OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1585-90

This striking dish is unusual for the ground of kaleidoscopic tight black scrolls upon which the design is set. In the 1570s and 80s it became popular in Iznik to enliven the background of vessels. The most common means of doing this was the fish-scale motif. Another device however were scrolls such as these, familiar from contemporaneous wave-and-rock borders.

Two almost identical dishes, one formerly in the Barlow Collection and later sold by the Savile Club and the other in the Ashmolean Museum, are published by Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik. The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, no.492 and 494, pp.248-49. Not only do these dishes have, like ours, a design set on a bed of black scrolls but both are also decorated with a similar floral design split by a saz leaf. They also both have identical lappet borders, and similar decorative band in the cavetto. Atasoy and Raby write that dishes with this wave-scroll ground seem to have been especially favoured by one particular Iznik atelier in the 1580s, whose output is characterised by the use of broad outlining of designs. Both the Savile Club and the Ashmolean dish are considered within this group and it is likely that ours is too.