale. That centre in turn is very close indeed to one formerly in the Lagonico Collection which was suggested by John Carswell to be a loose interpretation of the a banded sphere as it appeared in the arms of Manuel I of Portugal (La Collection Lagonico, Sotheby's Monaco, 7 December 1991, lot 46). The visible extension of that design in the present dish and in the Binney example make this interpretation more questionable.