RARE KASHAN LUSTRE POTTERY ALBARELLO

Persia

Early 13th Century

Height: 21.3 cm.

Cylindrical with slightly flaring sides, upward sloping shoulder, short truncated neck and out-turned rim. The body decorated with a frieze of bold kufic inscription against scrolls, either side naskh inscriptions scratched through a solid band running around the albarello. The shoulder with the frieze of floral scrolls. Another band of scratched naskh inscription around the neck. The mouth with a solid band of lustre, stylized leaves around the base.

Arabic inscriptions repeated in naskh bands read:

Transliteration:

‘Al-iqbāl wa al-dawla wa al-in‘ām’

Translation:

‘Good-fortune and prosperity and blessings’.

Calligraphy has at all times been one of the major ‘motifs’ of Islamic art and continues to be a primary element of Islamic design both in the formal sense and as means of communication. Calligraphy, as a motif, served both visually with its uniquely Islamic aesthetic and delivered messages as a text; such as good wishes to the owner, poems or pious quotations like verses from the Qur’an or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. In many instances, calligraphic inscriptions, particularly verses from the Qur’an or sayings of the Prophet, are considered as a source of grace and blessing barakah) as well. In some rare cases, the inscription records the date which allow us to know the piece’s exact date of production. For further information on the use of calligraphy on early Islamic ceramics please see Ernst Grube, Islamic Pottery of the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century in the Keir Collection, Faber & Faber, London, 1976, p. 98.

In the early days of the 20th century, medieval Persian lusterware survived only in fragmentary form. This all changed in the 1940s with the discovery of large storage jars containing lustre-painted ceramics in near perfect condition (similar to the present jar), in the medieval city of Gurgan, near modern Gunbad-i Qabus in the Caspian region of Iran, please see Oya Pancaroğlu’s Perpetual Glory: Medieval

Islamic Ceramics from the Harvey B. Plotnick Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, p. 124. These finds were written up and published after the excavations by Dr. Mehdi Bahrami, Gurgan Faiences Cairo, 1949.

Lustre technique, invented by Muslim masters in the 9th century, is an over-glaze technique, in which the pigment is applied a second firing at a lower temperature than the first and is applied to the surface of a hard, fired glaze.

A certain Abu’l Qasim, brother of Yusuf of the Abu’l Tahir family which dominated lustre production in Kashan, wrote on pottery in 1300. Abu’l Qasim ended up as a court historian at the Mongol capital Tabriz, where amongst other works he contributed to the monumental Jāmi‘ al-Tawārikh (Compilation of Histories) under the direction of the Mongol vizier Rashid-al-Din. At the end of a work on precious stones and perfumes, Abu’l Qasim added an appendix on the art of pottery, which he described as a ‘kind of alchemy’. Please see Oliver Watson’s Persian Lustre Ware Faber and Faber, London, 1985, pp. 31-32.

Lustre reached its apogee in the early 1200s, the time this albarello was produced, just before the devastating Mongol invasions which happened twenty years later.

Provenance: Private UK Collection

Ottoman Empire 18th Century

Heights: 9 cm., 9 cm., 8 cm. Total Height: 35 cm.