OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1520

The period of the 1520s and was one of great experimentation at Iznik. While it did not produce as many extraordinary large vessels as the period before 1500, and did not have the developed colour scheme that came in in the 1530s, it was the period in which the roots of the later styles all found their genesis. The present bowl shows exactly the experimentation that is typical of the period, all executed in a very good blue colour. The central roundel is found on a number of 'Potter's style' vessels, such as one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik, the Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, no.170, pp.116-7). It is surrounded by feathery strands which, had they been allowed to grow, would have spiralled into a tughrakes or Golden Horn style dish. The strange flowers on top of the wavy stems and the reserved panels around the rim recall elements of the Abraham of Kutahya earlier style. The design is however dominated by the cypress trees, delicately garlanded with tughrakes bands, that recall the trees on the contemporaneous bottle base formerly in the Jasim Homaizi Collection and now in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (Atasoy and Raby, op.cit, no.304, p.164).