IRAN, 12TH CENTURY

There is a long Near Eastern tradition of royal statuary, even beyond the spectacular Achaemenid and Sassanian rock reliefs of Taq-i Bustan and Naqsh-i Rustam. The statues excavated from Khirbat al-Mafjar in present-day Palestine demonstrate that this continued into the Islamic period, though the lack of evidence of royal statuary from excavations in Samarra suggests that by the ninth century palace design had moved on. It took the influx of Turkic peoples from East Asia, who came as soldiers but developed into dynasts, to revive the art of royal statuary. In this, they were doubtless influenced by their indigenous traditions of stucco statuary, which is attested to by fragments excavated by Sir Auriel Stein in Ming-oi in the early twentieth century, which date from the Tang (618-907 AD) and Song (960-1279 AD) dynasties. The revival in royal statuary was seen first in the Ghaznavid capital of Lashkari bazaar, and found its full expression in the foundations of the Seljuqs (Stephen Heidemann, Jean-Francois de Laperousse, and Vicki Parry, “The Large audience: life-sized stucco figures of royal princes from the Seljuq period”, Muqarnas, vol.31 (2014), pp.40-1)

No Seljuk royal palace has been scientifically excavated, and little is known of their construction or what went on within them. The convex reverse of our figure suggests that it would have been mounted to a wall. David Durand-Guédy suggests that such pavilions would have been temporary, built out of adobe to host the itinerant Seljuk court before they moved on, similar to those built by the Qarakhanids near Samarkand. There, the ruler might meet with local dignitaries and treat them to food and entertainment. This statue suggests that these were musical affairs: the beardless youth holds a stringed instrument, perhaps an ‘ud or the Iranian forbear the barbat. Musicians also decorate the heavily-frescoed walls of Qusayr Amra, the Umayyad palace in the Jordanian desert.

Probably the most famous examples of Seljuk statuary are the two in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which stand at over a metre tall and retain much of their original polychromy (acc.nos. 57.51.18 and 67.119). Far more similar to the present lot, however, are those which were excavated from the city of Susa in present-day Iraq. They are in the Louvre, and published by Guillermina Joel and Audrey Peli (Suse: Terres Cuites Islamiques, Paris, 2005, pp. 198-206, cat.nos. 265-280; in an accompanying essay they mention similar figures excavated in Wasit and Gurgan). They are all variously crowned with jewelled headdresses and wear flowing robes. Only one is complete, and the majority reduced to only a head. A further figure, so remarkably similar as to be possibly from the same set, is in the Royal Ontario Museum (acc.no. 958.118.2).