CENTRAL IRAN, EARLY 13TH CENTURY

This dish is impressive for its size and completeness. Its aniconic decorative scheme belongs to the third phase of Kashan lustreware design, termed 'the Kashan style' by Oliver Watson, which combined places where the design was drawn on directly with lustre paint and others where the design had been inscribed into a coat of lustre. Structured around a central roundel with radiating poetic inscriptions alternating with palmettes heightened with cobalt blue, this dish can be compared with an example in the Sarikhani collection. That bowl is also of a similar size and has a profile which is similar to the present lot (acc.no. I.CE.2243; Oliver Watson, Ceramics of Iran, London, 2020, p.231, no.117).

Though the example in the Sarikhani collection also has two rows of calligraphy around the rim, it differs from ours in that they are both executed in a hurried naskh script, while the inner register on this example is realised in a confident kufic-style script, filled in with cobalt-blue. Originally a script developed for manuscripts, kufic had been used in an epigraphic context since the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem by 'Abd al-Malik. Though it had largely fallen out of use as a bookhand by the thirteenth century, it survived in certain contexts. It appears on the rim of a remarkable dish sold as part of a Princely Collection, Sotheby's London, 5 October 2010, lot 76, which was dated by the inscription to Jumada I AH 590/April-May 1194 AD.