Every Object Tells A Story: Oliver Hoare's Cabinet of Curiosities

ev ery obj ec t t el l s a story Oliver Hoare’s Cabinet of Curiosities

ev ery obj ec t t el l s a story

An exhibition dedicated to the memory of j e a n- c l au de c i a nc i m i no 1931 – 2 01 4

33 Fitzroy Square, London w1t 6eu 6 May – 26 June 2015

First published in 2015

by Oliver Hoare in association with Pallas Athene (Publishers) Ltd

© Text copyright: Oliver Hoare © Copyright images: Oliver Hoare isbn 978-1-84368-107-6

Oliver Hoare Ltd 9 Dilke Street London sw3 4je +44 (0)207 835 1600 info@oliverhoareltd.com www.everyobjecttellsastory.com

Designed by Anikst Design, London Printed in Belgium

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All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the written permission of Oliver Hoare.

Ac k now l e d ge m e n t s

Every catalogue involves a lot of work by a lot of people. Kate Cooper has worked uncomplainingly for the last six months or more, putting order into the piles of information as I delivered them to her, assembling it all into a coherent form that might one day resemble a catalogue. When, to our great relief, Misha Anikst decided to take over the design and production of our raw material, Kate remarked: ‘You took on Jackson Pollock to paint your ceiling, and suddenly you got a call from Michelangelo.’ The result of Misha’s collaboration is that the catalogue has been turned into a work of art in its own right. Borges might have enjoyed the conundrum of how to incorporate the catalogue into what it is cataloguing. I also count myself lucky to have had a long relationship with Colin Bowles, whose skill in presenting so many disparate objects reflects his own curiosity and interest in any object of quality, however modest. Lighting defines an exhibition, a kind of theatrical magic that allows us to see things anew, and Charles Marsden-Smedley has scattered his sparkle, to the advantage of everything he has illuminated. The firm editorial hand of Catherine Blake has rendered my, at times, contorted prose pellucid. Phillip Paddock of P.J. Gates Photography has done me proud, with his painstaking and sensitive photography. Ann Corne, my assistant, has managed to hold everything else together, while I have struggled with the writhing beast that such an enterprise inevitably is. The continual shifting of things from storage to photographer to Colin Bowles, and back again, has been handled by Andy Renous of Chelsea Movers, with never a complaint. And finally, my thanks go to those kind friends who have agreed to lend to the exhibition. Considerable parts of the catalogue come from conversations that have made its production so enriching.

I n t roduc t ion

Many years ago, when I was quite young, I was sitting with a much older and very experienced antiquities dealer in Tehran, who always had the most extraordinary things. I asked him how he could price such things. ‘When I present an object like this to a client,’ he said, ‘I watch his eyes, and if I see that it makes him dream, I ask a high price.’ Being from a different background I have never been able to practise such craft, but I have always remembered what he said, and admired its logic. The function of a work of art is to make us dream, but of course the nature of that dream depends to a great extent on what we know about the object. Connoisseurship has traditionally been the means for making the dream meaningful and real, and while we are told that such skills are in decline, I am not so sure. Connoisseurs are not necessarily the biggest buyers in the contemporary art market, but they are far from extinct.

The stories of works of art, while often a large part of their fascination, are not necessarily easy to uncover. One purpose of this catalogue is to tell stories that show that objects of little value can have as interesting a tale to tell as something of great value. These stories are of various kinds; some involve my own interaction with a particular piece or person; others are purely historical; and yet others depend on information, sometimes unexpectedly acquired, sometimes the result of determined digging, or even of fanciful imagining.

Any artist will tell you that at a certain point, what he is creating comes from something that passes through him, revealing what they never knew they possessed. I think the same spirit comes through craftsmen, who never claim their craftsmanship as art, and yet whose works are often suffused with a beguiling quality that is communicated through the dedication of their expertise.

There are categories in what is presented – Antiquity, music, sex, magic, the natural world, curiosity and history – but the boundaries are loose. The function of objects is to make us dream.

c ata l ogu e

1 JADE BOULDER With its original 16th-century Ming dynasty wood base Size: 83 cm high, 48 cm wide (with stand) Worthy of an emperor’s tomb, this monumental obelisk of dark green jade is a quintessentially Ciancimino object.

It was always Jean-Claude’s special skill to magic up amazing things, the like of which were rarely seen elsewhere. How he did it time and time again, and year after year, remains a source of wonder, and even when he swerved into Art Deco for solid commercial reasons, his heart remained with the exotic, the rare, the unknown. He embodied, I would say, a certain ‘Zen’ frame of mind; tea-ceremony wares meant more to him than palace porcelain, and a zippy Tantric diagram more than a smooth and elegant miniature. He noticed things that for others were invisible, and was as responsive to the hand of Nature as to the hand of Man. His way of seeing things put

him way ahead of most of the rest of us, and one reason that he is held in such affection by so many people – apart from his endlessly entertaining presence – is because of the way he shared his enthusiasms and insights. He changed the taste of a generation, expanded our vision beyond the conventional, and gave form to the excitements of an exciting time.

And so I am grateful to Jean-Claude’s family – Sylvia, Pablo and Georgia – for allowing me to include his magnificent jade boulder in this exhibition. The idea for Every Object Tells a Story was originally Jean-Claude’s, and our collaboration in 2012 for the first exhibition of this kind at his Pimlico gallery was for me, and I think also for him, a very happy time.

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2 GREEN JADE PEBBLE From the Green Jade River, Khotan, Xinjiang Province, China Size: 12.5 cm long The principal sources for the jade called nephrite are two rivers that cascade down from the Tibetan highlands, and flow past the ancient Silk Road city of Khotan before disappearing into the sands of the Taklamakhan desert.

The White Jade River and the Green Jade River are dry for much of the year, but in spring become torrents, dislodging an avalanche of rocks and rolling them along the flat stretches of the rivers until the spate subsides. It is then that the locals from Khotan and the surrounding villages come out to walk the river-bed, searching for the shiny sleek pebbles of jade. The rivers are wide, and the jumble of rocks bewildering.

I discovered pebbles of jade in the markets of Khotan on my first visit there in September 1990, and began buying whatever I could find until I had a suitcase full.

They seemed so much more beautiful than jade that was carved, polished by their journey from some unknown

seam high in the Himalayas. One morning in the market a trader offered to drive me to a village outside town where he knew someone who gathered jade. The man he introduced was in his early 20s; he was a Hafez, a man who knew the Qur’an by heart; and he was totally blind. He walked in the river-bed in his bare feet, and could tell jade from other stones by its feel. He was the most successful collector of jade in the region. Only one piece was left from the previous spring, this finger of dark green jade, which he gave to me as a present.

The Emperor Qianlong invaded Eastern Turkestan in part to gain control of the source of Khotan jade, so desirable was it for the Chinese. On a visit to one of the Ming tombs, I was surprised to see a pile of unworked jade in the burial chamber, a portion of his luggage for the afterlife. But because he was an emperor they were boulders, not pebbles.

The Green Jade River, September 1990

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3 RED POR PH YRY SLAB Roman Egypt, 1st century ad; Mamluk Cairo, 14th century ad Size: 143 × 43 cm Soon after joining Christie’s in 1967, I was assigned a small cubbyhole in the office of Tony Derham, one of their experts in Chinese art. We became firm friends, and remained so for many years thereafter. From this small patch of territory I was instructed to build up ‘The Department of Islamic Art’, the geographical context of which stretched from Spain to China. It was the first time an auction house had such a thing. A while after after my arrival, Tony was promoted to auctioneer. On the morning of his first sale as such, while he perused the catalogue to familiarise himself with the reserve prices, registered bids and so on, we were interrupted by the arrival of a smartly dressed, blazer-clad gentleman, an elegant Levantine, who engaged us in lively conversation. When it was time to go down for the auction, Tony asked me to accompany Mr. B and look after him. We stood at the back and watched the proceedings, conducted with crisp efficiency by the new auctioneer. Halfway through the sale the star item was put on the block; an unusually large early Ming blue-and-white dish.

It made a world-record price, not much by today’s standards, but then a great sum, meriting a mention in next day’s Times. At this point Mr. B put his hand on my arm,

steered me out of the rooms and downstairs to the lobby.

‘That Ming dish was mine,’ he told me, ‘I bought it in Cairo for £5. Please join me for lunch at the Ritz at 1 o’clock, I have things to discuss with you.’

Over lunch he explained that he had long before befriended an Armenian family who owned a big villa in Cairo, and who had collected over generations all sorts of Islamic art. It was a subject Mr. B knew little about. The family was forced to leave Cairo when Nasser came to power, surrendering their considerable business interests.

The villa, however, remained legally theirs. It was boarded up and had become invisible, looked after by an elderly relative who inhabited what had been the servants’ quarters. In order to boost his meager pension, this relative was prepared to sell works of art from the villa, but only to people designated by his cousins in exile. The curious thing, said Mr. B, is that everything, whatever it is, is for sale for the same price: £5. Including the Ming dish that had just sold. He then described what he had seen but didn’t understand, particularly the values thereof. Chests of Ottoman velvets, Mamluk enamelled glass, carved wood and stone, ceramics, paintings, and so on. Assuming

· 14 ·

that I knew about such things, he asked if I would be prepared to join him in Cairo the next time he went.

A couple of days later I made an appointment with the Managing Director of Christie’s, told him the story, and suggested that here was an extraordinary possibility to boost the profile of the market for Islamic art. There was a long pause, until he looked up at me with undisguised hostility. ‘You are forbidden to go to Egypt for any purpose, or under any pretext,’ he began. ‘Wherever you go you create a mess, and we generally have to deal with it. We are in delicate negotiations with the Government of Egypt, and the last thing we need at this point is you blundering about and complicating what we are trying to do. I repeat: you may not go to Egypt.’ End of interview.

I had to admit that he was not entirely wrong, but my transgressions generally had to do with customs officials, and mainly at Heathrow when I hadn’t declared something they found in my luggage, and then impounded.

It happened because I was excited by what I had found and couldn’t bear the temporary separation that official importation entailed. I saw nothing much wrong since in those days there was no import tax on works of art; I was

flouting pointless bureaucracy but not defrauding the Treasury. Eventually, one day, I was even sent down to Heathrow to apologise personally to the Head of Customs for my multiple misdemeanours. It felt a bit like going to confession. Afterwards he offered me a cup of tea, we chatted amiably, and I was reassured to find that even customs officials are human beings. Like priests, I suppose.

Three weeks later, on a Monday morning, a telegram arrived from Mr. B: ‘arriving Cairo Thursday stop send flight details stop will meet you at airport stop’. At lunchtime I walked to the office of Syrian Arab Airlines off Piccadilly, which provided the cheapest fares for the Middle East, and bought a ticket to Cairo scheduled to arrive in the evening of Thursday. Before leaving for the airport I called Christie’s to say I was ill, and found myself embarrassed by the sympathy offered in response to my fraudulent illness.

Mr. B was clearly as much at home in Cairo as in other capitals of the world, and took me from the airport on a whirlwind tour of the social life of the city. At each stop we seemed to accumulate more people in our train, until we ended up in a belly-dancing establishment on the road to the pyramids. Dawn streaked the sky by the time we left,

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and there was little time to sleep since an early start was scheduled for our visit to the villa.

Mr. B had not exaggerated the interest of what lay concealed there. In room after room we opened cupboard after cupboard and chest after chest, while he questioned me about each piece extracted from its yellowing newspaper wrapping: its origin, its age, and above all its possible value. Not everything was of interest, but the good things, and there were many, reflected a refined connoisseurship.

It took most of the day to complete our investigation, and finally in the late afternoon I wandered out into the courtyard to breathe some air free of dust. There I saw, under the portico, a great jumble of architectural elements, the wooden pieces stacked upright against the back wall and the stones strewn over the floor. As I was pulling out a wood panel to get a better look at it, the elderly guardian shuffled over to my side. ‘That comes from Ibn Tulun, you know, the frieze beneath the ceiling.’ I hadn’t expected such expertise from a man who, up until that point, had seemed to be tethered to this world only by the weight of the jelaba that enveloped him. We proceeded around the portico and he gave me a history lesson on the Islamic buildings of Cairo as illustrated by the fragments before us.

It was in one corner of the portico I spotted this slab of porphyry. ‘That was part of an imperial Roman building here, and later re-used in an early 14th century mosque’, my new professor explained. Forty years before, he went on, most of the great Islamic buildings in the city were in a state of dereliction. When bits fell down they were left where they lay. The buildings became quarries of stones for new

buildings in the local quarter, and the wood, as often as not, was gathered by the poorest classes and used as firewood.

I supposed he was right about the porphyry slab. Mining began in the Gebel Dokhan mountain under the Ptolemies in the 3rd century bc, and was abandoned in the 5th century ad when the cost of the huge infrastructure involved could no longer be sustained. From Tiberius’ time onwards, all porphyry belonged exclusively to the emperor. After mining ceased, the porphyry used to embellish later Byzantine and Islamic monuments was recycled from the buildings of the Roman Empire.

When I informed Mr. B of my wish to buy the slab he looked doubtful. Small pieces were easy to transport, he said, but large items were more problematic, and particularly because I wanted to keep the slab, it was a lot of effort for no profit. Eventually we agreed that it would be sent separately at my risk. I didn’t mind how long it took, and anyway £5 was not such a grave risk. It was indeed many months later that I was summoned to Tilbury Docks to clear it through customs, and the ride home in a taxi cost more than the slab.

With business done in Cairo, Mr. B decided it was time to move on to Beirut, where there were more things to show me. That Saturday night I eluded his grasp and was taken by friends to a restaurant in the Bekaa Valley. It remains a vivid memory because it was the first time I had seen at each place on each table a Lucky Strike packet containing twenty neatly rolled joints. When I arrived at Christie’s on Monday morning, after four near-sleepless nights, no one doubted I had suffered a nasty bout of flu.

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4 AN OTTOMAN TOMBAK VESSEL WIT H ROMAN POR PH YRY LID Constantinople and Rome, 17th century Size: 36 × 20 cm The bowl of this unique vessel is of heavy cast bronze, and clearly made especially to accommodate the precious porphyry lid, of which the shape is typical of the stem vases carved in Rome in the first half of the 17th century.

While the Romans mined porphyry on an industrial scale for three centuries and more, the Byzantines recycled it on a post-industrial scale for much longer. The Ottomans inherited a vast store of the stone once they had conquered Constantinople, and slices of it appear everywhere in the floors and walls of the great mosques and grand buildings of the city. It had lost none of the imperial associations that made it the most emblematic stone of late Antiquity, its

hardness equated with virtue and its colour with royalty.

The technique of carving porphyry was rediscovered in Italy during the Renaissance, but not elsewhere, which probably explains why such care has been taken to re-use this elegant curved Roman lid in an Ottoman context. It has been suggested that the crescent finial has a political message of the triumph over Rome and Byzantium, but it could also be a message of understated elegance!

Published: Dario del Bufalo, porphyry, Red Imperial Porphyry, Power and Religion, Allemandi & C., Turin, 2012, V47, p. 145.

· 17 ·

5 POR PH YRY BOWL Rome, 1st–2nd century ad Size: 18.7 cm diameter

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6 MARBLE STEM- CU P Constantinople, 3rd–4th century ad Size: 10.5 cm high

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7 POR PH YRY TRAY Constantinople, 4th–5th century Size: 34.5 × 28 cm

8 T H E EM PEROR’S FOOT Roman Empire, late 1st century bc Size: 48 cm long Marble Probably from a twice life-size statue of the Emperor Augustus.

On loan to the exhibition.

Provenance: private collection, U.K.

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9 KEMAL BEY

In the mid-1980s a large swarm of the antique dealers of Istanbul suddenly abandoned their traditional hive in the Grand Bazaar and its adjacent quarter, and reassembled in a modern multi-storey block in Mecidiyekoy, which at first sight had all the charm of a municipal car-park. The reason for this mass migration was entirely economic. Traffic in the old city had become so bad that no one could spare the time it took to navigate its narrow, cobbled, shop-infested streets, while Mecidiyekoy was in the heart of the booming new business district, and a thoroughfare for the new wealth of Istanbul.

It struck me on my first visit there that the overall effect of dinginess was enhanced by the fact that all the shops there looked identical, they were all full of the same stuff.

In Europe and elsewhere shops tend to specialise, and as soon as you enter it becomes clear what that speciality is, whether sculpture, or furniture or paintings, even though it is mixed with other things. Here the only differentiation was the quality of the same things that each shop held, and it was this that took time to sort out. And worth spending time to do so, because for all its unprepossessing dinginess, the reconfigured bazaar at Mecidiyekoy was the heart of an intricate web which spread out across the entire city, and far beyond. There were a few people, those who dealt

in the important stuff, who kept away and operated by necessity in the shadows, but in general it was rare for any transaction to remain undetected by this web.

I first caught sight of Kemal Bey bent in close perusal of a panel of calligraphy at the back of a shop on one of the upper floors. When the shop-keeper introduced us and he shuffled forward to shake hands, his perfect resemblance to a small, tame bear was only spoiled by the absence of pointed ears. His greeting was old-fashioned and effusive, ‘the full Turkish’, while his small, bright eyes avoided looking at me directly, as if too close an examination at this early stage of our acquaintance might appear rude. We sat, and over many cups of tea I listened to him talk about the city, which he knew more deeply than anyone else alive. Since I knew we would meet again before returning to London, I looked for a present for him, and found a sample of writing by a 17th-century calligrapher, whom I knew from our conversation he greatly admired. It was an easy trick, because ever since Attaturk changed written Turkish from Arabic to Latin script, few Turks can read the signatures of calligraphers, or even distinguish between the hand of a common scribe and a great master.

Kemal Bey was delighted with his present, and as I hoped, it sealed our relationship. Thereafter, whenever I arrived in

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the city, he would turn up wherever I was staying, and make a date for a trip around town.

Our outings were varied and idiosyncratic; unnoticed architectural fragments of great beauty from every layer of Constantinople’s long history; a pastry shop with a 16th-century recipe, and a fish restaurant where they understood on a daily basis what to draw from the fast, cold currents of the Bosphorus; museum store-rooms full of treasures that would never be shown; the tekkes of the Mevlevi and Bektashi dervishes, abandoned since Ataturk closed them down in 1925; crumbling grand mansions inhabited by tramps; small drinking establishments where the Ashiks still sang; more raffish watering-holes where gypsy girls swivelled their hips to hypnotic rhythms. Kemal Bey liked the girls, and they loved him.

One day he took me to an old mansion near the Fatih Mosque, somewhat sagging under the weight of its age.

The young man who opened the door was obviously expecting us and led us up to the main reception room on the first floor, furnished in the Austro-Hungarian manner so beloved of the Ataturk era. Instead of pointing

out whatever he had brought me to see, Kemal Bey shuffled around the room with his hands behind his back telling his beads, occasionally whistling the refrain of some song he knew. Looking around I realised I must be there to find something, but the décor was horrible, and the paintings and peeling panels of calligraphy that adorned the walls were even worse. He was clearly in no hurry, and I stood in the middle of the room wondering how to resolve this conundrum. Looking up at a certain point for want of anywhere else to look, I saw above me hooked onto a beam a pair of small rock crystal polyhedrons. With the aid of a chair I unhooked them and showed them to Kemal Bey, asking him what they were.

He beamed at me as if to say I had found what I was there for, took me downstairs and made me give a pitiful sum to the youth who had let us in, and we set off for the next destination. It was only later, when we had somebody to translate, that I learned that these rock crystals were hooked into the robes of the Whirling Dervishes, and served to attract, accumulate and distribute Baraka, the mysterious energy manipulated by dervishes.

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10 T H E TOUC H STONE BUTTON

In September 1994, I flew from Hong Kong to Kunming with George and Catherine Ortiz. Our plan was to travel by road as far as Lijiang on the eastern slopes of the Himalayas, and return from there two weeks later by plane via Kunming to Hong Kong.

Lijiang is a beautiful small town built of wood and stone, arranged feng-shuily athwart three streams, and once rich from its place on the Tea and Horse trade route.

The people of this area belong to the ‘Naxi Ethnic Minority’. Ezra Pound accorded Lijiang a Shangri-La-like

Yuan, Sung or Tang, or a mixture of them all. The second wonder of Lijiang is a tree in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery a few miles outside town, a peony tree known as the ‘Tree of 20,000 blossoms’.

It was early evening when we walked up the winding cobbled streets of old Lijiang from our hotel below. A few stalls were opening for the evening market, brightly lit, displaying piles of vegetables and domestic bric-a-brac, and among them was one stall with a sign saying ‘Antiques’. We went over to have a look. The previous day in Kunming

status in his final cantos, although he had never been there; and Bruce Chatwin devoted a chapter of What Am I Doing Here to his visit there in 1985. For other reasons, also, Lijiang has been discreetly famous for a long time.

It is home to an orchestra that plays music composed in the courts of Tang and Song China, music otherwise completely unknown after the Mongol invasions of the mid-13th century. Somehow, this ancient and refined court music has been uniquely preserved by the Naxi people in a remote north-west corner of Yunnan Province. It is said that the Tang Emperor sent an orchestra in the 9th century as a present to a local ruler who had helped him militarily, and the assumption is that as these court musicians aged, they passed on their style of music-making to local Naxi musicians. Rather like the troupe of Katthak dancers sent to the King of Granada by the Vijayanagar ruler in India in the 15th century, which had a lasting effect on the flamenco dances of Andalucia. Confusingly, another legend has it that the orchestral gift to the Naxi ruler came from Kubilai Khan himself during his military campaign in Yunnan of 1253, so the music played by this unique orchestra is either

flea-market I had bought a pair of unusually elegant old ivory chopsticks. George not only admired them, but to my surprise coveted them, so much so that he bought several pairs of chopsticks around the market and then proposed a swap – quantity for quality. It was not so much the quality that was inferior but none of his made a true pair, which he knew, and it irked him, particularly at dinner that night as I ate with my incomparably superior pair. As a result, when he spotted a tin full of chopsticks at the back of this stall in Lijiang, he made haste towards them, while I scanned the glass-topped cases in front, filled with miserable Maoperiod memorabilia. The only thing that drew my attention was a button of matt black stone, which I guessed was a piece of touchstone, and I indicated to the owner of the stall that I wanted to see it. Spotting us in conversation, George rushed over, demanding to know what I had found. I explained that it was a piece of touchstone for which the price was $30, an absurd amount, so that if he wanted it he was welcome to it.

He examined it and put it back into the case.

Next morning we drove out to the monastery with the prolific peony tree. Although architecturally unremarkable

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– traditional low monastic buildings arranged symmetrically around a rectangular courtyard – its situation is spectacular, wedged on a ledge cut into a vast and magnificent empty flank of the Himalayas. The monastery suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution, when the gangs of thugs arrived, and stole its religious patrimony, trashed what could not be removed, and then murdered the community of monks who lived there. Except that they missed one, who, extraordinarily, did not run away but instead hid nearby, because he realised that the pig-ignorant revolutionaries had missed the great treasure of the monastery – its tree of peonies. Such a tree needs looking after, and this he did for years at great personal risk, bringing the oil secretly at night to lubricate its extravagant roots, and ensuring a sufficient supply of water. And there the old monk still was when we visited, looking after his monastery and tree, in a place with a sweetness about it that you never wanted to leave.

Two days later I opted out of George’s somewhat intense cultural programme and chose instead to pass a lazy day back on the terrace of the monastery. Arriving in Lijiang at the end of that day, I learned from the hotel receptionist that Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz had already set out on their walk through town, and were expecting me for dinner at a

restaurant opposite the hall of the Lijiang Orchestra, for whose performance we had tickets that night. There was a light drizzle as I began my walk up through town, and stopping by the ‘Antiques’ stall on the way found the owner suffering from toothache, his jaw swathed in bandages.

Interrupting his groans, I enquired again about the price of the touchstone button, which for the $1 he was now asking I bought, and slipped into my pocket. I spotted George and Catherine a little further on haggling at another stall and went over to greet them. Once we had exchanged details of our respective days, George turned to me and said: ‘I don’t waste my time like you do, look what I found while you were loafing around!’ and he started pulling an unexpected quantity of chopsticks from the various pockets of his tweed jacket. ‘There, what do you think of that?’ he asked, triumphantly. Relieved that my own pair was back at the hotel so that the immediate prospect of comparison and commentary was avoided, I congratulated him on having what must be the finest collection of chopsticks in Yunnan, if not in the whole of China, and he seemed rather pleased.

When we sat down in the restaurant George generously insisted I use a pair of his chopsticks for dinner, and as I was choosing a pair asked whether I had found anything to buy that day. I took the touchstone from my trouser

· 25 ·

pocket and flipped it onto the tablecloth. As soon as he saw it his face became contorted by a storm of conflicted emotions, until he shouted at me: ‘ You had no right to buy that! It’s mine! You told me I could have it!’ The violence of the outburst took me by surprise, as much as it alarmed our near neighbours in the restaurant. He continued, but more quietly: ‘You’re devious, dishonest and ungrateful, you told me $30 was too much so you could get it yourself!’

‘No, George, $30 was too much, I just bought it for $1, and by the way, since I paid for it, it’s mine, not yours.’ The obvious next step was to hand it to George as a gift, but there was something in the dynamic of the situation which had further to go, because owning this worthless piece of stone, I realised, had temporarily made me the owner of George Ortiz as well. I vaguely remembered a story from long ago, called something like ‘The monkey, the cherry and the bottle.’

After dinner we crossed the cobbled street and sat in the columned atrium of an old mansion that now served as the Orchestra’s home. The performance was very moving, for its mournful, haunting melodies played on instruments that still existed only because they had been hidden from the Cultural Revolution by these ancient, long-whitebearded gentlemen in their elegant robes, who played so impassively by flickering candle-light, as if the entire span of what they represented was little more than the pluck of a plectrum.

When it was over and we went outside, the drizzle had become a torrential downpour, and as we stood waiting for a taxi I saw George slip Catherine some cash with which she slipped back into the mansion. Back at the bar of the hotel talk turned to the new weather conditions, and the barman was adamant that if the rain continued through the night and into next day, the Kunming flight would be cancelled. The only way to catch our connection from Kunming to Hong Kong the day after was to take the bus that stopped for passengers at lunchtime next day just outside the hotel. The trip took seventeen hours, and passengers travelled in hammocks packed like sardines in a very smelly tin. George went up to bed, and as I was

ordering a final nightcap, Catherine came up and pressed two tapes into my hands, saying that George realised how much I had loved the music and wanted me to have these recordings as a souvenir. I was within a split-second of feeling very touched, when it occurred to me that the expected response was: oh how nice, and I would like George to have this precious piece of touchstone in exchange. I kissed Catherine goodnight, asked her to thank George for the tapes, and turned back to my drink.

Next morning the rain was intense, and the cancellation of our flight became inevitable. We got tickets for the bus, and then I wondered how best to spend the intervening hours and anaesthetise ourselves to the extent that it was possible, facing seventeen hours in a bus. Next to the hotel was a small bar owned by a young local couple, who had introduced me to the dark sweet wine of Lijiang, which they drink piping hot. I took George and Catherine there and we sat in their low-slung chairs to drink their potent brew, until indeed ‘all our problems seemed to fade away’, transfixed by the drumming of the rain, and the hot wine running through our veins. Until, that is, in our hazy tavern, George turned to me and said: ‘I only wish I could have made this trip with Bruce Chatwin.’

‘So do I, George,’ I answered.

‘What do you mean?’ ‘Mean’ was almost screamed.

‘If Bruce had been here, he would have written an incredible story about the world’s greatest collector of antiquities who lost his mind in Lijiang because he was unable to possess a piece of touchstone the size of a button.’

There was a considerable pause, and then George broke out into uncontrollable guffaws of laughter, contagious to the point that we all laughed until we no longer had the strength to continue.

I never did give the touchstone button to George.

I felt the story it had to tell me was different from the one it could tell if he owned it. Each time he came to stay with me in London thereafter, I would put it on his bedside table next to the alarm clock, and the matter was never referred to again.

· 26 ·

1 1 A DIORITE OWL EYE-IDOL BOWL Anatolia, 3rd millennium bc Size: 23.5 cm long

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1 2 CYLCON STONE Australia, age unknown Size: 38.5 cm long More mysterious than this object would be difficult to find.

The National Gallery of Victoria, The Australian Museum, The Queensland Art Gallery, have thirteen such stones, all from the Darling River region of New South Wales, that were published in Aboriginal Australia, 1981–1982. Some of them have decorative markings; this one does not. None of them was retrieved from archaeological deposits, and local

19th-century Aborigines always denied knowledge of their function or meaning, and none were recorded as being seen in use. The markings on those so decorated correspond to those found in rock art sites. Beyond this meagre information, nothing can be entertainingly invented.

Provenance: Lord McAlpine, 1987

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13 a, b

14 a, b, c

13 a, b TWO ALABASTER EGY P TIAN MUMMY BUTT -PLUGS Ptolemaic Egypt, late 1st millennium bc Size: 9 cm; 5 cm long Leakage from mummies was a problem, and such plugs solved at least one of the problems involved.

Provenance: Lord McAlpine, 1988

1 4 a, b, c T H REE AMERICAN INDIAN STONE PLUMMETS Indian Mound Culture, Ohio, 1st millennium ad Size: 10 cm; 9.5 cm; 8 cm In 1870 Ed Stevens published Flint Chips. On page 500 he dismissed the use of such stones as fishing-line weights or ear ornaments, theories that had been advanced to explain their function. The problem is that plumb weights are generally used for building, and the Plains Indians did not build buildings.

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15 a, b TWO OLMEC DIVINATION STONES Mexico, 1st millennium bc Size: 5 cm; 4 cm These stones are known as ‘Palidores’, but we seem to have lost their instructions for use.

Provenance: Spencer Throckmorton, New York, 1990

16 A MAYAN STONE EMBLEM OF A BALL - GAME KNEE- GUARD Central America, 1st millennium ad Size: 13.5 cm wide By comparison with the pre-Columbian ball-game, American football is a wimp’s game. Apart from its ferocity it had religious significance, which this stone emblem embodies. The ex-votos in churches and cathedrals are something of the same kind, but not quite, and therefore its precise significance escapes us.

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17 A MAYAN ‘ PRESTIGE’ F LINT Honduras, 1st millennium ad Size: 21 cm high The label states: ‘Flint implement supposed to be a weapon of State. Brought by a naval officer from Honduras, Central America.’

Provenance: Pitt-Rivers collection.

18 A LARGE MAYAN ‘ PRESTIGE’ F LINT Not illustrated Honduras, 1st millennium ad Size: 25 cm high Flints were often buried as offerings at sacred site, and were also probably offered as gifts, conferring prestige on both giver and receiver.

Provenance: Maurice Brahm, 1991.

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19 A GROOVED STONE CELT Illinois or Wisconsin, North America, 1st millennium ad Size: 20 cm high This is what is also known as a ‘prestige’ object, and not much more can be said about it, apart from the fact that it is delightful to handle.

2 0 BACTRIAN STONE COSMETIC DIS H Afghanistan, circa 2000 bc Size: 11.4 cm square

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2 1 WINGED LION WIT H RIDER AND DRUM Northern Wei, 5th–6th century ad Size: 18 cm high Flints were often buried as offerings at sacred site, and were also probably offered as gifts, conferring prestige on both giver and receiver.

Provenance: Maurice Brahm, 1991.

2 2 A ‘GOLDEN HOr De’ GOLD BELT F ITTING Central Asia, 14th century Size: 7.2 cm long The dragon has a garnet or ruby eye.

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23 H UNTING HOUND Near East, 3rd–4th century Size: 70 cm long, Stone The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe, And storied urns record who rests below.

When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen, Not what he was, but what he should have been.

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, foremost to defend, Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own, Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone, Unhonoured falls, unnoticed all his worth, Denied in heaven the Soul he held on earth – While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Not only man’s best friend, but also his most useful one, and besides, life without one is impoverished. Odysseus’ dog Argos was the first to recognise him, almost causing him terminal problems as he reclaimed his faithful Penelope. This dog seems to be resting after a long day’s hunt, content to remember his exploits. Lord Burlington has left a pillar in the grounds of Chiswick House, commemorating his dog Lilly as ‘jocundissima’. Lord Byron commemorated his dog Botswain as follows: Near this Spot are deposited the Remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power – Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust, Degraded mass of animated dust!

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!

By nature vile, ennobled but by name, Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.

Ye, who behold perchance this simple urn, Pass on – it honours none you wish to mourn.

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; I never knew but one – and here he lies.

This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery if inscribed over human Ashes, is but a just tribute to the Memory of Boatswain, a Dog who was born in Newfoundland May 1803 and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808 When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth, Unknown to Glory, but upheld by Birth,

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2 4 T H E H ERO OF MYT HOLOGY Western Asia, 3rd millennium bc Size: 26.3 cm high, 23.7 cm wide This is an astounding representation of the mythical ‘Hero’, whose meaning would be even more obscure had it not been for Austen Henry Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam’s recovery of the Old Babylonian tablets bearing the Epic of Gilgamesh, between 1850 and 1853. The deciphering of the cuneiform by the remarkable George Smith at the British Museum is an epic in its own right.

Mr. Smith presented his paper on Gilgamesh to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in the presence of the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone.

The Epic, as well as this stone, link us to the earliest questioning by human beings, of the purpose of existence, of their obligations and possibilities. While Gilgamesh remains unfamiliar to many people, the myth he represents nevertheless exerts a strong influence on our culture, and on the way we see our lives. You could say that the appeal of Christianity came from the fact that it played successfully to the ingrained pattern of this myth. In other words, what sold Jesus was the idea that he had transcended Death, the final conundrum that Gilgamesh was unable to solve. It would be unwise to suggest that this figure is meant to represent Gilgamesh, but it undoubtedly connects to the myth in which he is the protagonist, and to his heroic

struggle against forces that must be overcome to realise the full potential of human nature. ‘He who saw the Deep…’ is the famous opening phrase, describing Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, ‘Surpassing all other kings’. His conclusion, eventually, was that it was impossible to overcome Death and achieve immortality. Only the fame of great deeds can be immortal.

A friend of my parents was the son of an ashik (a storyteller, reciter of epics and songs) in Tiflis. When people gathered in the evenings in his house to hear his father perform, he would sit in a corner or under the table, and listen to the great epics as they unfolded, night after night.

One was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which he came to know by heart, so many times did he hear it, and such was its grip on his imagination. Many years later, in Europe, he came across a translation in English, and was astonished to discover that it had been transmitted from generation to generation over 4000 years or more without any significant change.

Provenance: Private collection, Japan On loan to the exhibition

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22.

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25 A F IRED EART H ENWARE F EMALE IDOL The Balkans, 5th–4th millennium bc Size: 19 cm high This figure belongs to a group of similar terracotta idols attributed to the Balkans.

The results from scientific tests to establish its date are pending, but it belongs to a culture that extended along the North-Eastern Mediterranean and into the Balkans.

Provenance: Private collection, Germany Auction, Hamburg, 1979 Private collection, U.K.

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2 6 GANDH ARA GREY SC H IST H EAD OF T H E BUDDH A Afghanistan, 3rd century ad Size: 36 cm high In the latter part of the 1960s a shop opened at the gritty end of the King’s Road, called ‘Oxus’. It was a shop like no other, a single room of modest proportions stuffed with treasures. Such things in the hands of dealers in Mayfair or St. James’s would be mounted, carefully lit, and presented with learned documentation. At Oxus they were strewn across the floor, piled up in corners, stuffed in carved wooden chests from Nouristan and Badakshan, or ranged along the walls on rickety shelves. Festoons of tribal jewellery hung from nails banged into the walls as needed, and the only seating was provided by piles of textiles.

The swashbuckling owner of this establishment was David Lindhal. He wasn’t exactly a pirate, since his charm was such that he never needed a cutlass. But he was an adventurer of boundless energy and enthusiasm, and he had a keen eye. Unlike most of those who retraced the hippy trail with rucksacks full of rubbish, he returned

each time with marvels, and as time went on his caravans grew longer, and heavily laden.

Since I worked at Christie’s at the time, David asked me to clear his shipments through Customs for him as they arrived. It was a relatively simple procedure, the only requirement being to certify that the pieces were antique, that is to say over one hundred years old, as stated on the flimsy documentation that accompanied them. The advantage for me was that I got to see everything before anyone else.

This head, or rather fragment of a head, was in the very first shipment, and as soon as I saw it I was transfixed by its serene beauty. I knew little about Gandhara art at the time, but it seemed the perfect incarnation of Greek ideals of beauty, entwined with the Indian embodiment of spiritual beauty as reflected in human beings. More than forty years later it still represents what it promised all those years ago.

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27 PRIMO CARNERA , C H AM PION OF T H E WORLD Romeo Gregori (1900–1940) Rome, 1934 Size: 40 cm high Carrara marble Primo Carnera qualified as a contender for the world title when he knocked out Ernie Schaff in thirteen rounds in New York City on February 10th 1933. Schaff died four days later from the effects of the beating he took that night. On June 29th at Madison Square Garden he faced the world heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey and knocked him out with an uppercut in round 6. Despite questions raised by fans and sportswriters as to whether the uppercut actually connected with Sharkey’s chin, his win was confirmed. He became Italy’s most famous athlete, and was declared a national hero by Mussolini. After successfully defending his title twice in 1934, he was defeated by Max Baer, who knocked him down eleven times before the fight was stopped in round 11. Another famous defeat came at the hands of Joe Louis in 1935 at the end of six rounds. In all he fought 103 professional bouts: 89 wins and 14 losses.

Seventy-two of his wins were by knockout.

He also pursued a film career that began in 1931. In 1933 he starred as himself in The Prizefighter and the Lady, opposite Myrna Loy. In the 1949 movie Mighty Joe Young he fought a giant gorilla. Carol Reed gave him a role in A Kid for Two Farthings (1955), and his last appearance was alongside Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained (1959).

The sculptor of this remarkable bust, Romeo Gregori, was born in Carrara, where he learnt his craft as apprentice to several of the master sculptors there. He moved to Rome in 1921 and became known for a series of heroic sculptures in a style typical of the Fascist era. This bust is something quite different, and undoubtedly his masterpiece. He prepared for it by making a version in terracotta, today in a private collection in Ferrara. It is a unique tribute to the nobility of a boxer, and the brutality of his profession.

On loan to the exhibition.

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2 8 A CELTIC BRON Z E WASSAIL CU P Northern England, 4th–3rd century bc Size: 11 cm diameter Celtic heads have attitude, and this is no exception.

Whether the aggression was innate, or provoked by foreign and local invaders, is hard to decipher nowadays.

Walking through a football crowd recently, I heard several snatches of conversations, including: ‘So I fucking decked him, didn’t I?’, which suggests that the Celtic frame of mind is still among us. But I hope,

if this was a wassail cup, a lot of companionable drinking would have gone on before the fights broke out.

Provenance: Anatole France, Paris (1844–1924) Ratton-Ladrière, Paris Private collection, Paris Private collection, London

29 CELTIC STONE H EAD Yorkshire , circa 3rd century BC Size: 39 cm high Oak base with forged nails, probably 18th century It is well known that among the Vikings were bands of Berserkers, famed for their ferocity and violence.

‘This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feeble-

ness followed, which could last for one or several days.’

Fabing, Howard D., 1956, ‘On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry’. Scientific Monthly 83 (5): 232–237). (Worse than hearing the bell with Mike Tyson in the opposite corner!)

Less well known is that the Celts of Great Britain had similar fraternities dedicated to extreme violence, for whom battle was the purpose of life, and whose refinements of slaughter will haunt the imagination of anyone rash enough to enquire into them. In Ireland such people were known as the fian. The expression of fierce aggression on this face suggests that it celebrates one such person. They still survive today, but in a gentler mood, for example in the ‘Yobs’ cartoon in Private Eye.

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3 0 A SOUT H ARABIAN ALABASTER STELE 2nd–1st century bc Size: 40 × 18.5 cm It is easy, pleasing, and indeed usual to relate a sculpture such as this to more contemporary creations. In this case Brancusi springs to mind, and the Celtic head preceding cannot help but remind us of Elizabeth Frink. The analogy is a false one, but at least it has helped widen our appreciation of what until recently was seen as ‘primitive’ compared to the Classical canon on which so much of our culture reposes. The example of Gauguin and the early 20th-century appreciation of African sculpture by Picasso, André Breton and others, has had profound repercussions.

South Arabia has the most fascinating history. Already in the 3rd millennium bc the incense of South Arabia was burned in the temples of Egypt. As time passed the tribal kingdoms became rich from this trade, and developed

sophisticated techniques for managing water for their crops. The wealth increased greatly with the domestication of the camel in the 1st millennium bc, enabling caravans to reach the Near and Middle East. Under Imperial Rome South Arabia became even richer as its ports serviced the spice fleets between Italy and the Far East. And thereafter it became a relatively forgotten area.

Its lively mixture of savagely competitive communities of Jews, Christians and pagans was largely ‘smoothed’ out by the arrival of Islam in the 7th century, but apart from the period of the Rasulid dynasty from the 13th to the 15th centuries, it has remained culturally inert. Nevertheless, the quirky and empathetic relics of its great past shine out wherever one encounters them.

31 A SOUT H ARABIAN ALABASTER STELE Not illustrated 2nd–1st century bc Size: 28.5 × 15 cm

32 A SOUT H ARABIAN ALABASTER GA Z ELLE Not illustrated 3rd–2nd century bc Size: 16 × 15 cm

33 A SOUT H ARABIAN LIMESTONE GA Z ELLE Not illustrated 3rd–2nd century bc Size: 53 cm high

3 4 A SOUT H ARABIAN MARBLE H EAD Not illustrated 1st century bc – 1st century ad Size: 21 cm high

35 A SOUT H ARABIAN MARBLE H EAD Not illustrated 1st century bc – 1st century ad Size: 22 cm high

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3 6 AL F REDO BIAGINI Baboon Rome, 1930 Size: 50 cm high Marble Alfredo Biagini (1886–1952) is not a name well known today, unlike Gino Severini with whom he worked closely in the 1920s. Severini’s role in Italian Futurism endears him to the current custodians of correct thought about 20th-century art, whereas Biagini worked in a now unfashionable classical style reworked with Art Deco precision. By the mid-1920s, Severini had come to the conclusion that Apollinaire had been right about the futility and provincialism of Italian Futurism, and had given up on the project. Meanwhile, by the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s Biagini was the best-known and most sought-after sculptor in Rome.

The Baboon was made for the Cinema Barberini, the finial for the bannister of the grand marble staircase up to the Royal Circle. The space for the cinema became

available once the Barberini stables for horses and carriages became obsolete, and the architect Marcello Piacentini was commissioned to design the newest and grandest cinema in Rome by the film director Roberto Rosselini’s father.

The quality of Biagini’s work is evident. Few animalier sculptures are so revealing of an animal’s character. And the way he has used the marble to suggest its fur is brilliant. On an imaginative level it is tempting to see the Baboon’s malevolent stare directed towards the Fascist fashionistas that paraded up and down the staircase on which he was obliged to sit.

R. Pacini, Il cinema teatro Barberini, Emporium, lxxii, 1930, pp. 382s.

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37 AN ARC H AIC BRON Z E Z IT H ER TUNING KEY (QIN Z H EN YAO) North China, late 3rd century bc Size: 9.3 cm high A number of such keys are known and published, and are of particular interest because they demonstrate the link between China and Achaemenid Iran, and indeed the rest of the Middle East. The model for this composite beast with bearded human face, wings, scales and a curled tail had travelled east along the Silk Road. A further reason, no doubt, that this link is illustrated

by something connected with music, is that there was a common musical tradition across the whole of Central Asia for millennia, at least until The Beatles interrupted transmission.

Provenance: J.J. Lally & Co., New York Private collection, London

38 T H REE C H INESE IVORY PLECTRUMS Not illustrated 19th century Size: 19 cm; 19.5 cm; 21 cm high

39 TWO AMLAS H TERRACOTTA IDIOPHONES Not illustrated North-West Iran, early 1st millennium bc Size: 39 cm & 37 cm high See: A l’ombre de Babel, exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1995, p. 90, no. 134.

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4 0 T H E 13T H DALAI LAMA’S DOUBLE BASS Lhasa, Tibet, 1920s Size: instrument 170 × 56 cm; case 180 × 62 cm This awesome instrument was commissioned by, or for, the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1876–1933), who was apparently mad about American jazz. It’s a most unexpected and delightful idea. A band, I hope including those huge long Tibetan copper trumpets, rocking the Potala, His Holiness slapping the bass, a line of cooing nuns, nutbrown grizzled monks blowing their hearts out on all sorts of improbable instruments. It might seem a frivolous idea, but I don’t think of it like that. The spiritual life should not be an endless recitation of mournful prayers and bead-turning. The Mevlevi dervishes dance, the Helvetis provide sublime music for their meetings, in India sacred dance is recognised for what it is. It is a question of balance, and therefore the fact that the 13th liked jazz is proof for me that he was a truly spiritual man. Apart from his mysterious predictions, Nostradamus wrote a marvellous book of recipes for making jam – still available in Salon-deProvence, where he lived – which likewise suggests to me that he was not some crazy mystic, but a fully rounded man, who lived in this world while communicating with another.

This is the Excalibur of instruments: only a strong man can release it from its case. The body is a waisted drum of black lacquered hardwood; the open front next to the fret-board stretched with python skin, and the lower bulb

with a section cut away and carved with a filigree panel of calligraphic symbols and cloud-scrolls. The base of the drum is painted with some kind of howling jazz-demon and flowers. A ball-ended steel spike pulls out from the base. The huge wooden case is painted with Buddhist symbols, a big Dragon and a blowsy Phoenix, on green and yellow backgrounds, with steel hinges and rings to hold it all together. It is lined with different gold-embroidered silks, including a green panel with another swirling Dragon. When you see this instrument, the idea of rocking the Potala doesn’t seem so absurd.

The instrument was purchased by a diplomat stationed in Beijing from the Tsering family, who had been close to the 13th Dalai Lama. At the time Tibet was still closed to foreign visitors. During a period of exile in Northern India the 13th had been very taken with aspects of Western culture, and the Nobulinka Palace where he resided still houses Art Deco radios, gramophones and jazz records. A road was built between his residence and the Potala along which he could ride in his Model T Ford, carried up into the Himalayas by a team of porters.

Looking at the case one evening, it occurred to me that the Dragon illustrated on the green background must be dancing the jitterbug.

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MUSIC

The vast arc of territory that runs from the old Ottoman empire – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and then beyond through the whole of Central Asia as far as Xinkiang, down through Afghanistan and into India – has two common threads in its common culture: story-telling and music. Perhaps a third thread is carpet-weaving, but it’s definitely in third place. Beautiful music was produced by elegant instruments, embellished with ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and tortoiseshell underlaid with goldleaf to make it glow. The forms of the instruments have not changed much through the ages, as we can see from miniature paintings in which musical instruments often feature. There are subtle changes over time, often because a particular musician had specific demands. But in general these instruments have remained much the same – on the basis, I suppose, that you don’t need to re-invent the wheel.

These instruments are often objects of great delicacy and beauty, particularly from the territory that can be described historically as the Turkic domain.

Over the years I have handled a number of elegant Persian instruments, specifically kermanches from Tabriz,

made of ivory and ebony, but apart from them the instruments from the Persian world are rather dull, while their music is sublime, and their poetry unsurpassed. This echoes the prayer beads made in Persia, which are pedestrian compared with the Turkish equivalents. More surprising, because calligraphy in Persia achieved an unrivalled refinement, their calligraphers’ tools have nothing of the beauty of the Ottoman calligraphers’ knives for cutting their reed nibs, the plaques on which they cut them, the burnishing tools for gold and paper, the cutters for the leather bindings, even the mortars for grinding the colours.

It seems odd for a culture so refined, but there we are.

We tend to think that the older something is, the better it is. My impression, in terms of musical instruments, is that this is not the case. Most of the instruments illustrated were made in the second half of the 19th century, or in the early part of the 20th-century. There seems to have been a revival of musical culture during this period that these instruments reflect. The ivory Sarinda from Bijapur is the exception, whereas the 18th-century Ottoman Tanbour is noticeably less refined than its 19th-century descendants.

4 1 O t t om a n Ta n bou r Turkey, first half 18th century Size: 135 cm long Wood, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, gold leaf, ivory

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42 A pa i r of O t t om a n Ta n bou r s Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 135 cm long Wood, ivory

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43 O t t om a n Ta n bou r

4 4 O t t om a n Ta n bou r

Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 133 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

Turkey, circa 1900 Size: 133 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

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45 O t t om a n Sa z Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 117 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

4 6 O t t om a n Sa z Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 124 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

47 S eta r Morocco, 18th century Size: 109 cm long Wood, bone, gut

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4 8 O t t om a n Ou d Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 75 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

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4 9 O t t om a n Ou d Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 79 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

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50 O t t om a n K e r m a nc h e Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 41 cm long Wood, ivory, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

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51 O t t om a n K e r m a nc h e Turkey, second half 19th century Size: 43 cm long Wood, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold leaf

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52 Ta m bu r a South India, 18th century Size: 72 cm long Wood, ivory, black compound, gilt bronze

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53 Ta m bu r a North India, 19th century Size: 93 cm long Wood, ivory, pigments

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5 4 IVORY SARINDA F ROM T H E ADIL - S H A H COURT IN BIJA PUR Central India, first half 17th century ad Size: 36 cm Bijapur is worth a visit. Not many people go there, it is a long slog from Hyderabad or Bombay, between which it sits midway on the northern edge of Karnataka, along thin roads rumbling with furiously driven trucks. The few hotels are designed for itinerant traders. Once there, however, it all seems worth it, not only, but mainly for, the astonishing Gol Gumbaz, a great behemoth built of basalt, with the second largest dome in the world, 40 metres in diameter, larger than Santa Sophia, and only a little smaller than St. Peter’s in Rome. The great dome is supported by a cube 47.5 metres on each side, and beneath it is a raised platform the size of a tennis court. Opposite the entrance is the only feature that breaks the cube: a deep, demi-octagonal, high-vaulted recess that occupies a good part of its wall. The acoustical properties of the space are extraordinary. Outside, each corner of the building has a seven-storey tower. At first sight it appears like a dark and squat prototype for the Taj Mahal, built less than a decade later.

Construction of the Gol Gumbaz began in 1626, in the last year of the life of Ibrahim Adil-Shah II, and continued under his son Muhammad until 1656, the very year the latter died. He was buried in the Gul Gumbaz, along with various members of his family when their time came, the graves marked by modest raised batons of marble arranged incongruously along one edge of the platform. And since then it has been a mausoleum.

But there is another version of the purpose of this mighty building. It was the music room of the AdilShahs. The deep recess was where the sultan and his court reclined; the platform was large enough to accommodate a great number of musicians, of whom there were 3000–4000 at any one time at court; the ‘whispering gallery’ around the base of the dome was for the women; the walls are tunnelled with staircases leading to the windows, where wide sills provide seats for an audience. Ibrahim II was a renowned composer, as well as a poet and warrior – he mainly wrote poems to his wife, his favourite musical instrument, and to his elephant, Atish Khan – and it seems probable that the conception for the grandest music room ever constructed was his. He announced publicly that his aim was to establish a kingdom based on learning, music, and ‘Guruseva’ (serving the teacher) – in his case Hazrat Banda Nawaj, the Sufi saint of Gulbarga. His son, Muhammad, was mindful of his refined inheritance, and strove to keep it alive.

It is difficult to prove that this ivory instrument comes from the Adil-Shah court. There is one other comparable example known, but they both conform very exactly to the style of what we know of Bijapur. A refined court environment was necessary to produce instruments of this quality.

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55 T H E Z IKR DRUM Kashghar, Xingkiang, 19th century Size: 2.20 m long The Zikr, in this case, was a communal spiritual exercise carried out by a group of dervishes in their meeting-place, deep-breathing repetitions of a Name of God. This drum, hollowed out from a tree-trunk, was suspended on an iron bar between two columns of the portico, and beaten to

keep the rhythm of breathing among those participating.

Its deep-throated roar was one with the community for whom it was beaten. There are few such beasts in captivity, and my information about it comes indirectly from the Faculty of Music at Istanbul University.

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56 ‘ PICASSO’S GUITAR’ Argentina, 20th century Size: 54 cm Ricardo Paz is a most unusual man. He and his wife Belen run a shop in Buenos Aires where they sell unusual and wonderfully crafted furniture made in their workshop at the back. Upstairs is Ricardo’s den, packed with treasures, a small part of their extraordinary collection, fruit of decades of a relentless quest. The collection would generally be thought of as ‘Folk Art’, Argentinian ‘Folk Art’, but in reality it represents much more than such a term implies. Both Ricardo and Belen have, and have continued to develop a rare sensitivity and understanding of the poetry inherent in objects which for many others appear too humble or primitive to merit attention.

Furniture, textiles, tools perfectly shaped to perform the function they were designed for, some ancient and some not so old, but they all sing the same song to you, about how beauty enhances every aspect of every human life.

The collection is known, of course – it has been published in several finely presented books – but it deserves to be better known, since it is unique, both in scope and quality.

It was in Ricardo’s den, in early April 2014, that I first laid eyes on ‘Picasso’s Guitar’, and I begged him to lend it for this exhibition. Not only did he agree, but he also wrote its story, for which I am most grateful.

The Time Machine. Who wouldn’t ride a time machine given the opportunity? Objects from the past can perform this function, as long as the passenger in these time machines has imagination and a desire to learn. Every object has a story to tell, but the trick is to get at the story.

For instance, how was a man’s life in Europe before the Industrial Revolution? Life and actions were so dependent on Nature that sudden rain or a storm could affect a man’s life for days. It is hard for our children to realise how life has changed over the last fifty years. It is almost impossible for them to imagine how their life would be without electricity.

But the human species lived without it for thousands of years until the 19th century. Not so long ago. Even simple things like gas lighters would seem magic to a man little more than a hundred years ago. And how much is a hundred years in the scheme of things? So, when meditating about where we are going as humankind, it is never a bad start to ask ourselves where we come from. With this question in mind I entered my homeland’s dry forest. Probably the biggest dry forest in the planet, and the most threatened, by the way. The province of Santiago del Estero, in Argentina, is as big as France and as old as Spain. Named after Santiago de Compostela, probably because of the enormous amount of stars filling its vast sky, Santiago del Estero was the place where the Spaniards settled when first arriving from the

actual Peru in 1550. The Incas guiding them had to stop in this spot between the fertile margins of the rivers Dulce y Salado (Sweet & Salty rivers) where natives had been gathering for centuries before their arrival. Fierce and primitive people coming from the Amazon jungles; more developed communities from the Andean cultures; and among them, the walkers from the flatlands, the Pampas and Patagonia. They had been living in that forest long before that group of bearded white men arrived. Can we say those days had nothing that resembles the actual ones? It’s worth remembering that these new adventurers were running not only from hunger, but also from the Inquisition. Some among them, Jews and Moors, brought seven centuries of Islamic culture, and harmonised easily with the native populations. They were not just looking for gold, as is often said: they were also looking for freedom.

Five centuries later, me, a descendant of those two, the newcomers and the natives, find myself sitting by a friendly fire. Its light is the only light in the black desert around me. A sweet, determined and mature woman is singing for me, sitting in the yard of her adobe house. ‘Una mujer del Monte’, as we call the dry forest. She is happy and proud of her new guitar, an industrial one, just arrived from the distant town, but already turning grey and greasy, like all of us. The first paved road is more than a hundred kilometres from here, a day by car, much longer on horseback or walking. We are singing together in the gateway between civilisations. The guitar is used like a percussive instrument, a six strings Berimbao, which allows her to sing and laugh as only a grown-up woman can. She is great. My own lack of knowledge of chords (which embarrasses me) has no meaning here, she says, and laughs. It is such a different rhythm, coming from such a different heart, a whole different music erupting from her.

Only much later will I be able to play for her, when the fire is close to ashes. At some point she begins to laugh again, and decides she wants to give me her old guitar, the one with which she sang before the new guitar arrived. It was abandoned somewhere, but she finds it and gives it to me.

She made it herself, a long time ago, but she isn’t attached to it at all. Having no use for it, it simply has no sense any more. With her new guitar she is now discovering a new civilisation. Flying between the night stars and the sunlit landscape, she spends her time singing in celebration of Creation. When she travels, as is usual for the people of Nature, her vehicle is Silence.

On loan to the exhibition.

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57 T H REE BELL - STONES Argentina Sizes: 74.5 cm, 78 cm, 59 cm The locals in western Argentina trek for days with mules into the high Andes, to the slopes of the volcanoes, to find stones such as these. They are a kind of obsidian, spewed out by a volcano when it’s angry. Their attraction is that when you strike them with another piece of stone, preferably from the same area, they sing. The most prized are those that emit a different series of sounds depending on which part you hit. I imagined, as usual, when I first saw

them, that they must have been for use in mysterious shamanic rituals. But not at all. People like to have them hanging around the house, apparently, and bang them as they go by; they are simply volcano garbage with a nice tinkle. Nevertheless, it’s a long trip to make for the equivalent of a wind-chime. The source of these is Ricardo Paz (see the previous entry), who is also responsible for their elegant silver mounts.

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58 ‘ LA PIEDRE CAM PANA’ Argentina Size: 89 × 16 cm Stone, wood, silver, leather, string It was hanging close to the front door of a very old and almost destroyed building. A strange black stone silently hanging there, shining in the remains of this abandoned adobe hut forgotten in the most salty and deserted empty landscape… We were in the high mountains of the Argentine Andes, in the province of Catamarca, that keeps its name since the Inca days, meaning the border fortress of the last frontier. A very old man appeared from nowhere, probably left behind, abandoned as well as everything else there. Thinking of shamanism, I pointed

to the black stone and asked him, what is this? He smiled and with a gentle gesture picked a pebble from the ground and hit the hanging stone. The sound transformed the fallen building into an invisible cathedral. ‘This used to be our oratorio [a praying space], and this stone was its doorbell. It’s been a long time since those days. No one comes here anymore. Please take it with you if you like it, and take its eternal winds wherever they can be heard.’

Ricardo Paz

59 ‘ARREADOR DE ÑANDU’ Argentina Size: 84 × 37 cm The South American ostrich is called ‘Suri’ by the Indians, and ‘Ñandu’ by the Criollos. Since ancient times the natives have run behind them for power. Its fibrous meat is nourishing, its tendons good for weaving ropes, its neck ideal for making bags, its enormous eggs made magical presents, and, most importantly, its feathers were used to embellish their strong naked bodies.

An arreador is a long whip used to guide cattle from over a horse, with a Ñandu foot as the whip handle.

Luxurious and ornamented with fine braided leather, it has the look of a power object more than a rural tool.

It came to me as a present, given by a wealthy estanciera, named Doña Claudia, better known as ‘La Madrina’.

She gave it with a cunning smile, saying she knew I would appreciate its mystery.

The wooden batijuela holding the whip is a primitive tray made by the people from the dry forest, probably the first piece of ‘furniture’ they make when arriving at the camp to be. The silver wire holding the whip to the batijuela is a reminder of its Argentine origin.

Ricardo Paz

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58

59

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6 0 ‘ LAS TABAS ’ Argentina Size: 72 × 32 cm; 62 × 40 cm Bone, iron, silver and wood.

When, in the year 1536, Pedro de Mendoza arrived at the green desert called ‘Las Pampas’, the land beyond ‘El Rio de La Plata’, he brought with him a few cows and horses.

Unfortunately for him, the local natives preferred to eat him and set the cattle free, instead of the other way round as he probably proposed. This is how some years later the whole Pampas became filled with these four-legged animals, until the endless flat land had as many cows as the stars in the sky.

Among them lived the gauchos. The link has long been established between the Berber cultures of North Africa and the spirit of these outlaws, riding through the vast land

between the Native Indians and the Colonial Spaniards.

The gauchos invented the taba, a game with very basic rules. A bone from the cow’s knee is thrown 5 metres ahead, landing heads up or down, lucky or not; suerte o culo.

Simple as it sounds, the taba game is still played in the Pampas, sometimes for a lot of money, often involving some shedding of blood.

Two sets of five of these tabas are shown, held by silver wire to a pair of batijuela trays.

Ricardo Paz

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61 A COLLECTION OF FORTY SCRIMS H AW circa 1800–1900 It is beyond this cataloguer’s capacity to write anything meaningful about this unusual, and possibly unique collection of erotic scrimshaw, beyond noting that long periods at sea clearly stimulated sailors’ imaginations. The collection itself was formed over many years by a man recently deceased at a great age, and was no doubt part of a much larger collection of similar subject-matter. There must be an expert specialist somewhere – probably British since it would require a particular kind of eccentricity – but so far I have failed to locate him. Even institutions with links to whaling, such as the Nantucket Whaling Museum, are reluctant to advertise comparable scrimshaw, if indeed

they possess any. Nevertheless, this collection deserves a proper study. A number of the ships have names, and their logs must exist somewhere. An expert on costume should be able to date fairly precisely many of the ladies by what they are wearing; more of a challenge, of course, once the more brazen among them have cast off their apparel. And then there is the link between whalers in the Arctic and slavers of the Caribbean. Most of the ships are British or American, but there is also a distinctive French flavour to some of the boudoir scenes. One can only hope that one day someone who combines the wit and erudition of Norman Douglas and James Laver will take up the challenge.

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i a . ‘ Th e C a p ta i n ’s R et u r n a f t e r 3 y e a r s at S e a’ b. Wh a l i ng i n t h e A rc t ic & a port sc e n e Walrus tusk Size: 24.5 cm long

ii a . On t h e di va n b. ‘ W i l l i a m Pry de C a p ta i n ’; ‘Joh n Fa l e 1 s t M at e’; ‘2 n d M at e H e n ry ’; ‘Jao Pa pi e H a r po on e r’; t h ei r s h i p; ‘ Ba l ee n for t h e l a di e s c or s et s a n d s tays ’; ‘Oi l for t h e l a m ps ’.

Walrus tusk Size: 18 cm long

iii a . De c k Quoi t us b. Th e w h a l e r ‘ Wa n de r e r’ Sperm whale tooth Size: 15.5 cm long

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iv a . T wo - ta i l e d e n t ic i ng M e r m a i d b. ‘ Wh a l i ng i n t h e A rc t ic ’; t h e s h i p ‘ Ly di a’ h e l d u p by t wo w h a l e s ’ ta i l s; t h e ‘C a p ta i n ’s Hous e’.

Sperm whale tooth, metal cap Size: 13 cm long

v a . ‘ Th e C a p ta i n ’s Pe r k s ’ b. Pl a n of a s l av e s h i p Not illustrated Sperm whale tooth Size: 13.5 cm long

vi a . ‘S l av e Sh i p ’ Not illustrated

b. Th e C a p ta i n ’s e n t e rta i n m e n t Sperm whale tooth Size: 15 cm long

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vii a . Th e pr i son e r of t h e Ph a l lus b. Th e u nc h a s t e k i s s Walrus tusk Size: 23 cm long

viii Pr e pa r i ng for s e duc t ion Sperm whale tooth Size: 13 cm long

ix D o -i t -you r s e l f Sperm whale tooth Size: 15 cm

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x a . S ta n di ng u p b. On h e r bac k Sperm whale tooth Size: 19 cm long

xi A no t h e r h a ppy i n t e r lu de Sperm whale tooth Size: 17 cm long

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xii A pi r at e’s pa rt y Sperm whale tooth Size: 14.5 cm long

xiii A h a ppy i n t e r lu de Sperm whale tooth Size: 20 cm long

xiv a . A da m s e l wa i t s b. A da m s e l dr e a m s Sperm whale tooth Size: 12 cm long

xv a . Ou t d o or Sport b. A s h i p off t h e c oa s t ; ‘Qu e e n of t h e S e a s ’ Sperm whale tooth Size: 12 cm long

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xvi a . A n e l e ga n t c ou pl e b. ‘ Th e w h a l e r K at h l e e n ’ Sperm whale tooth Size: 15 cm long

xvii a . Th e r e s h e bl ows b. Th r e e s h i ps a s t e r n Sperm whale tooth Size: 11 cm long

xviii a . A wat e r fa l l b. ‘ Th e w h a l e r M i n e rva’ Sperm whale tooth Size: 12.5 cm long

xix a . A sa i l or a n d h i s mol l b. A w h a l e r Sperm whale tooth Size: 13 cm long

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xx a . Sa i l or s at pl ay b. A f ly i ng ph a l lus Sperm whale tooth Size: 15 cm long

xxi a . Shor e l e av e , Pe ru, 1856 b. Sh i p a n d c or n uc opi a Sperm whale tooth size: 12.5 cm long

xxii ‘ W i t h H us ba n ds at S e a , Sh e c om fort s Sh e’ Sperm whale tooth Size: 15 cm long

xxiii A f l igh t y f l o oz i e Sperm whale tooth Size: 17 cm long

xxiv A no t h e r f l igh t y f l o oz i e Not illustrated Sperm whale tooth Size: 18 cm long

xxv H e l i f t s h e r a l of t Sperm whale tooth Size: 13.5 cm long

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xxvi a . U n ion, a w h a l e r a n d a hous e f ly i ng t h e A m e r ic a n f l ag b. D om e s t ic bl i s s & a s h i p i n dry-d o c k Sperm whale tooth Size: 17 cm long

xxvii a . ‘ T ru e L ov e’ b. Wh a l i ng Sperm whale tooth Size: 13.5 cm long

xxviii a. A ll is r evea led b. T wo w h a l e r s Sperm whale tooth Size: 12 cm long

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xxix a . A n a l f r e s c o de l igh t b. ‘ R Plu r i bus U n u m’ & a s h i p Sperm whale tooth Size: 14 cm long

xxx a . A l ov i ng c ou pl e on a ba r r e l b. A s h i p w i t h c or n uc opi a Sperm whale tooth Size: 10 cm long

xxxi L ov i ng c ou pl e Walrus tusk Size: 10 cm long

xxxii Th e t i p Walrus tusk Size: 7 cm long

xxxiii A s t i m u l at i ng e nc ou n t e r Sperm whale tooth Size: 12 cm long

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xxxiv a . H a n k y-pa n k y i n f u l l at t i r e b. Th e s h i p t h e ‘ D ov e’; w i t h a row of hous e s be l ow Sperm whale tooth Size: 8 cm high

xxxv V e n us u n de r a wat c hf u l e y e Sperm whale tooth Size: 9 cm long

xxxvi A sa i l or’s rom a nc e Sperm whale tooth Size: 12 cm long

xxxvii A. Ca nister B. ‘ Th e De v i l i n f r igh t ’ (ba s e) Walrus tusk Size: 9 cm high

xxxviii ‘ Th i n k i ng of you’ Walrus tusk Size: 5 cm high

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xxxix I n t i m at e sc e n e s Walrus ivory Size: 6 cm diameter

xl A pa per-k n i f e w i t h c l e nc h e d f i s t h a n dl e a n d a s t ru m pet on e ac h s i de Walrus tusk Size: 22 cm long

62 TWO CARICATURES Not illustrated Whale ear-bones, painted Size: 13 cm high

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63 A COLLECTION OF 56 EROTIC GLASS NEGATIVES

By Photo-Hall and Lumière, Paris, second half 19th century Average size: 10 × 9 cm ‘Gelatino-Chlorure d’Argent’ & ‘Chlorure-Bromure’ with three original boxes This collection raises an obvious and interesting issue: the difference between pornography and art. The border between the two is forever shifting, and attitudes differ widely in different parts of the world. The great temple carvings at Khajuraho cannot be considered pornographic, however graphic their depictions of human sexual activity. The marvellous masterpieces of Japanese Shunga prints were certainly intended to titillate, but they are also great art, so intention is not really a defining principle. One could say, I suppose, that they celebrate the most elevated experience of human life, but even so they were not intended for a wide public. Again, the usual view that the sculpted sexual emblems of Antiquity – Greek, Etruscan, Roman and so on – are a reflection of some kind of ‘fertility cult’, seems to me to entirely miss the point. Go to Hattusha in Anatolia if you don’t believe me. There, not far from the citadel, is a cleft in the basalt hillside carved with a beguiling procession of temple prostitutes. It is said that every Hittite woman had to serve a day a year at the temple. If such a benign system existed

here, our churches would be full, singing the praises of the Lord.

Some of the images in this collection are clearly intentionally pornographic, and rather off-putting as a result, I find, although mild compared to what the internet now provides. But they are not so shocking to us as they would have seemed one hundred years ago. A number of the more demure slides bear the caption ‘L’Etude Academique’, and resemble the paintings familiar from the 19th century, both in the traditional academic style of, for example, Gericault, and the Impressionists. Renoir said something to the effect that he painted with his penis. So the question is: why is a painting of a nude woman standing in a bath-tub painted

by Degas or Bonnard considered art, while a photograph of the same subject is often labelled pornography? In the Tate Gallery, near the amazing Epstein sculpture of Jacob struggling with the Angel, is a picture by Stanley Spencer, showing him with his mistress, about as graphic a portrayal of sexuality as you can find. It’s there for the public to see, an intense image of intimacy.

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64 A TIBETAN PH ALLUS MADE F ROM MAMMOT H IVORY Tibet or Ladakh, probably medieval Size: 23 cm long With silk wrap The label states: ‘Collection of Sir Francis Younghusband, Tibetan Phallus in Casket, Lhasa. Not for display.’ The casket has disappeared, but the phallus remains resplendent, and is now displayed, our sensibilities having changed. It was apparently placed in a hole between Yama’s legs, and removed and ‘used’ in Tantric ceremonies.

Provenance: Sir Francis Younghusband Spink’s, 1984

65 GREEN SC H IST PH ALLUS Not illustrated Mongolia, probably 13th–14th century Size: 14.5 cm long This rather unusual tri-testicular tool, with its curious button for enhanced performance, was found some decades ago in the Altai region of Southern Siberia; there where the throat-singing Tuvan people roam. It was in the bed of a river, which in diverting its course had inadvertently collapsed part of an ancient tomb that was found to be the final resting place of a Mongolian princess. There is something charming about the idea that she wished to take it with her to Eternity.

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66 A ROMAN BRON Z E VOTIVE PH ALLUS Italy, 1st century ad Size: 6 cm high Provenance: Private collection, London Rupert Wace Ancient Art, 2000

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67 A RED SANDSTONE ARC H ITECTURAL F RAGMENT North India, 12th century Size: 25 × 20.6 cm You won’t see Saint Augustine portrayed in such a pose in a Catholic church, and in a way more’s the pity. If that had been our Christian custom we might have avoided the ghastly consequences of the doctrine of Original Sin that has stunted our potential ever since it was promulgated. The fear, and therefore control that this idea has exercised, is extraordinary.

The trouble is that you can’t just say: I don’t believe; and get rid of the claws of so many generations and levels of conditioning. The only release is to understand the conditioning, which takes time, to be able to step outside it. Don’t throw away the baby with the bath water, we say; the Sufis say: Don’t throw away your sandals before you can afford a pair of shoes.

68 S H UNGa f rom t h e a l bu m ‘ IMAYO IROKUMI NO ITO’ f rom t h e s er i e s ‘ E n t w i n e d C ol ou r e d Th r e a ds of M e n a n d Wom e n of t h e Pr e s e n t Day ’ Not illustrated Japan, late 1780s Size: 25 × 37.5 cm Unsigned; with a collector’s seal H.V. Oban yoko-e, beni-girai Henri Vever (1854–1943) was a jeweller by profession, and an extraordinary collector in many fields. He was among the first Europeans to develop a serious fascination for Japanese art, becoming the lynchpin of a group of Parisian collectors who got together every month for over thirty years to share their insights and enthusiasm. Vever was the main contributor to the major Paris exhibitions from 1909 to 1914, and many of his masterpieces were illustrated in the first books on the subject of Japanese prints.

Provenance: Henri Vever Collection, Sotheby’s, October 30th 1997, lot 108.

Literature: Hayashi, Kiyonaga & Shuncho, Empon Kenkyu (Study of Erotic Books), Tokyo, 1964, pp. 143–4.

Michel Beurdeley et al., Le Chant de l’Oreiller; l’Art d’aimer au Japon, Fribourg, 1973, p. 178.

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69 A FON WOOD PH ALLUS Dahomey, 19th century Size: 27 cm long Few short stories can match this one. In 1977 Bruce Chatwin went to Dahomey (now Benin) accompanied by John Kasmin, to do research for his book, The Viceroy of Ouidah. While there, the acting king received them in an official ceremony in his compound at Abomey, in the course of which the great-grand-daughter of King Sagbadjou (aged 103) presented them with this wood phallus. It may be difficult for us to decipher the significance of such a gift, but it was gratefully received, of course.

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70 ‘OH , EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST, AND NEVER T H E TWAIN S H ALL MEET ’ (Rudyard Kipling) A Lady of Constantinople, French school, circa 1800, oil on canvas, 30.5 × 22.5 cm The French Maid, Paul Roberts, 1978, oil on canvas, 170 × 125 cm

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‘You can wait a long time for a Dodo and then three come along at once…’

7 1 A RARE BONE OF A DODO Mauritius, 17th century Size: 13.5 cm The arrival of the Dutch fleet off Mauritius in 1598 spelled the imminent extinction of the Dodo. They were fat, had forgotten how to fly, and were far from fleet of foot. The last record of a living species dates from 1681. The reasons for their demise were, of course, more complex than the insatiable appetite of hungry Dutch sailors. They were exported as curiosities, among others by the English traveller Peter Mundy, who sent one to Surat, which is portrayed in a painting by Mansour for the Emperor Jahangir, dated 1625. In Europe they appeared in the paintings of Roelandt Savery and Cornelius Saftleven.

Elias Ashmole obtained a complete stuffed specimen from the Tradescant collection, but in 1755 it was deemed sufficiently decayed to be emptied into the dustbin.

Apparently by the cleaning lady.

Almost all the bones in the world’s museums survive because of an English schoolmaster, Mr. George Clark, who, in 1865 identified some Dodo bones at the edge of a swamp called ‘La Mare aux Songes’, near now what is the International Airport. As a competent amateur naturalist he was able to recognise what he had found, and

persuaded the local plantation owner, Mr. de Bissy, on whose land the swamp lay, to lend him a few slaves.

These were made to walk through the swamp and locate the bones with their bare feet. To be fair, each successful bone recovery merited a reward.

My chance encounter one day with this particular bone was for me an exciting moment. I didn’t imagine that such a thing could happen, but nor did I feel able to buy it; its value being now equal to that of the bone of a revered saint in olden days, perhaps even more, since we still believe in the Dodo. Had it been a sanctified relic, and had this been long ago, I would, I suppose, have felt obliged to order a sumptuous casket to house it. With this in mind, I decided to commission Michael Cooper to sculpt a Dodo, providing a visual context for what otherwise might be mistaken for a turkey’s bone, and thus suffer the fate of Elias Ashmole’s rare specimen.

Being of a sentimental nature, Michael has provided his Dodo with an egg, which nestles neatly under its body.

Hope for the future, he tells me. More worryingly, I think he really believes it might hatch.

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72 AN ALABASTER SCUL P TURE OF A DODO

by Michael Cooper, 2014 Size: 38 cm high × 70 cm wide I can remember Michael’s first sculpture. It was the head of his baby daughter Lorien cast in bronze. Since Lorien was my god-daughter, and I, at the time, was Michael’s lodger in his Pimlico home, I became the lucky recipient of one of the casts. When I looked at it carefully I was astounded; because it was such an accurate likeness, rendered with expressiveness and flourish. None of us, his friends, had any idea that he was actually becoming a sculptor. We knew he went to spend time with sculptors – Anthony Gray and Jonathan Kenworthy – but I assumed that his attendance there was like my afternoons at Heatherley’s life-drawing classes during holidays and in various artists’ studios in Paris, alleviating the tedium of having to learn something at the Sorbonne. Occasionally, at cocktail hour, I would encounter David Wynne folded up in a corner of his living room. Only much later did I learn that Michael had been his helper in assembling The Boy With A Dolphin, which sits on Cheyne Walk overlooking the river and remains the most inspirational public sculpture in London.

He never talked about his ambitions as a sculptor. He says now that he was worried that he was a dilettante and that if asked what he was going to do – as often happened – to answer that he was going to be a sculptor might provoke disbelief. It all started whittling wood during long, soggy evenings in Ireland. Then he spent a year in a stone-mason’s yard under the Waterloo arches, and there, amid the rasp, grime and dust, first realised what he really wanted to do. ‘Chipping stone’, he called it, so of course we did not take it seriously. Others did, particularly Derek Hill and Grey Gowrie, who encouraged him at the time when he needed it most.

And it is we, among others, who have benefited. Our house in France is animated by creatures transformed by Michael’s imagination and skill. A coiled serpent in bronze gazes out across the garden, a large turtle lounges at the rim of a water tank, a seductive white torso stretches indoors and sweetly reminds me of days past. My favourite

in the great white albatross – branded by my daughter as ‘the duck’, being unacquainted with the species – sitting on a high parapet beneath which a pair of hoopoes nest each year to bring up their young. When they leave we put up a ladder to clean off their additions since they enjoy sitting on its warm back to survey the surroundings.

It is the physicality of carving that draws him to his studio. The hammer and chisel, and the blocks of stone each with their own personality. It is like a conversation, but an intuitive one, which when it flows makes sense of every strike. Having built up a knowledge of skeletons, human and animal, to provide the structure for understanding the tension between bone, flesh and skin, he found it possible to express the sensuality of stone. This is the joy of sculpting, he says, the revealing of its unexpected potential: ‘Stone, in spite of its hardness, can be soft like a buttock.’

‘I experienced at times a feeling that something had been achieved which was correct and harmonious, almost in spite of myself. It was like a dimension that I could only glimpse. These moments were most apparent when I was working on sculpture. There would be times when some other faculty seemed to be working, allowing me to see other aspects of the work and achieve a result often quite different to what I had planned. As I carved a block of stone, it became possible to harmonise with the material and work in partnership with it rather than in conflict. The physical effort of carving and the concentration required produce a very precise focus, suspending the usual thought process and allowing another part of me to function.’

Every artist will recognise what he describes. And there is little that one can add. But were I to be asked what I thought was Michael’s particular characteristic as an artist, I would say his humility. It is this that allows something to pass through him. He does not get in his own way.

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73 BRON Z E SKELETON OF A DODO Cast in 2000 Size: 70 cm high Pangolin Editions casts with which to assemble the entire skeleton. The result is testimony to his profound knowledge of the natural world, combined with his unparalleled skill in casting bronze.

Exhibited: ‘Bones to Bronze, Extinct Species of the Mascarene Islands’, 2004.

On loan to the exhibition.

© Steve Russell Studios courtesy Gallery Pangolin

It was the idea of Dr. Carl Jones, Director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, to recreate lost species in bronze. His idea was realised in conjunction with Rungwe Kingdon and Claude Koenig, directors of the Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry at Chalford, near Stroud. An astonishing amount of research went into the recreation of each animal and bird. While no complete skeleton of a Dodo survives, enough bones exist from different specimens to have enabled Rungwe to make

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74 t h e DODO Nick Bibby Cast by Pangolin Editions Size: 78 cm high their scholarly research enabled the sculptor Nick Bibby to model the Dodo in clay, from which this bronze was cast by Pangolin.

© Steve Russell Studios courtesy Gallery Pangolin

The Pangolin team in Mauritius was supported by Nick Arnold of the Natural History Museum, Errol Fuller, Anthony Cheke and Julian Pender-Hume. The pooling of

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75 BRON Z E CAST OF T H E FOOT OF A DODO Not illustrated

By Pangolin, from a specimen in the Natural History Museum, London Size: 23.2 cm long

76 DIDUS T H E HOODED DODO Not illustrated Coloured engraving, London, 1803 ‘G.Edwards delin’; ‘J.Pass sculp’ Size: 27 × 21 cm

7 7 H EAD OF T H E DODO AND T H REE BONES Drawings by Catherine Wallis Not illustrated Oxford University Museum of Zoology, November/December 2014 Sizes: head A3; bone A3; bone 29.5 × 21 cm; bone 29.5 × 21 cm The head is the only genuine piece of Dodo flesh in the world, saved from destruction in 1755 when a complete stuffed specimen, acquired by Elias Ashmole from the Tradescants, was thrown away.

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7 8 A RARE S PECIMEN OF T H E KAKA PO PARROT New Zealand Size: 45 cm high The purpose of including a stuffed Kakapo parrot in the context of this exhibition is to introduce Shaikh Saud al-Thani. Not that he looked like a nearly-extinct stuffed bird; far from it, he was a man of rare elegance. But those of you who take the trouble to read what follows will understand why the Kakapo is a perfect peg on which to hang such a story.

Shaikh Saud was in his early thirties when I first met him in 1997. It was just at the time that he and his cousin the Emir began thinking seriously about making Qatar an important centre for art and culture. Along with other members of the ruling family, they had decided that the brash new tourist developments favoured by other Gulf States were not suited to the rather homely and conservative atmosphere of Qatar, and that they would try to build something of long-term value for the country and, indeed, for the entire region. The two poles that they chose were

education and culture. And so, at a relatively early age, Shaikh Saud found himself entrusted with an as-yet undefined programme to turn his country into a new Middle Eastern centre for the arts. The first and most obvious area to look at was Islamic art. Their timing coincided with the appearance at Christie’s of an extraordinary bronze fountain-head in the shape of a deer from Cordoba at the height of its Caliphal splendour in the late 10th century. It was initially estimated at £150,000– 250,000. At the auction Shaikh Saud bought it for £3,400,000, against the determined bidding of the C.L. David Collection in Copenhagen, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. A powerful new presence had announced itself in the market. Immediately after the sale the price seemed incredible, but now, as with most great works of art after time, it seems a bargain. In the same sale he acquired the Timurid steel mask that was illustrated as

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the frontispiece for the catalogue of the ‘Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600’ exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was an impressive debut.

The strategy of paying whatever was needed in public auction for what they wanted in fact served their purpose well. There were the occasional dog-fights with desperate under-bidders – particularly with Shaikh Nasser al-Sabah of Kuwait for Mughal pieces – which resulted in unexpectedly high prices, but soon both institutional and private buyers gave up the unequal fight, allowing Shaikh Saud to dominate the auction market for several years, with the result that he was usually able to acquire what he wanted for reasonable prices. This aggressive practice in auction was in stark contrast to the way in which he dealt with collectors and dealers, where he was an extremely canny and clever negotiator. He knew very well how to use his weight in the market as it grew. Early in his career I voiced the opinion that, while not suggesting that he should ever pay stupid prices, he should always be generous towards people who brought him things, and not try to screw them as so many others had done before. It would serve him well, and he would always get the first choice of everything. I do not know whether it was due to my advice, or because of his natural instinct, but his way of dealing with people reaped rich rewards. He kept open house in London for whoever had something to offer; he travelled tirelessly to visit every possible source of works of art; and he was unfailingly courteous and charming to everyone who crossed his path.

Within eight years Shaikh Saud established himself as one of the most extraordinary and perspicacious figures ever to bestride the art world. The combination of the wealth of Qatar, and his vision as it developed, opened up the unique possibility of creating a hub of universal culture in an area that had never known such a thing; of creating institutions that were capable of bridging the gap in many creative ways with the West; of laying down a cultural wealth for the future benefit of his own country. Alas, little of his vision has been, or will be, realised. Since Shaikh Saud was obliged to resign from his position as Chairman of the National Council for Arts, Culture and Heritage, the future of his many projects, apart from the Museum of Islamic Art, remains uncertain. Probably nothing further of what he planned will be built, and the institutions that do emerge are unlikely to function according to their full potential. The story of this disaster needs to be told, because there are two different versions. One is the accountants’ version, which has become common currency as justification for the elements in the Qatar establishment who destroyed this extraordinary man, throwing away the cultural

future of their country in the process. The other version is the purpose of this short essay.

‘It’s not hard to work out who the great architects are, but it is hard to get them to take me seriously’, Shaikh Saud complained one day, adding, ‘they have no idea where Qatar is, they don’t want to work in Arab countries because of their reputation for being difficult and incompetent, and anyway they have more offers of work than they can fulfil from everywhere else in the world.’ This remark was occasioned by the refusal of I.M. Pei to accept the project to design a museum for Islamic art in Doha. The refusal was exquisitely polite: after their meeting in New York Mr. Pei sent an orchid to Shaikh Saud, the significance of which he immediately understood. Thereafter, ‘sending a flower’ to someone became, in Shaikh Saud’s vocabulary, the code for a polite refusal.

The route to I.M. Pei began with the international architectural competition launched to find an architect for the Museum of Islamic Art in 1996. Since no-one in Doha had experience of organising such an event, the Aga Khan Foundation was approached for help, and undertook to supply both the organisation and jury for the competition.

Among those who competed was Zaha Hadid. Among the jury was Luis Monreal, the director of La Caixa Cultural Foundation based in Barcelona, which, under his direction, had become the most dynamic organisation of its kind in Europe. With his usual flair, Shaikh Saud realised that Luis’ experience and knowledge were of value to him, and that he could learn much of what he needed from him.

Luis, for his part, was unusually impressed by the intelligence and seriousness of Shaikh Saud, and over the next four years generously devoted as much time as he could spare to providing guidance and advice where needed, as well as introducing him to many architects and artists around the world.

The architectural competition was won by Ghassan Badran, an architect of the Hasan Fathi school, who was based in Amman. But, by this time, Shaikh Saud’s horizons has widened, he had met a number of important architects, including I.M. Pei, through Luis, and his vision of what he could do for his country had taken wing.

Wherever he travelled at this time, his room was piled high with every conceivable book and review to do with contemporary architecture. He took the difficult decision, from a personal point of view because he liked Ghassan Badran, and from an administrative point of view because of the financial implications, to reverse the result of the competition. In this context, the rebuff from I.M. Pei was a serious disappointment.

In the middle of all of this, Shaikh Saud went to Japan, to visit Arata Isozaki, another architect to whom Luis

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Monreal had introduced him, and to see the Miho Museum, Pei’s extraordinary masterpiece on a mountain-top near Kyoto. This visit to the Miho had a profound effect, because it confirmed his vision of collecting masterpieces, and made him absolutely determined to get Pei to design his museum. He arranged a meeting in Paris with Pei, Luis Monreal, and the Emir and his wife, Shaikhs Moza, calculating that his cousin’s charisma and interest would count. He then set up another meeting in New York for which he asked me to produce a catalogue of the collection as it existed, in a single copy for Mr. Pei, to show that they were serious. By this time he had acquired the collection of Jassem Homaizi, the finest group of Islamic objects in private hands, and with other extraordinary pieces he had collected, it was not difficult to produce an impressive catalogue. The problem was time. There was less than a month until the meeting, and most of the month was taken up with travelling. This time the meeting in New York was a success, and Pei was convinced.

He visited Egypt, and later Tunisia, to look at Islamic monuments and then started working on the project. For Shaikh Saud it was a personal triumph, to have brought to Qatar one of the world’s greatest architects. He realised that the difference in cost of building an indifferent edifice or an architectural masterpiece was not so great; the difficulty was to persuade the greatest architects to work for him. And it was here that his peculiar genius came into play. His uncanny presence and intelligence impressed itself upon the people that interested him, architects and artists, whom he continually visited on his travels. Once a project began, he involved himself in every detail.

For Shaikh Saud, Pei was the great classical master, and Isozaki the poet of architecture. The latter’s magical quality fascinated him. They travelled around India together looking at Moghul monuments, and after the trip Isozaki presented him with a book of his sketches of the places they had visited. Shaikh Saud commissioned Isozaki to design a house for him in Qatar, which, after five years of close collaboration, emerged as a model which was quite unlike anything that had been imagined before.

More like a sculpture, or a space-ship, it had many unusual features: such as a dome designed by Anish Kapoor over a swimming pool patterned by David Hockney, and flight cages for Amazonian parrots. As the project developed, Shaikh Saud’s plans for the house began to change. He saw it less as a place to live in, more as a building that should be open to the public. A private museum was incorporated to house a small collection of world masterpieces from different cultures. He engaged twenty-seven contemporary designers, giving them each a room, believing that a museum of the best designs of a period would be both

useful and educative for the people of Qatar, who otherwise could have no access to such concepts. Sadly this project was never realised, along with its sculpture garden on which he had lavished so much care, commissioning works from Chilida – his last great monumental sculpture – Serra, Cristo, Koons and Kapoor, among others.

A defining moment for Shaikh Saud took place when he entered Jean-Claude Ciancimino’s shop in the Pimlico Road in London. There, lining one wall were the two bookcases made by Ruhlman for the Palace of Indore. He looked at them, asked the price, negotiated briefly, and bought them. He then asked what exactly they were. He had no knowledge of Art Deco, and had never heard of Ruhlman, or of Indore. Some years later in New York Ronald Lauder told him that in his opinion they were the greatest examples of Art Deco furniture in the world, that he had been negotiating to buy them and regretted missing them. Shaikh Saud’s subsequent impact on the Art Deco market was, as usual, spectacular, particularly for anything connected with Indore, but the really interesting impact came from the spectre of the Maharajah of Indore on Shaikh Saud. The Maharajah was in many ways the ultimate aesthete, who in 1930 built the supreme Art Deco monument, his palace in Indore, designed by Muthesius and furnished by Ruhlman and Eileen Gray.

But beyond this, Shaikh Saud became fascinated by the personality of the Maharajah, whose pursuit of perfection and refinement became a model he wished to understand and follow. Curiously, there is a striking physical resemblance between the two of them. He visited the palace twice to absorb its lessons, in spite of its gloomy transformation into the local tax compliance office, and doggedly sought out the Maharajah’s family and descendants to find out more about the man, and see what was left. The result of this foray into Art Deco and Indore was remarkable: an incredible collection of furniture; a sublimely elegant orange-and-black Bentley; the perfect ruby ring set by Cartier; the family photographs by Man Ray; and above all the greatest of all Art Deco paintings, the two portraits of the Maharajah by Boutet de Montval, the ‘white portrait’ in Indian dress and the ‘black portrait’ in tails. Muthesius also designed a yacht for the Maharajah, and a boat-house which was never built. Shaikh Saud acquired the designs for the boat-house and planned to have it built by the sea in Qatar to house the entire Art Deco collection, for public view and as a tribute to someone he admired. Another project which will not be realised.

Shaikh Saud’s fascination for every aspect of the Maharajah of Indore’s life had several unexpected consequences. Brancusi stayed at Indore, and before the contents of the palace were sold off, there were two versions of his

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most famous sculpture, ‘Bird in Space’, on view there. It was this information which sparked Shaikh Saud’s interest in 20th-century and contemporary sculpture. Of equal importance was the Maharajah’s relationship with Man Ray, who also visited Indore, and which focused Shaikh Saud’s attention on photography. When the first part of the extraordinary Jammes collection of photographs came up for sale at Sotheby’s in London, he bought 80 percent of the sale, and went on to acquire a number of other outstanding groups of photographs. In a relatively short time he assembled one of the finest collections of photographs in the world. He added the Spira collection of photographic equipment and paraphernalia, second only to the KodakEastman holdings. He visited every dealer and scoured auctions around the world, in one case buying every lot of a Christie’s South Kensington sale of cameras. He located one of the rare cameras built for the Daguerre brothers, and found a way to get prototypes of the most sophisticated cameras used on satellites. Once he judged that the collection had reached a critical mass, he persuaded the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to design a museum to house it. The result was a sublime lotus-bud shaped building, which would have added another architectural masterpiece to the Doha corniche. Now, alas, if it is ever built, it will not be in Doha.

His strategy with photography, as in all areas that interested him, was not merely a smash-and-grab raid on the market. He wanted to understand it, and in order to do so made it his job to get to know as many photographers as possible. With some, such as David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Francois-Marie Banier and Helmut Newton, he established on-going, friendly relationships.

He got to know Irving Penn, and, extraordinarily, managed to persuade Henri Cartier-Bresson to come to London and take his photograph, in spite of the fact that at their first meeting in Paris, Cartier-Bresson claimed not to have used a camera for twenty years. It was one of the areas in which he opened up a lively dialogue with Lord Rothschild, who visited him in Doha, and began to develop the idea of creating a three-way relationship with Somerset House in London, and the Getty Museum in California, to promote photography through shared exhibitions and publications. At the local level, he promoted a photography club, organising exhibitions, encouraging new membership, and making available the resources of his amazing collections.

The visit to the Miho museum had also had a powerful impact on Shaikh Saud’s interests. There, for the first time, he saw the silver Horus inlaid with lapis-lazuli which is the museum’s emblem. David Bailey, who accompanied him on his trip to Japan, took a revealing

photograph of him through the display case as he contemplated the silver Horus, his face a picture of abject misery that such a masterpiece was forever beyond his reach.

Even so, the encounter spurred him to take a serious interest in Egyptian art, which he pursued with his usual unflagging vigour. His approach to learning was quite unlike the procedures that most people adopt. He did not read much, because he found English difficult in its written form, and little that he needed existed in Arabic.

He bought every book on the subject that he could find, and then looked endlessly at the pictures, over and over again. Wherever he travelled the books accompanied him.

His quite remarkable visual memory – he never seemed to forget anything he has seen – coupled with an uniquely acute eye for art, enabled him to grasp a subject, even one as complicated as Egyptian art, in an astonishingly short time. Rather like Richard Burton with languages. It was not, of course, only through books. He visited museums continually, comparing everything he could find in all the major collections. Visiting The Egyptian Museum in Cairo with him was a surprising experience, because he knew, among all its prolific chaos, where to locate all its masterpieces. He befriended academics and experts around the world, and had the capacity to draw out of them their knowledge, like a serum that he could then inject into himself. He got to know all the dealers, to place his finger on the pulse of the market-place, and to plot where masterpieces still lurked to which he could gain access. One of his successes was to position himself to benefit from the misfortunes of Robin Symes, and acquire from the Receiver the cream of his Egyptian collection.

His uncanny resemblance to the Pharaoh Akhnaton often drew humorous comment, particularly when he stood in front of one of his statues, perhaps one of the reasons for his fascination with the 18th dynasty.

His relentless search for Egyptian masterpieces in private hands inevitably led him to the bronze bust of Amenmhat III in the collection of George Ortiz. He went to Geneva to meet him, and see his collection, and after we left I asked him what he would choose if he could take away just one thing. ‘Ah, if I could have one thing that Mr. Ortiz possesses, it would be his eyes,’ was Shaikh Saud’s reply. Thereafter he continually analysed the catalogue of the collection that George had given him, until he knew it by heart and had compared each piece with all the other known comparable examples. It opened his mind to the value of the juxtaposition of so many cultures, and an appreciation of the rare ability to acquire masterpieces in all of them. The idea that Qatar could eventually buy the collection began to form in his mind, although at his most optimistic he thought it was probably impossible. On the

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one hand it meant dealing with George Ortiz, and on the other doing it on behalf of his country, which he knew for the next several generations would have no clue as to what it represented. Nevertheless he persevered. He held that there was great advantage to be gained from buying a collection formed by one of the most perspicacious of all collectors over a period of fifty years, and something that could never be matched again. ‘It’s like buying someone’s life,’ he remarked, ‘and anyway I don’t have fifty years to spare.’ In the context of the cultural programme he was developing it made perfect sense, even if it took many years for the inestimable value of such a collection to be understood by his fellow-countrymen. He eventually hit on the idea of borrowing a dozen masterpieces to display in the temporary exhibition hall of the Islamic Museum when it opened, as a way of introducing the collection and establishing its presence in Qatar. It now seems a pipe-dream, but one which in his hands had a chance of being realised.

Compared to the cost of sophisticated military aeroplanes, the price of art is nothing, and by the time that such military hardware has become redundant, the value of a great art collection has become incomparably greater, not just in financial terms, but for what it represents for a country. Tourists do not visit Paris to look at its tanks, or admire France for its fighter-planes.

Another muse for Shaikh Saud was the Comtesse de Behague. Although she died before the Second World War, a small part of her collection of antiquities was auctioned

by Sotheby’s in Monte Carlo in 1985 In the course of his relentless analysis of every part of the art market that interested him, he came across the catalogue of the sale, and was fascinated. He knew about Stoclet, Cartier, and other collectors of their ilk, but saw that among them all she had the unique eye. He made it his business to find out as much as he could about her; he met her descendants in France; he visited the house she had created in the rue Saint-Dominique in Paris, with its eccentric décor and theatre, now the Roumanian Embassy; and then commissioned a young scholar to produce a book on her remarkable collection, which, surprisingly, had never been done.

His efforts to locate any of her great works of art in private hands led him to Ronald Lauder, who owned her Ostrogothic gold eagle broach, then on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. After his visit to Lauder’s extraordinary apartment in New York, where one is overwhelmed by the array of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, a series of sculptures by Brancusi – among many other things – I asked him, as usual, what he most liked. He answered that of all he had seen, there was a small painting of a black square in a white border that seemed to him the best thing. He had no idea of what this

1915 painting by Malevitch represented, but he had picked up on arguably the single most important work of art that Mr. Lauder owned.

Surprisingly, it was not art that most interested Shaikh Saud, but the natural world; birds, animals and plants, of which he had great knowledge, and to which his farm outside Doha was dedicated. It is shaded by a vast plantation of palm trees of every conceivable type, of which he knew the origin of each species as well as its Latin name.

He once told me that after much searching he had found out that a farmer in Sri Lanka possessed a particularly rare palm tree that he had been unable to locate anywhere. He flew to Colombo, hired a car and eventually found the farmer deep in the countryside, with the splendid tree growing next to his little house. Over a cup of tea he struck a deal with the farmer to buy his tree. The farmer went into his house, and as he sat admiring his new prize he suddenly heard a terrible wailing coming from inside the house. After a while the farmer emerged in an obvious state of distress. He had told his wife, thinking he was bringing news of their great good fortune. She, on the other hand, refused to accept the sale of the tree, in the shade of which they sat every day of their lives, and she would not accept living there without it. And so Shaikh Saud returned to Qatar empty-handed.

Around the plantation are large open pens for gazelles, more than twelve hundred in all, representing almost every known variety. Many of them he had caught himself in expeditions that he mounted in Somalia, in spite of the danger – they were shot at on several occasions – and extreme discomfort. The reason for these hazardous expeditions was that he feared that the poverty resulting from the political turmoil in the region would result in more and more gazelles being killed for their meat, and that some species, like the Bera, would soon be extinct. He hoped to build up a breeding stock so that eventually, when conditions improved, these threatened species could be released back into the wild. The breeding programme, particularly for the Bera, has proved extremely complicated, but overseen by a permanent veterinary staff from Germany has been uniquely successful. He confessed one day that he thought the landscape in northern Somalia was the most beautiful in the world, and that he continually dreamed of going back there.

His great passion, beyond even palm trees and gazelles, was for Amazonian parrots. At the farm there are huge flight-cages, where you walk through tropical jungle and see brilliant macaws flashing through the foliage, and hear the haunting calls of many exotic birds. Among the parrots, the one that concerned him most was the Spix macaw, an exquisite bird on the brink of extinction.

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In order to have the right to own such a bird, he succeeded in having his farm officially recognised by the World Wildlife Fund, and then assembled as many survivors as he could find around the world – principally from a rare bird dealer in the Philippines – in order to breed them without risk of extinction through in-breeding.

Originally he wanted to acquire a large tract of Amazonian jungle to preserve the species, but came to the conclusion that he could not trust those who would have to be in charge of the project. His devotion to these birds is such that he once flew to New Zealand, and then took a boat to an outlying island in spite of his fear of the sea, climbed to the top of a peak, and sat there all night under cold drizzle in order to feed a few grapes to a flightless Kakapo parrot, of which only a few dozen remain. The next day he returned to Qatar, delighted. He was so fond of his parrots that he invited the pre-eminent painter of birds, Elizabeth Butterworth, on numerous occasions to his farm to paint their portraits, following in the great tradition of natural history patronage.

His fascination for the natural world had two specific effects on his collecting. He assembled what must now be the greatest private collection of natural history books in the world, which he intended eventually to house in the National Library of Qatar, and which few institutions apart from the British Library can match. As usual, he was not content with just any copy of a work, he wanted the best. He trawled through his vast collection of auction catalogues reaching into the distant past to get to grips with the historical scope of the market; he was in constant touch with every major dealer in the field; he visited libraries, collectors and academics. The result, arrayed on industrial shelving in his warehouse at the farm, was astonishing; their princely leather bindings glowed from the shelves, and included such treasures as Lord Bute’s immaculate Audubon with its purpose-built display-case (purchased separately), and original watercolours by Audubon, Redoute and Barraband, the latter, in Shaikh Saud’s opinion, the greatest of all bird illustrators.

Fossils and minerals became the second focus of his attention on the natural world, and part of a threepronged project. He thought that it would be possible to completely redesign his farm, and make it accessible, on a part-time basis at least, to the public and particularly to school-children. For this transformation he had Zaha Hadid in mind, whose work he admired, and whose imagination, he thought, could produce an extraordinary solution for a zoological-botanical ensemble in the desert.

Secondly, he wanted a botanical garden along the lines of the Eden Project for the corniche in Doha, in the park behind the Islamic museum. He discussed the idea with

I.M. Pei, and asked for a design, since it would be in close proximity to the Islamic museum.

He had, as yet, no site or architect in mind for the fossils and minerals, but in the interim organised an extraordinary exhibition in the autumn of 2004 to show a part of what he had collected. Its title was ‘Lost Worlds’, curated by Errol Fuller, dedicated to the children of Qatar, and accompanied by a catalogue with a foreword by Sir Neil Chambers, Director of the Natural History Museum in London. He wrote that the publication and exhibition were ‘remarkable evidence of the extraordinary collection of natural history objects that has been built up by Qatar during recent years. Over a period of a few years, a collection of international status has been brought together, covering many aspects of the natural world…There is an unparalleled series of specimens of extinct birds and an amazing collection of bird illustrations….’ One illustration on view was of the Mascarene Parrot painted by Jacques Barraband circa 1800. The species has been extinct for almost 200 years, and the only two stuffed specimens, in Paris and Vienna, have long ago faded. This remains the best record of how this beautiful parrot actually looked in life. The striking aspect of the exhibition, noticed by everyone who visited it, was the outstanding beauty of all its exhibits. Fossilised sea-lilies, ammonites, trilobites, Irish elk horns, a huge mammoth tusk and Dodo bones were among the exhibits rightly presented as works of art around the centrepiece of the exhibition, a 28-metre long skeleton of a diplodocus.

It is to be hoped that in due course an exhibition will be mounted to show the quality and extent of Shaikh Saud’s collections. In the meantime it is worth pointing out the influence that he has had in the wider Arab world, although without his particular genius it is unlikely that any project will match his vision. When I first knew him he told me he was in a hurry, because he would not live to be fifty. That he was correct is a cause of great sadness for everyone that knew him. He was an extraordinary man, I’ve never known anyone like him.

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79 A RARE DIBITAG GA Z ELLE’S SKULL Northern Somalia, found as a skull in 1971 Size: skull 20 cm; height with horns 24 cm A corpus of stories featuring the wisest of fools, Mullah Nasruddin, is familiar throughout the Near and Middle East, as well as Central Asia. There is a tradition that whoever tells one of his stories will then tell seven in a row.

The same seems to be true of Shaikh Saud stories.

One day Shaikh Saud called Michael Rich and asked him to arrange a visit for him to the Natural History Museum in London. We arrived in a big limo, punctually at 11 am. Shaikh Saud sauntered up the steps swinging his beads, and greeted the Director and curators who had come out to welcome him. As we walked inside the Director asked if there was anything in particular that he wished to see. He particularly wanted to see their specimen of the ‘Dibitag’ Gazelle. A rapid conference among the curators determined that they had no such thing. ‘Oh, but you do,’ Shaikh Saud answered, ‘you are the only institution in the world that has one. It was shot by a British officer in Northern Somalia in 1913, but because it had a deformed horn he gave it to you.’ They led us to the area where gazelle specimens were stretched on glass-fronted mahogany frames and invited Shaikh Saud to try and find what he was looking for. He started pulling out the frames by their brass handles, one by one, until after a dozen or so inspections he found it. And there on the label was the information that it had been shot, and then presented, by a British officer in Northern Somalia in 1913.

What else would he like to see, the Director asked?

Shaikh Saud mentioned a certain Central American crocodile. Yes, we have that, said the curators, and we trooped off to Crocodile Corner, where the long skin was pulled out in its frame. As we stood there in a semi-circle,

Shaikh Saud pulled up his trouser-leg, and lifted his leg until it was nearly level with the skin. On his foot was a light blue crocodile boot. As his foot came down he said: ‘I’ve always wondered whether my boot-maker in Paris was telling me the truth about the type of crocodile skins he was using for my boots.’ A palpable shiver of disapproval ran around the assembly of curators. Shaikh Saud shook all their hands with his most charming smile, and walked out swinging his beads, delighted with the visit.

A year later we made our first trip to Japan, to visit the Miho Museum. Emerging from the hotel in Kyoto next morning where a line of cars was waiting to whisk us up the mountain, Shaikh Saud said he was taking a different car because he had something to do on the way. I protested, saying that in Japan being a minute late was seen as an insult, particularly as we were going to meet a Living Goddess. Entertain her until I arrive, I’ll only be an hour or so, was the answer. Exasperated, I asked what could be so important. He explained that he was going to meet the chairman of a major enterprise, which had made the most powerful zoom lens ever. Since the lenses inside cost $300,000, they had realised that the zoom lens was not commercially viable, and he was going to buy the single prototype. Why do you want it? My exasperation was growing. The reason, he said, was that with such a lens, he might be able to get a photograph of the ‘Dibitag’ Gazelle next time he went to Somalia. I expressed my disbelief.

‘I can’t explain to you what it means to me,’ he said as he shifted from foot to foot, ‘it’s like undressing a beautiful woman for you.’ He jumped in his car, and sped off.

On loan to the exhibition.

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8 0 AN EXCE P TIONAL EXAM PLE of t h e EXTINCT PASSENGER PIGEON (Ectopisces migratorius) North America, 19th century Size: 40 cm high, 50 cm wide Recased late 20th century

Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant birds in North America, probably accounting for a quarter of all the birds there. They lived in enormous migratory flocks; in 1866 a flock a mile wide and 300 miles long passed over southern Ontario, containing in excess of 3.5 billion birds.

In terms of numbers they were second only to the Rocky Mountain locusts. The last living example of the species died in Cincinnati Zoo on September 1st, 1914. She was called Martha. This sad event has been commemorated by

three books published in 2014. Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned, dissected, photographed and mounted.

Currently, Martha is in the museum’s archived collection and not on display. A memorial statue of Martha stands on the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoo. Audubon has left a charming description of the mating rituals of these pigeons, pointing out that during the nesting season they remained monogamous.

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The above information is lifted verbatim from Wikipedia. Of the three recent publications, Errol Fuller’s book, The Passenger Pigeon (Princeton University Press, 2015), is the most worthwhile: lucid, informative, and above all, it avoids preaching an ecological message. (Errol himself is too wise an old bird!) Spectacular as the extermination of such vast numbers of an entire species in recent times might appear, it is nothing new, although accelerated by the means available to modern man. From the time that Homo Sapiens emerged from East Africa between 70,000 and 45,000 years bc, it has wreaked havoc on the environment.

Around 16,000 years ago they crossed from Siberia to Alaska, via the land-bridge that still existed, and in the course of the following three millennia that it took to populate the entire American landmass, they exterminated 80 percent of the larger mammals and many of the smaller species. Thirty million years of independent evolution were wiped out. This destructive tendency was intensified once the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ changed us from huntergatherers to farmers, a development that is sold to us as the great step forward in ‘Civilisation’. Probably, if interviewed, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would present themselves as supremely civilized: just doing their job! In spite of all the information available, modern Homo Sapiens takes an inordinately long time to digest it and make use of it. Perhaps only when faced with our own extinction will we finally change our ways. Jalalludin Rumi wrote a poem about human evolution, saying that in order to make the next jump in our evolution we had to ‘increase our need’.

That ‘need’ may be our survival as a species.

The passenger pigeon played a religious role in some northern Native American tribes. The Huron believed that every twelve years during the Feast of the Dead, the souls of the deceased changed into passenger pigeons, which were then hunted and eaten. Before hunting the juvenile pigeons, the Seneca made an offering to the old passenger pigeons, an offering of wampum and brooches that were placed in a small kettle or other receptacle by a smoky fire. The Ho-Chunk considered the passenger pigeon to be the bird of the chief, as they were served whenever the chieftain gave a feast. The Seneca believed that a white pigeon was the chief of the passenger pigeon colony, and that a Council of Birds had decided that the pigeons had to give their bodies to the Seneca because they were the only bird that nested in colonies. The Seneca developed a pigeon dance as a way of showing their gratitude. The flavour of the flesh of passenger pigeons varied depending on how they were prepared. In general,

juveniles were thought to taste the best, followed by birds fattened in captivity and birds caught in September and October. The fat was also kept as butter. Though they did not last as long as the feathers of a goose, the feathers of the passenger pigeon were frequently used for bedding.

Pigeon feather beds were so popular that for a time in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, every dowry included a bed and pillows made of pigeon feathers. In 1822, one family in Chautauqua County, New York, killed 4,000 pigeons in a day solely for their feathers.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, various parts of the pigeon were alleged to have medicinal properties. The blood was supposed to be good for eye disorders, the powdered stomach lining was used to treat dysentery, and the dung was used to treat a variety of ailments, including headaches, stomach pains and lethargy.

The passenger pigeon was an important source of food for the people of North America. The Native Americans ate passenger pigeons, and tribes near nesting colonies would sometimes move to live closer to them and eat the juveniles. The juveniles were killed at night with long poles.

Most Native Americans were careful not to disturb the adult pigeons, and instead ate only the juveniles as they were afraid that the adult pigeons might desert their nesting grounds; in some tribes disturbing the adult pigeons was considered a crime. Away from the nests, large nets were used to capture adult pigeons, sometimes up to 800 at a time. Among the game birds, passenger pigeons were second only to the wild turkey in terms of importance for the Native Americans living in the south-eastern United States. The bird’s fat was stored, often in large quantities, and used as butter. Archaeological evidence supports the idea that the Native American ate the pigeons frequently prior to colonisation.

Some reduction in numbers occurred from habitat loss when European settlement led to mass deforestation.

Next, pigeon meat was commercialised as a cheap food for slaves and the poor in the 19th century, resulting in hunting on a massive and mechanised scale. A slow decline between about 1800 and 1870 was followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890. John Herald, a bluegrass singer, wrote a song dedicated to the extinction of the species and Martha, the species’ endling, that he titled ‘Martha (Last of the Passenger Pigeons)’.

When I asked Errol Fuller how much he thought I would have pay for this specimen when it was about to be auctioned, he answered: ‘Ooh, I don’t know – pause – this one could fly.’

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81 AN ESKIMO BABY ’S BLANKET Early 20th century Size: 157 × 107 cm The particular morphology of the down of the eider duck makes it the lightest and most effective insulation that is known. It has long been valued: traded by Vikings, hoarded by kings, even accepted as currency in the Middle Ages. The ducks in the Arctic make their nests near human settlements, probably in the hope of protection from their predators – seagulls, foxes and mink – while they sit on their eggs for 28 days. They line their nests with their own belly feathers, which they leave as a gift to their human protectors when once more they return to the sea. As a

result the humans fulfil their role as guardians, and watch gun-in-hand through the nights of their nesting.

It seems that the elaborate technique for making such blankets disappeared in the 1940s, and few have survived, among which no other can match the condition of this example. In the Far North moth-proofing was unnecessary, but once they were moved to warmer climes they were extremely vulnerable to moth-attack, which has ruined the blankets that exist in museums collections. The motifs around the border represent the heads of Eider ducks.

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82 AN ALC H EMIST ’S POR PH YRY MERCURY BOWL English, probably 14th century Size: 27.5 × 22 cm; box 31 × 25.5 cm Swedish porphyry, oak, bitumen To find something like this you would have had to visit Christopher Gibbs, whose mysterious lair was at the time in Elystan Place, where he sat like a magus with marvellous things. Doctor Dee’s bracelet and Count Cagliostro’s shoe buckles once resided there, I remember. And although Christopher’s scope embraced much more than the curious and the esoteric, this interest of his tinged his taste in every area, and contributed to the influence he exerted on so

many in the art world, an influence matched by very few.

He was king of the house sales, the romance of which he described in an article that I have never forgotten but can no longer find. One of the most interesting features of this bowl – a close second to Doctor Dee’s obsidian scrying mirror in the British Museum – is its Gibbs provenance.

Provenance: Christopher Gibbs, circa 1970

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83 A TAINO STONE Z EMI Antilles, West Indies, 900–1500 ad Size: 15 cm high According to Christopher Columbus, these Zemi stones were objects of great devotion, credited with enhancing crops and weather, and helping with childbirth. Outside the ritual context and meaning, we can only admire the elegance. And dream.

Provenance: Spencer Throckmorton, New York

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8 4 TWO IRON VOODOO PRESENTOIRS Haiti, early 20th century Size: 52.5 cm and 36 cm Instructions for use: plant in the corner of your field; sprinkle corn on the hand; take a chicken, cut its throat so that the blood flows over the grain in the hand; your harvest will be bountiful.

Provenance: Mabille, French Cultural Attaché in Haiti & Surrealist artist, 1930s

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86

85 A S H AMAN ’S JAGUAR TABLET FOR H ALLUCINOGENS Southern Houari, Peru/Chile border, 500–700 ad Size: 16.5 cm long In the early 1970s the price for Chinese hard stone snuff bottles rocketed. This was because rock-stars and their followers found them ideal for keeping cocaine, suspended around their necks on thongs, and with the convenient spoon attached to the lid. This is a far superior type of drug container, attached to a deep shamanic tradition.

Provenance: Spencer Throckmorton, New York, 1992

86 A PLAINS INDIAN S H AMAN ’S TALKING WAND H EAD 18th century Size: 9 cm high Wood This mysterious object, which has one face in this world and the other in the Other, is typical of the strange treasures that lay in the drawers of John Hewett’s cabinets.

His influence on the most refined layers of collectors throughout the world was predominant for decades.

Provenance: John Hewett

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87 CAMEO BLUE AND W H ITE GLASS PLAQUE WIT H A H EAD OF H ERMES Probably Renaissance Italy, 16th century Size: 5.8 × 6.5 cm Provenance: Lockner collection, Germany

8 8 YORUBA DIVINATION TRAY Nigeria, 19th century Size: 42 cm diameter You put sand in the tray, shake it all about, and read off the formation of the sand in relation to the figures around the rim. It is a bit like reading the tea-leaves in Brighton or Hove. Worth a try, no doubt, and good luck!

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89 H AN POTTERY MONEY BAG Not illustrated China, 206 bc–220 ad Size: 23 cm high It was essential to go into the afterlife with some money, to bribe a Guardian if needs be, or purchase the necessities of afterlife life.

9 0 s e v e n t ee n PILGRIM TOKENS F ROM MEVLANA’S S H RINE Not illustrated Konya, Turkey, 19th century and earlier Sizes: from 4 cm to 2 cm Gold and silver closed down their tekkes, as well as those of all the other dervish orders in Turkey. When in 1953 the ‘whirling dervishes’ were once again allowed to perform in public, it was under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism, and as Kudsi Erguner notes in Journeys of a Sufi Musician (2006), they were largely promoted as a tourist attraction.

Like the pilgrims to Compostella, those who went to Jalaluddin Rumi’s tomb in Konya took away a token of their visit. In this case the token was shaped like the turban of Mevlana, rather than the coquille of Saint James. Many of them are engraved with an invocation, and still contain prayers written on scrolls of paper. In 1925 Attaturk prohibited all Mevlevi ceremonies, and

91 A PAIR OF ‘ WITC H’S ’ MIRRORS Not illustrated Italy, late 18th century Size: 61 × 47 cm There are many interpretations of the purpose of such mirrors, and indeed the methods for their use. Look on the internet and take your pick! Nevertheless, these are unusually elaborate examples. While continuity between pre-Christian religion in Europe and modern paganism is unlikely, an underground survival of paganism was claimed by the Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret

Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921).

It was she who donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford a small glass bottle, the accession label to which says: “‘This is reputed to contain a witch, and the late owner, an old lady living in a village near Hove, Sussex, remarked, ‘They do say there be a witch in it, and if you let ’un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble.’”

92 AN EART H ENWARE SOUL - CATC H ER Not illustrated Wadja, Northern Nigeria, 19th century Size: 42 cm high During the ceremonies over which a witch-doctor presided, something was needed to store souls, temporarily, until they were summoned. This type of vessel provided the solution.

Provenance: Lord McAlpine, 1987

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93 MIRROR OF T H E SOUL Iran, 12th–13th century, inscriptions 14th century Size: 12.3 cm diameter Cast brass, engraved It would be difficult to find a more totemic talisman from the Islamic world, or a more potent one should you believe in such things. This form of mirror derives ultimately from China and became familiar in Iran during the Seljuk era in the 12th century. At the same time the mirror became a symbol in the mystical literature of Iran – and almost all the literature was mystical – of the soul, or more precisely that part of the human being that could be polished by certain spiritual practices to the point that it could reflect a higher reality, and make it understandable. The polished surface of the mirror in this case has been engraved with an elaborate magical square of 225 compartments into which the Surat al-Fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur’an, has been ingeniously fitted, so that the interface between the human soul and the Divine Reality is made possible by the correspondence expressed in this way. The existence of such a talisman assumes that it operates whether its function is recognised or not, attracting, accumulating and distributing Baraka, that mysterious substance that features in Christianity as Grace.

I was hired by Christie’s in 1967 as their expert in Russian art. I knew nothing about the subject, it happened by mistake, and when I started working there on the front counter I knew it was only a question of time before they discovered I was a fraud. For the first few days I was taken around, shown the different departments and introduced to their personnel, and in the course of this peregrination

we walked through the basement of King Street where each department stored its works of art in separate cages. There in a corner of the corridor I spotted a pile of Islamic art, and stopping to have a closer look was told it had been there for years because nobody knew how to catalogue it. As I examined the pieces and realised that many were published in major publications, I announced that I could catalogue the pile, and was shortly afterwards told to do so.

It was the collection of T.L. Jacks who had been the BP representative in Iran for 25 years. The sale three months later was a big success, museum curators came from all over the place, and my role as Russian expert was soon conveniently forgotten. My favourite piece in the sale was this mirror, bought by John Drage for ten times my estimate, against the most powerful Iranian art dealer of the time.

When he died his widow brought it to me, knowing the history and the significance that we both attributed to it.

There is another example in the Louvre with an identical configuration of the magical square, but not as fine.

Provenance: T.L. Jacks, sold Christie’s, London,1968.

John Drage Published: The Unity of Islamic Art, ed. Esin Atil, Riyadh, 1985, no. 83.

Sabiha Al-Khemir, Beauty and Belief, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2012, pp. 86–88, 210, 249.

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9 4 COCO -DE-MER CARVED IN BURMA Seychelles, 19th century Size: 32 × 29 cm

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95 SIX KAS H KULS Iran, 19th century Size: 31 to 35 cm long The strange history of the coco-de-mer from the Seychelles, and our historical imaginings about them, have been widely discussed and published. In India and other areas of South-East Asia, they were valued for their enticing resemblance to a woman’s buttocks, and generally preserved intact. Some were sliced horizontally towards the top and mounted in silver, to appeal to colonial interlopers, often to store their cigars. In the Middle East, however, they were put to a quite different use.

Sliced vertically, each nut provided two begging bowls, which, with chains attached, hung from the shoulders of wandering dervishes throughout the Middle East. In these they received charitable donations of food and water to sustain them on their way. These begging bowls are freighted with significance. Unlike in the monastic tradition of Christianity, begging was a temporary phase

in a dervish’s spiritual education that lasted as long as was necessary. The begging bowl became the symbol of the search, and is considered to hold the Baraka of that search.

One of the finest of these six kashkuls belonged to Zagraphos-Bey, banker to the last Sultan of Turkey, which suggests the depth to which a mystical tradition was embedded in every level of Middle Eastern culture. We cannot easily imagine this because our views of the spiritual life have been coloured by Christianity, and its particular interpretation of what is required. Most of the Ottoman sultans had a Mevlevi dervish as their closest confidant, while their armies were presided over by Bektashi dervishes. Many are the stories about Sufi teachers who deposited their Baraka in objects such as kashkuls, to be retrieved and used later by whoever had the capacity to do so.

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The following story illustrates another symbolic aspect: It is related that a dervish once stopped a king in the street. The king said: ‘How dare you, a man of no account, interrupt the progress of your sovereign?’

The dervish answered: ‘Can you be a sovereign if you cannot even fill my kashkul, the begging-bowl?’

He held out his bowl, and the king ordered it to be filled with gold.

But, no sooner was the bowl seen to be full of coins than they disappeared, and the bowl seemed to be empty again.

Sack after sack of gold was brought, and still the amazing bowl devoured coins.

‘Stop!’ shouted the king, ‘for this trickster is emptying my treasury!’

‘To you I am emptying your treasury,’ said the dervish, ‘but to others I am merely illustrating a truth.’

‘And the truth?’ asked the king.

‘The truth is that, the bowl is the desires of man, and the gold what man is given. There is no end to man’s capacity to devour, without being in any way changed. See, the bowl has eaten nearly all your wealth, but it is still a carved sea-coconut, and has not partaken of the nature of gold in any respect.

‘If you care,’ continued the dervish, ‘to step into this bowl, it will devour you, too. How can a king, then, hold himself as being of any account?’

(Idries Shah, Wisdom of the Idiots, Octagon Press, 1970.

With kind permission of the Idries Shah Foundation.)

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9 6 A SOOT H- SAYER’S GRIMOIRE IN GEEZ SCRI P T Ethiopia, 18th century Size: 15.5 × 12.5 cm Unless you are familiar with Geez script, this will be like a book about calculus to someone still learning his tables. Rough as it looks, it embodies a sophisticated body of knowledge, and is testimony to a craft, that of foretelling the future, which in our days is largely in the hands of charlatans and believed by the

gullible. There are traditions that have investigated this area, and how to do it, and it would be a mistake to treat it as mere superstition. Whether you want to believe its findings or not is another question. As a general rule-of-thumb I would say believing in anything is a mistake.

97 TIBETAN MONASTERY KEY Tibet, 17th–18th century Size: key 12.5 cm; leather strap 65 cm In the popular imagination the monks of Shangri-La sat serene in the flickering light of butter-lamps, reciting sacred sutras and chanting their mantras, for the good of themselves and humanity. Some of the time, no doubt, this was true, but they were also a bumptious

and belligerent lot, as this key illustrates. The point of the long thong was to use it as a weapon in the violent altercations that erupted between cantankerous monks.

A bit different from the Zen ‘slap of enlightenment’!

Violence seems an inalienable part of the Path of Peace.

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9 8 A TIMURID LA PIS LA Z ULI S POON Central Asia or Iran, 15th century Size: 14 cm long Lapis lazuli was exported from Afghanistan throughout the Ancient World over millennia.

During the Islamic period it reappeared mainly as the pulverised ingredient of the sparkling blue pigment in miniature paintings, or as inlaid details in luxury objects. It is rare to find something entirely made of the stone. This spoon is an exception, and chimes perfectly with the refined Timurid culture of the 15th century.

99 A TIMURID TINNED COPPER S POON Not illustrated Central Asia or Iran, 15th century Size: 16 cm long

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10 0 A MING FOOT -MASSAGER China, 17th century Size: 30 cm long Ivory, steel, gold and wood If you saw the 1991 film Raise the Red Lantern, you will have seen the heroine played by Gong Li having her feet massaged with an instrument such as this. When I was a boy, my father had a great friend from Japan, Gunji Koizumi, with whom he had opened the first Dojo for martial arts in Europe in the later 1920s. When my father was unwell, Mr.

Koizumi would come round, lay my father out on the carpet in the living room, and massage his feet until he was cured of whatever ailed him. When I recounted this strange fact to my school-friends, they all thought I was barmy.

Now the efficacity of reflexology is almost universally recognised, and generally thought of as quite normal.

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101 A MING OF F ICIAL’S TRAVELLING H AT - STAND China, 17th century Size: 28 cm high Hanghuali wood and bone Ming officials travelled all over the vast territory of China, bothering the locals wherever they arrived about what they produced and therefore how much tax was owed.

Their travel was hard, and they were always unwelcome. All the more reason to appear immaculately dressed. This discreet stand was opened out at night in the inn, and served to keep the Mandarin’s hat in good shape.

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102 A SCRIBE’S ERASER South Germany or Italy, circa 1600 Size: 37.5 cm long Steel, engraved and gilded, and carved bone It was not designed to stab a negligent scribe when he blotted his copy-book, but rather to scrape off an offending bish from the vellum onto which an assiduous calligrapher was transcribing a sacred text. There is a noble coat-of-arms inlaid in gold on the blade, so this refined instrument comes from a princely scriptorium.

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10 3 MAN RAY: OBJ ET T ROU V É Schlumberger, mid-1960s Size: 10.5 cm In the 1960s Jean Riboud was Man Ray’s most important collector in Paris. He was also chairman of Schlumberger, long time friend of Max Ernst, and brother of another celebrated photographer, Marc Riboud. He was something of a mystic with a great affinity for India, and his wife, Krishna, was a niece of the poet Tagore. On a visit to Riboud’s office, Man Ray spotted this steel cog, part of some new-fangled drilling equipment that Schlumberger were developing, and remarked that it was as beautiful as any modern sculpture, more honest and much better made. Riboud presented it to Man Ray who declared it a work of art, an objet trouvé, and took it home. Later he gave it to Jack Mayer, his friend, a flamboyant and perceptive art dealer in Paris, originally from Memphis Tennessee, and nephew of the even more flamboyant Auntie Mame.

Jack was the only member of her family that Mame really loved, and she intended to leave her considerable fortune to him, but unfortunately, on her way to Europe by boat she unexpectedly died, having changed her will in favour of the local cats’ home because Jack’s letter to her before

she departed never arrived. Jack found this turn of events hilarious, which was, of course, why she loved him.

Jack gave me a room in his Montparnasse apartment during my first year as a student in Paris. When he took me to dinner with Man Ray, we walked into his studio in Rue Ferou and found ourselves in total darkness. There was a sudden ratchety click and the beam from a projector lit up the far wall with a vintage black-and-white pornographic image. ‘The Italians in the 1930s produced by far the best pornographic photographs,’ were Man Ray’s first words to us from where he sat hunched over the projector. On the table beside him were two articulated wooden artist’s dolls, one of which he had fitted up with an erect phallus, and the other of which he had drilled with a hole. He arranged the dolls together into the same pose as the couple in the projected slide, and then took a photograph of them. He was, he explained, so fed up with seeing pornography pretending to be art that he had decided to do a book of art pretending to be pornography.

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104 CONCORDE F LOWN H IGH PRESSURE TURBINE DISC Not illustrated Size: 69 cm diameter; 12 cm thick Steel, 250 kg approximately

105 WENCSLAUS HOLLAR (1607–1677) A Fur Muff with a Band of Brocade Etching, 1645, first state (of two), a very good impression of this rare and delicate subject. (Pennington 1950).

Size: 9.2 × 14.8 cm Wencslaus Hollar was born in Prague to a Protestant family. His first known etching dates from 1625, five years after the Battle of the White Mountain and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. In 1627 he left Bohemia for Stuttgart, and then went on to Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Holland.

In 1634 he was active in Cologne, until 1636 when he entered the service of the Earl of Arundel whose embassy was passing through the city. He thus arrived in London in December of that year, and stayed working until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1644. Legend has it that he was captured along with Inigo Jones by Cromwell’s troops at the siege of Basing House. He escaped to Antwerp, remaining there until 1652 when he returned to London, finding it very changed, puritanical and miserable, under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. He was appointed King’s Scenographer to Charles II in 1666, the year the

Great Fire destroyed much of London. In 1669 he travelled to Tangier as official draughtsman. He died in 1677 and was buried at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. He was notoriously devoid of business sense. The bailiffs were carrying off his possessions as he lay dying, and he had to beg them to let him die in his own bed.

The range and quality of Hollar’s work is extraordinary.

Most famous is the Long View of London from Bankside printed from six plates in 1647; and most loved his beautiful series of shells. Women’s costumes from different parts of Europe inspired another long series of prints.

My first encounter with Hollar’s fur muffs took place in the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, in the context of an exhibition in 2008 entitled: ‘Amazing Rare Things’.

There they were, eight of them, laid out in a case. I found them astounding, surreal even, with a palpable soft erotic

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charge. The only thing which came to mind that seemed atmospherically related was ‘Also a woman’s glove…’ from André Breton’s Nadja. Otherwise they were out there on their own. Later I read Richard Godfrey’s Wenceslaus Hollar, A Bohemian Artist in England, (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1995) whose sensitive assessment is probably the best there is. ‘Hollar adored women – the complexities of their hair, their posture, and their clothing and accessories, their fur muffs being to his special delectation. This enraptured contemplation of the feminine world is the best-loved aspect of his work, and one in which he transcends plain prose and draws and etches with poetic spirit. In this he is at one with such courtly poets as Herrick, Lovelace, or Suckling, who vie for our attention with their verses in praise of female beauty…..

These are justly the best loved and admired of all Hollar’s prints, and they constitute his most original contribution

to the history of printmaking. The closely laid and expertly bitten lines perfectly suggest the softness and warmth of fur, in which Hollar delighted. The delicacy and closeness of the lines is such that they wore quickly and could scarcely be retouched; consequently fine impressions of them are rare.’

Hollar knew all the great men of the Restoration, those brilliant figures clustered around the Royal Society. John Evelyn was his close friend and admirer. It would seem obvious that, while branded in France in the 18th century, the Enlightenment began in England in the second half of the 17th century, in much the same way that the Industrial Revolution was initiated a hundred years later by the ‘Lunar Men’.

Provenance: Ex coll. George Ambrose Cardew (L. 1134); an unidentified collector’s mark (not in Lugt).

10 6 WENCSLAUS HOLLAR Not illustrated Head of a Cat (Pennington 2109) Size: 18.9 × 14 cm 1646 Etching, a good impression of this rare print, with narrow margins, pale scattered foxing, a small skinned spot at the left sheet edge on the reverse, otherwise in generally good condition.

Provenance: G. Storck (L. 2318) F. Rumpf (L. 2161) V.G. (L. 2513)

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107 REMBRANDT H ARMENSZ VAN RIJN Not illustrated Faust (B., Holl. 270; H. 260) Size: 20.8 × 16.1 cm Circa 1625 Etching with drypoint and engraving, with part of a ‘Strasburg lily’ watermark, a very good impression of the second state (of three), with considerable burr to Faust’s gown, trimmed on or just inside the platemark, an unobtrusive soft crease across the upper right corner, pale staining and minor defects on the reverse where previously hinged, otherwise in good condition.

10 8 ALBREC H T DÜ RER Not illustrated The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (B. 64: M., Holl. 167; S.M.S. 115) Size: 39.2 × 28.2 cm Circa 1498 Our great bard Bob Dylan wrote: ‘Senor, senor, tell me where you’re heading, Lincoln County or Armageddon’, showing that the spectre of the Apocalypse is still very much with us. This idea has been constantly present, and most obviously resurgent in times of troubles; for example in the 14th century after the Black Death, and in the early 17th century with the Rosicrucian manifestos. It is interesting that Joachim of Fiore, the 12th-century mystic of Calabria, whose millennial predictions became so influential, operated in an area that previously had been a major centre of the Orphic cult. Do not believe, however, that this kind of thinking is a thing of the past; it is very much alive and kicking. It often takes strange turns, like

Jonestown and the Culte du Soleil, or the hordes that converged on a mountain in South-West France at the end of 1999 to be airlifted by a spaceship out of this sinful world. Many have been the groups of believers who have ascended mountains to escape the End of the World, as predicted by some self-proclaimed prophet. The interesting thing is that when the End doesn’t come as predicted, they are disappointed. And the question is: why? Why is total destruction preferable to survival, and humanity’s general messy carry-on? The answer must be that the tension created by the unresolvable situation of being human is unbearable, and therefore any kind of resolution is preferable to the uncertainty with which we live.

10 9 ALBREC H T DÜ RER Not illustrated Melencolia I (B. 74; M., Holl. 75; S.M.S. 71) Size: 23.7 × 18.6 cm 1514 Engraving, watermark Bishop’s Crest (M. 39), a good early meder II impression, with the scratch in the sphere probably erased, still printing clearly and with contrasts, trimmed to or just outside the subject, a horizontal printer’s crease at centre right, a few other minor printer’s creases, a 15 mm. repaired tear at the lower sheet edge, a horizontal central crease mainly visible verso, the sheet slightly cockled due to remains of old adhesive verso, otherwise in good condition. So much has been written to

explain this mysterious image that there is little point in adding to it. The speculation it has provoked is seldom convincing, rather like writings about megaliths, ley-lines and the like. One detail is worth pointing out: the bottom line of the Magic Square has the numbers 4, 15, 14, 1. The date is 1514; the first letter of the alphabet is A, and the fourth is D. Provenance: Rusu, purple stamp verso (not in Lugt).

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1 10 ALBREC H T DÜ RER Not illustrated Philipp Melanchthon (B. 105; M., Holl. 104; S.M.S. 101) Size: 17.6 × 13.2 cm Circa 1526 Engraving, a good, warmly printed meder c impression, printing with inky plate edges, watermark Small Jug (M. 158), with thread margins, occasional tiny touches of pen and ink to the platemark, pale staining, two horizontal creases visible on the reverse, otherwise in good condition.

Melanchthon (1497–1560) was an influential Humanist, and close friend of Dürer’s. He completed his studies at the universities of Heidelberg and Tubingen at the age of fifteen. At twenty-one he became professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg, where he met

Martin Luther and became his friend and supporter in the cause of the Reformation. In 1518 and again in 1526 he came to Nuremberg, where he was to establish a new, secular school for the City Council. He owned a large collection of Dürer’s prints.

The inscription reads: Dürer could record Philipp’s looks, but his mind the artist’s hand could not grasp.

Provenance: With P.&D. Colnaghi & Co., London.

1 1 1 MELC H IOR LORC H Sultan Suleiman II Standing with an Elephant Not illustrated Engraving, 1559 Hollstein 35, the third of three states Size: 39 × 32 cm Intriguingly, the Sultan shown is Suleiman II while the inscription says it shows Sultan Ibrahim I (reigned 1640–1648). The latter’s reign was one of the most interesting in the whole rumbuctuous history of the Ottomans, both politically and personally. Traumatised by his youth

under constant fear of death, he has since been known as ‘Deli Ibrahim’, ‘Mad Ibrahim’. He staged humungous orgies in his palace, and gave another palace to the foxiest of his concubines, carpeted in sable. He probably did die of exhaustion, drink and drugs. What a way to go!

1 1 2 JEAN-JOSE PH-PASCAL GAY (17 75– 1832) ‘Ghostly Figures appearing in the Crypt of Saint Irene’ Not illustrated Lyon, early 19th century Size: 38 × 33 cm Watercolour on paper Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon in the 2nd century, was born in Smyrna to Greek parents. He was known for his diatribes against the Gnostics, particularly those in the Rhone Valley whom he called ‘followers of Magus the Magician’.

While he might appear the model of the fulminating theologian, he nevertheless wrote: ‘For the Spirit blows

where it chooses’, so he must have known a thing or two.

When he died he was buried in the church of Saint John, renamed Saint Irenaeus in his honour, where this ghostly scene takes place. His tomb and remains were destroyed by the Huguenots in 1562, which may be why he still wanders restless as a ghost.

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1 13 T H E F IRST EUROPEAN RE PRESENTATIONS OF MECCA /MEDINA

by Sir John Chardin 1664–1680 ad Size: 30.2 × 23 cm; 28.3 × 25.7 cm Ink drawing on paper Chardin was born into a Protestant family in Paris in 1643, son of a wealthy jeweller who gave him a good education and a training in the jewellery trade. In 1664 he set off for the Middle East and spent eleven years travelling, visiting Persia, Turkey, India and Georgia. In Persia he was appointed Royal Merchant by the Safavid Shah Abbas II, and by his successor Shah Suleiman I. His written account of his travels, Voyages en Perse et Autres Lieux de l’Orient, first published in 1686, remains a uniquely informative document of the period, still in print to this day. King Charles II appointed him jeweller to the royal court and knighted him, and he was elected to the Royal Society in 1682.

Chardin made this drawing according to information given him by a Muslim he met in the course of his travels who had been on the Hajj. In some respects it is quite accurate – the colonnade, the Ka’aba, the buildings and minarets – but also noticeably inaccurate in showing a circular shrine, and even more so in placing the Prophet’s tomb in the Ka’aba, putting together the two holy sites of Mecca and Medina into one. It is, nevertheless, the

first known attempt to represent the Holy Sites of Islam by a European. At the top of the complete diagram, Chardin has written: Plan de la meque et lieu ou est enterre le faux profete y avant deux cours celle de dehors qui est fort grande et celle de lieu est la Sepulture de Mahomet et les os a l’entrée de Chascune y a quatre portes. The second diagram is unfinished, probably a copy to be donated to the Royal Society.

John Evelyn was a remarkable polymath of the 17th century, whose famous Diary remains an important historical source of the time. One of the founders of the Royal Society, and colleague of all the great scientists, artists, writers and architects who prefigured the Enlightenment, he was insatiably curious, and the arrival of Jean Chardin in 1680 at the end of his travels provided an irresistible opportunity to acquaint himself with the mysterious Orient.

There is no mention of exactly when and how he acquired Chardin’s drawings, but his Diary attests to the friendship that developed between them, once Chardin settled in London to avoid the persecution of Protestants under Louis XIV.

Excerpts from John Evelyn’s Diary: Evelyn met Chardin for the first time on August 27th, 1680. ‘I went to visit a French Stranger, one Monsieur Jardine [Chardin]… who having ben thrice at the East Indies, Persia & other remote Countries, came hither in our returne ships from those parts; and it being reported he was a very curious man, & knowing, I was desir’d by the Ro: Society in their name, to salute him, and to let him know how glad they should be to receive him, if he pleased to do them that honour:&c. There

were appointed to accompany me Sir Jo: Hoskins & Sir Christopher Wren &c. We found him at his lodgings, in his Eastern habite, a very handsom person, modest, & a well-bred man: It seems he travelled in search of jewels, & was become extremely rich: He spake Latine, understood the Greeks, Arabic and Persian by 11 years of Conversation in those parts, yet seemed he not to be above 36 years of age.’

Evelyn was very impressed by this first meeting, and fascinated by what he heard

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from Chardin of his travels. Chardin was leaving next morning for Paris, but since his baggage was still on the ship, including ‘the draughts he had caused to be made… he was extreamely sorry he could not gratifie the curiosity of the Society.’ He promised to return soon. Although he did not say so to Evelyn, he felt obliged to first present himself and the fruits of his travels to his King, Louis XIV. He had no intention of staying in France because of the persecution of Protestants.

The next meeting recorded in the Diary took place on October 10th, 1683, when they visited Montague House together, with Lord Grafton and Lady Scroope. The following year,

February 10th, Evelyn took Chardin to dine ‘at my L. Keepers… who shewed him his accurate draughts of his travels in Persia &c.’

December 27th, 1683: Evelyn visited Chardin who was working on an account of his travels.

October 6th, 1688: ‘I was Godfather to sir Jo: Chartins sonn (the great French Traveller), with the Earle of Bath, and the Countess of Carlile.’

May 18th, 1705: Evelyn went to see Chardin at Turnham Green, and admired the gardens.

Provenance: The Library of John Evelyn, dispersed at auction by Christie’s, London, in eight sales, 1977–8.

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1 1 4 KA’BA KEY ?

Probably made in Mecca, bearing the date 573 ah/1177–8 ad Size: 37 cm long Iron, copper and silver alloy This object has an interesting tale to tell. It might be a mournful lament if it were not so interesting. It came up for auction in London in 2010 and sold for £9.2 million.

The whole room erupted with applause so unexpected was the price; the estimate in the catalogue was £400,000– 500,000. Two weeks later Souren Melikian published an article in the Herald Tribune declaring the Key a fake. The legal representatives of the buyer, the King of Saudi Arabia, cancelled the sale.

Melikian’s opinions are notoriously unreliable. He knows a lot in the field of Islamic art, but there is something that twists his judgements, along with a propensity to attribute most works of art to Iran, including, incredibly, the Pisa Griffon. I am not alone in saying this: Abolala Soudavar’s 44-page demolition of Melikian’s catalogue for

who were making the money. It is understandable, but he has done a lot of damage, unjustifiably.

Returning to the Key and its inscriptions, Melikian wrote: ‘Conceivable in the later Turkish Ottoman or Persian usage when writing official inscriptions in Arabic, it would be astounding on a key, a key made in the 12th century for the most important shrine in Islam. Further stretching incredulity, the script attempted, unsuccessfully, to imitate the Kufic letter forms of ninth-century manuscripts. At that point it was difficult to reject the suspicion that here was one of those late apocryphal artefacts made for Ottoman sultans, who were keen to show they preserved in their treasury works loaded with a symbolism important to the world Islamic community that they aspired to rule.’

the Safavid exhibition at the Louvre, Le Chant du Monde, entitled ‘A Disenchanting Echo of Safavid Art History’ reflects what I, and many others, think. ‘There is hardly a page without a mistake. Typos and erroneous cross-references notwithstanding, the major problem of the catalogue is its methodology, one that solely relies on deciphering inscriptions, often wrongly, and using them to embark on a fantasy trip by developing theories in defiance of available evidence… I believe that the long list of his mistakes shall justify the harsh criticism that I have presented in this introduction.’

Early in my career as an art dealer, I wrote a letter to the Herald Tribune cataloguing a whole series of glaring errors in what he had written in his reports of Islamic auctions. It took a lot of prodding, but eventually they published my complaint, but without its original title: ‘Souren Melikian: the biggest fake in the Persian art market’. He was in a powerful position with his weekly column, read by many, but he seemed to be driven by a hatred of the traders. He saw himself more intelligent and qualified, and yet it was they

He also declared the cover illustration of the same catalogue, a Nasrid enamelled gold buckle, to be fake.

‘Similar inconsistencies marred the script of the other star lot in Sotheby’s sale. A gold and enamel buckle was celebrated in the catalogue as ‘an extraordinary example of the art of the goldsmith in 14th century Spain’ under the heading ‘an exceptionally Rare Royal Belt Buckle from Al-Andalus.’ The Arab name of Andalucia is another of those words with a powerful emotional charge – Romantic writers of the 19th-century Arab literary Renaissance sung in vibrant tones the lost province of the westernmost extremity of the Arab world. So deeply stirred were the bidders sitting in Sotheby’s room that they did not spend much time looking at the object. Otherwise, they might have noticed the wobbly lettering, made more improbable by its attempt at emulating certain forms of much earlier writing, such as the extremities of the taller letters. These occur in the Middle East, but are not matched in the body of inscriptions from Arab Spain. The word ‘al-sultan’ at the bottom has its initial alif (letter A) nearly attached to the

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following lam (letter L) and its entire appearance is improbable in 14th-century Spain. The enamelling is poor and the design miserable with its formless stylised vegetal motifs.

No wonder that the supposedly important Buckle remained previously unpublished. It might have been best if it had remained so.’

In the case of the Buckle there is irrefutable scientific evidence from two different laboratories that it is genuine, but this seems to have had no weight compared to Melikian’s own high opinion of his own opinion. What he wrote is an illustration of what Abolallah Soudavar describes, as quoted above. His critique of the Buckle is pure twaddle, and his peculiar bias is also on full display.

There can be no question about authenticity of the Buckle, but the Key is more ambiguous. It underwent scientific examinations in two specialised laboratories. The first concluded that the iron body of the Key was probably ancient, consistent with the date in the inscription, but that the silver alloy of the top and cap was probably more recent. The second report was unambiguous: it’s a fake. The British Museum also produced a study closely following Melikian’s line, but so superficial and full of inconsistences that it failed to address any of the questions that such an object presents.

The purpose of all this is not to plead the authenticity of the Key: I don’t know, like everybody else. It is rather a story of the strange nature of the art market. To me it is like an Oriental tale, in which an evil genie, whose role is to frustrate all human activities where possible, has turned something valuable into something worthless.* The custom of dedicating the lock and key to each Caliph seems to have originated during the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. It symbolised the Caliph’s role as a guardian of the holiest site in Islam, which carried with it huge prestige. The practice continued under the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and then with the Ottoman sultans of Turkey.

Fifty-eight keys, apart from this one are recorded; fifty-four are in the Topkapi Palace Museum; two, previously owned by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, are in the Nuhad Es-Said collection, now in Qatar; one is in the Louvre; and one was previously in the Peytel collection. Of these, seven date from the Abbasid period. The earliest is dated 555 ah/1160 ad. This key, if genuine, is the second earliest example known, and previously unrecorded. It seems likely that all the Ka’ba keys were made in Mecca. The key dated

555 ah is signed by Ilyas ibn Yusuf Ahmad al-Makki. The keys all have provincial features in their decoration, reflecting Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman styles, but they differ in quality from products of metropolitan workshops.

Max van Berchem was the first to publish two Ka’ba keys in 1904, one, of which, from the Peytel collection, dated 1363/4, is now in the Louvre. Janine Sourdel-Thomine studied the Topkapi collection between 1966 and 1970 for Gaston Wiet’s corpus of inscriptions of Mecca and Medina.

She notes seven Abbasid keys dated between 555/1160 and 622/1225, and quotes the earliest written record of a gold lock sent in year 219/834 for the door of the Ka’ba by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu’tasim.

In 1516, the Ottoman army under Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks. As a result, the Sherif of Mecca Abu Namayy Muhammad II bin Barakat, sent his son to congratulate the Sultan, taking with him the keys to the Ka’ba that were stored in Mecca. These were presented as a gift in recognition of the Sultan’s role as protector of the Two Holy Places, and have resided in Topkapi ever since. * Idries Shah published a story, ‘The Princess of the Water of Life’ (Seeker After Truth, Octagon Press, 1992. pp. 166–7), which neatly encapsulates the operation of ‘malevolence’ in human affairs. The point of such a story is, I believe, not to explain it, but to provide a point of reference to recognise it.

Bibliography: Max van Berchem, Deux clefs de la Mecque, Notes d’archéologie arabe III, JA, 1904, 1, pp. 90–96.

Gaston Migeon, Musée de Louvre. L’Orient musulman, Paris, 1922, I, no. 48 and plate XVII. Gaston Migeon, Manuel d’art musulman. Les arts plastiques et industriels, 2nd edition, Paris, 1927, I, pp. 390–392.

Gaston Wiet, Objets en cuivre, Cairo, 1932, p. 227, no. 311.

Sourdel-Thomine, J. ‘Clefs et serrures de la Ka’ba. Notes d’epigraphie arabe’, Revue des Études Islamiques, Vol. 39, 1971, pp. 29–86.

Allan, James, W., Islamic Metalwork, The Nuhad Es-Said Collection, Sotheby Publications, London, 1982.

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1 15 SANYASI WIT H A TURBAN OF H IS OWN H AIR Drawing by John Lockwood Kipling Size: 22.5 × 14 cm. Not illustrated Father of Rudyard, John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1011) spent much of his life in India as principal of the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay. He was commissioned by the government to record the craftsmen of northern India; he designed the uniforms and

decorations for the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi in 1877 where Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India; and he provided many illustrations for his son’s books. What you see in this drawing is the Rapunzel of hairstyles that no Mohican or Rasta can match.

1 16 FOUR CELESTIAL GLOBES ON A STAND India, probably 2nd half 19th century Size: 1.10 m high, main ring 88 cm diameter, 1.80 m maximum width Cast and beaten brass, chased and engraved Not illustrated Khanan, for whom the globes were supposedly made, was the Emperor Akbar’s most prominent general.

The instrument was cleaned and restored to remove heavy corrosion from its surfaces.

The globes were opened to remove dents and found to have iron frames inside which were also very corroded. This indicates that it stood outside for a considerable period of time and is not of recent manufacture.

The globes originally stood in the gardens of the palace at Bikaner. Since they fulfil no useful astronomical function the ensemble was apparently designed for decorative purposes, with an inscription probably intended to impress. The inscription in elegant thuluth script around the main ring, giving a history of Islamic astronomy, was possibly copied and adapted from an earlier Mughal inscription. Abd al-Rahim Khan

1 17 A COLLECTION OF NINE POLY H EDRONS France, 19th century or earlier Size: largest, 10 cm Metal, rock crystal and glass Not illustrated Of the five Platonic Solids, the regular Dodecahedron and the Icosahedron do not appear in the structure of crystals. An irregular Dodecahedron structure is found in Pyritohedron minerals, and many viruses have Icosahedral structures. Plato remarked that

God used the Dodecahedron ‘for arranging constellations on the whole heaven’.

Including: Dodecahedrons and Icosahedrons (Platonic), and a Truncated Icosahedron (Archimides).

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1 18 TSAR DADON MEETS T H E S H EMAK H A QUEEN Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942) An illustration for Pushkin’s ‘The Tale of the Golden Cockerel’ Signed and dated lower-left, numbered 21 on verso 1906 Size: 23.3 × 30.2 cm Watercolour, ink and gilding on paper Having been brought up on Russian fairy tales, I can now see that my entire vision of life has been coloured by the extraordinary visual universe created by Bilibin to represent the magic of folklore and fairy tales. The Russian tradition in this area is so rich, so vibrant, that as a child you tend to see your situation as a sort of waiting-room until, like Ivan Tsarevich, you can get on your white horse and set off to do great things.

Trained by Ilya Repin, and later influenced by Japanese prints, Bilibin translated his fascination with Russian folklore into unforgettable images. His fame as an illustrator was already established by 1899, when he released his first collection of illustrations of Russian fairy tales. He drew revolutionary cartoons during the Revolution of 1905, and designed the sets for Rimsky-Korsakov’s first production of ‘The Golden Cockerel’.

He lived through turbulent times. Unhappy with the October Revolution, he left Russia, and after brief sojourns in Cairo and Alexandria settled in Paris in 1925. Like all Russians he was uncomfortable away from his homeland, and returned in 1936. He died during the siege of Leningrad and was buried in a collective grave. Nevertheless, for anyone who has fallen under the spell of his images, he has never died.

Pushkin wrote the tale in 1834, his last fairy tale in verse. It is based on a short story in Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, entitled ‘Legend of the Arabian Astrologer’. The final two verses – ‘Tale of sense, if not of truth!/Food for thought to honest youth’ – reveal the values Pushkin attributed to fairy tales.

Exhibited: Ivan Bilibine Exposition, Alexandria, December 1924, illustrated no. 21 in the catalogue.

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1 19 ALEXANDRE de SAL Z MANN Drunken Russians in the Snow Size: 50 × 45 cm Gouache on card Jeanne de Salzmann died in 1990 at the age of 101, and twenty years later her notebooks were published under the title: The Reality of Being, The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. My parents knew her quite well during the time they spent with Gurdjieff, and admired her greatly. Thomas de Hartman had introduced her to Gurdjieff in Tiflis in 1919 while her husband Alexandre was working at the Opera House there, and she remained at Gurdjieff’s side until his death in Paris in 1949. But then she decided to nominate herself as his successor, and assumed the role of a spiritual teacher for the rest of her life. My parents, among others, thought this was a mistake and that Gurdjieff’s ‘system’ was unworkable without him, and had no further contact with her and her organisation as a result. Therefore, she was a shadowy figure, but of sufficient interest for me to buy The Reality of Being when it was published. The material of these notebooks, while interesting in a certain way, seemed to me of no use to anybody – precisely because the context for using them no longer existed – but what did catch my attention were the biographical notes, particularly regarding her husband Alexandre, about whom I knew nothing. Something in my mind was triggered by what I read, and later when I took this painting out of its frame, there on the back was a label: Alexander von Salzman, born Tiflis 1870. It was painted by Jeanne de Salzmann’s husband. This delighted me. I had bought it at auction in 1990 because I found it so funny, but until then had never made the connection.

In 1901 de Salzmann was part of Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky in Munich, developing the idea of the ‘total work of art’, incorporating theatre, painting, music, speech and dance, with lighting as an essential unifying feature. He developed this concept further with Jacques Dalcroze and Adolphe Appia at Hellerau between 1911 and 1915, and the influence of his revolutionary lighting techniques is still felt today. After two years at the

Kamenny Theatre in Moscow he moved to Tiflis in 1917, to escape the excesses of the Revolution, and because his friend from Munich days with Kandinsky, Thomas de Hartmann, was director of the Opera House. The de Salzmanns, along with the de Hartmanns, were founding members of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, and the first public performances of Gurdjieff’s sacred dances took place at the Tiflis Opera.

From 1921 he worked at the Theatre des Champs Elysées in Paris.

Alexandre de Salzmann was greatly admired by many artists. The writer René Daumal dedicated his masterpiece, Mount Analogue, to him. Edward Steichen photographed him in 1932. He crops up in different memoirs of the time. Carl Zigrosser, later vice-director of the Guggenheim Museum, wrote: ‘In the summer of 1927 I spent several long weekends and a few days in between at the Château du Prieuré near Fontainebleau where Gurdjieff had set up his Institute… There was one person among the original initiates at the Prieuré with whom I quickly established some kind of understanding. He was Alexandre de Salzmann. Because he was an artist we had a common interest. Likewise because we both spoke German I was able to communicate more freely with him. I spent much time with him at Fontainebleau and also saw him in Paris on weekdays. I bought drawings and decorative screens from him for my gallery in New York. He had great talent as an artist, though he modestly called himself a craftsman. He reserved the name of artist for those who had achieved what he called major works of art such as the Sphinx or the Pyramids. These objects, he felt, had a deep significance which modern works lacked.’

And yet today, his name is known to very few. A good example, perhaps, of the mysterious process by which we choose whom to remember and whom to forget, whom to value and whom to neglect.

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1 2 0 T H E BEGUM SAMRU North India, circa 1820–1830 Size: 77 × 60.5 cm Oil on canvas She was a beguiling beauty in her youth, but her early sex-appeal is as nothing compared to the extraordinary story of her later life. Unlike the many media-women we hear these days lamenting that once they have lost their youthful bloom they feel they have become invisible, with each passing year the Begum Samru became ever more visible.

Born in 1751, she began life as Zib al-Nisa, a dancing girl in Delhi. By the time she died in 1836 aged 85, she was recognised as one of the most extraordinary women of her time, renowned for her exceptional courage and utter ruthlessness.

As well as possessing great beauty, she was graceful and intelligent, and captivated Walter Reinhart, a swashbuckling Austrian adventurer who made a career as a soldier in northern India during the chaotic transition to British rule. He installed her in his zenana (harem) as his wife. Because of his saturnine character he acquired the nickname ‘Sombre’, which was altered by the Indians to Samru. After his death in 1778, the Begum inherited his land holdings, of which the principal part was the jagish of Sardhana, north-east of Delhi.

The estate was not expansive in size, but under the careful stewardship of the Begum it yielded substantial revenues, with which she maintained an army, well-trained

by Europeans. Linked to her powerful personality, it became an important political force.

The Begum married a second time, to the Frenchman who commanded her troops. Reinhart’s son then rebelled against his step-mother, and for a time his insurrection succeeded; the Begum’s French husband inexplicably shot himself, she was taken prisoner and kept strapped, wounded, to the barrel of a cannon for seven days. In spite of this indignity she prevailed, and her rebellious step-son was thrown into jail, where he remained until he died of poison in 1801, administered, according to some, by the hand of the Begum herself. After this episode, she decided never again to rely on any one man. Since she was a powerful, and by all accounts, eccentric woman, capable of maintaining her independence through turbulent times in an exclusively male world, she was inevitably the target for much malicious gossip. She was even accused of burying a female rival alive.

Continues on the next spread

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‘© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin’ (collection number: CBL In 74.7)

In this painting, seated on the Begum’s left is George Dyce, a self-styled colonel, who for some years had charge over many of the Begum’s affairs, until sacked for being insufferable. Dyce had married the daughter of Reinhart’s rebellious son, and his son by this marriage, David, is shown here on the Begum’s right, dressed in black.

Although eccentric and ill-at-ease in company, the Begum was devoted to him and treated him as the palace pet, eventually adopting him as David Dyce-Samru and making him the main beneficiary of her will. He was later married to an Englishwoman, who, once she got him back

to England, had him certified as insane in an attempt to get her hands on his fortune.

Next to David Dyce-Samru is John Thomas, son of an Irish adventurer, George Thomas, who had rescued the Begum during her step-son’s rebellion. When John Thomas was expelled from India after an ill-judged military adventure, the Begum cared for his Indian wife and brought up his four children. John was her favourite, became an officer in her army, and was well known for his style of dressing: ‘a debauched looking man in a kincob dress with a skull-cap thrown over his left brow’.

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Marble Relief in the Begum’s Cathedral

The Begum employed between fifteen and twenty Europeans during her later life, including her doctor, legal advisers and officers, and always took an active part in military affairs. As late as 1826, she led her army in support of the British expedition against Bharatpur, and when the British tried to bribe her not to go because her presence was politically sensitive, she declared that if she did not go,

India would believe she had grown cowardly with age.

Having become a Catholic, she built a church in Sardhana, and sent lithographs of it to the Pope in 1834, saying it was widely acclaimed the finest church in India. It was here she was buried in 1836, in a grandiose marble mausoleum executed by an Italian sculptor, including eleven life-size white marble figures.

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1 21 COLONEL CLAUDE MARTIN ’S COBRA Lucknow, Awadh, India, circa 1775–1785 Size: 47.7 × 37.5 cm Watercolour on paper The black Indian cobra (Naja Naja) is shown twice in movement, with studies of its skull and fangs; numbered ‘609’ in Nasta’liq in the lower-left corner.

Colonel Claude Martin (1735–1800) was the first European to seriously catalogue India’s flora and fauna. The original collection comprised 658 birds, 600 plants, 606 reptiles and a number of drawings of mammals. It in turn provided the inspiration for others, notably the Marquis of Wellesley at Barrackpore outside Calcutta, and Dr. Francis Buchanan at the East India Company’s botanical garden at Sibpur. Sir Elijah Impey was Chief Justice of Bengal, and with his wife Mary commissioned 197 studies of birds by three artists from Patna between 1174 and 1782. These beautiful paintings are quite different in style from Martin’s, and it has been suggested that they were influenced by contemporary Chinese textiles. The format that Martin chose was closer to the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, published in ten volumes between 1771 and 1786. Impey visited Martin in 1781–2, and it seems likely that it was this visit that provided the inspiration for Martin’s natural history project.

When Claude Martin arrived in Lucknow in 1775 to take up his appointment as Superintendent of the Lucknow Arsenal for the Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, he was already rich, famous and very well-connected. He had left

Europe in 1751, never to return, settling initially in Pondicherry. By 1760, having taken a dim view of French prospects in India, he deserted to the English to join their ‘Free French Company’. Lucknow was ‘the most dissolute and extravagant of the native courts that were independent of British rule in late eighteenth century India’. Martin built two magnificent palaces and filled them with works of art. He had extensive connections with the world of artists, collectors and dealers – Townley, Hamilton and the Society of Dilettanti in London, for example – and welcomed numerous artists, such as Zoffany, the Daniells and Thomas Longcroft, from whom he commissioned paintings. He amassed a huge library, scientific instruments, fossils, minerals and stuffed animals, antiquities and curiosities. He loved the louche life around him, and the riotous assembly of Europeans in the court around Asaf-ud-Daula. The latter seems to have appreciated Martin more than Martin appreciated him: he wrote scathingly about the Nawab in letters to his friends.

When Martin died in 1800, he bequeathed his fortune to found institutions for educating children at Lucknow, Calcutta and Lyon. The paintings he commissioned are rare, because during the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the palaces of Lucknow were sacked, and most of the folios destroyed.

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1 2 2 T H E SE POY OF GOA Indo-Portuguese, 18th century Size: 66.5 × 49.5 cm Oil on canvas This young Hindu sepoy clasping his rifle appears to be guarding a well-tended plantation somewhere along the Mandovi river. Probably painted by a European artist working for a Portuguese patron, such images are far rarer than the prolific visual record of their exotic environment commissioned by the British.

Inscription: in Portuguese, between the feet of the figure, ‘CIPAI’ (Sepoy)

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1 23 A PAIR OF SA FAVID TILES Iran, 17th century Size: 23 cm square The subject of these unusually refined Safavid tiles, the drunken Sheikh with loosened girdle, and the beautiful cup-bearer with a bottle of wine and a cup, is frequently encountered in the poetry of Rumi, Nizami, Sa’adi, Hafez and Jami, among others. The wine represents, of course, mystical experience; the youth the ‘circumstances’ in which it becomes available; and the state of the Sheikh the effect of the experience.

1 2 4 EARLY SA FAVID OPIUM TWEEZ ERS Iran, early 16th century Size: 25 cm long Steel, tinned copper, jade, gold The tip of the scabbard is open so that it can be used as a pipe to inhale the ‘dragons’ of smoke when the opium ball, held by the tweezers, begins to sizzle over the lamp.

Iranian opium is much lighter than the ‘Chinese’ variety from South-East Asia. Gin-and-tonic rather than Dry Martini cocktail. In the 1960s and ’70s it was still offered as a normal part of hospitality after dinner in the better houses of Tehran, and probably still is. A brazier of glowing coals was brought in by a servant expert in the art of preparing the pipes; a tricky business. The pipe in Iran consisted of a porcelain bulb, pierced with a hole over which

the heated pellet of opium was smeared. A wooden stem attached to the base of the bulb provided the means of inhaling the intoxicating smoke. One feature of the porcelain bulbs, available in every bazaar, was that they were usually decorated with a portrait of the Shah of the time, mainly the later Qajars. Reza Shah Pahlavi, who supplanted the Qajar dynasty in 1925, was widely admired for his ability to smoke opium and remain standing and operational, a sort of Lance Armstrong from another age.

I never saw an Ayatollah with an opium pipe, but live in hope. Peace in the Middle East depends on it.

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1 25 SILK H ERALDIC ANIMAL RUG Probably Kashan, Iran, 16th or 19th-century Size: 198 cm × 116 cm This rug has many interesting stories to tell. When first I saw its photograph I was intrigued, having never seen anything like it. On seeing it, I thought it must be 19th century, made in Iran, but because of the disappointment of the owner, I agreed to have it carbon-dated at Oxford.

Carbon-dating, by the way, has proved over the years to be the most reliable test of organic materials that we have. To my surprise, the analyses of pile, warp and weft, indicated that the rug dated from the late 15th or 16th century. A notable expert of carpets examined it and had no doubt whatever that the carbon dating was correct, and came up with a series of collaborative evidence from his own examination. At this point the rug became the most exciting new discovery in the field of carpets, and several eager buyers emerged. To conclude a sale it was first necessary to subject the rug to dye tests at a laboratory in Belgium, which determined that some of the dyes could not date from earlier than the 19th century.

It was at this point that I decided to buy the carpet.

Whether it was made in the 16th or 19th century seemed somewhat irrelevant. A painting by Delacroix or Matisse is

not necessarily less significant than a Titian or a Tintoretto; the important element is the quality of the work of art, not its date. And this carpet is, it seems to me, a masterpiece, whenever it was made. In its field are 98 different animals, heraldic, realistic, abstract, and almost cartoonish. Who imagined such an ensemble, and who had the skill to realise it in the knots of a silk carpet? It is an extraordinary achievement, whatever it is, although to see it as such it is necessary to view it outside the canon of classical carpet weaving that we have been taught. Late medieval bestiaries are the obvious place to look for the iconography, but they fail to match most of the models. Two late medieval textiles in the National Museum of Sweden provide a mysterious clue, with almost identical matches for three of the animals, but how do these rarely published images relate to a Persian rug, and where does the rest of the menagerie come from? It remains a puzzle. The only consistent thing about it has been the reaction of visitors to my studio during the months it has hung there. They have invariably commented on the impact of its unique design, and the extraordinary quality of its weaving.

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1 2 6 A SILK ‘SAMARKAND’ PICTORIAL SA F Khotan region, late 18th or 19th century Size: 4.20 × 1.63 metres There are three carpets known woven with this unusual, and so far unexplained design. The second example is in the collection of Parviz Tanavoli in Tehran, which he published in Hali magazine, and the other in a private collection in Madrid.

The significance of the figural design of this carpet is only one of the enigmas it presents. Why, for example, are there three carpets with this identical design, and nothing else that remotely resembles them? Do the figures ‘1210’ found on each example represent a date (equivalent to 1795 ad), and if so why is it written in Western numerals? Why is the man dressed in Russian or Caucasian costume, when the carpet was woven far to the East in Khotan? Is the sheep pregnant, and why does it have cloven hooves? Why

is the border full of serpents? Parviz Tanavoli analyses these different details in the Hali article, but can offer no answer to the question of what it means, beyond a suggestion that it is a cultural expression of the Silk Route. He was unaware at the time of writing of the existence of the other two examples.

There are, nevertheless, further clues. Firstly, all three carpets are made of silk; they are luxury products, and therefore they must have been specifically commissioned.

This is not a typical carpet design that can be sold to anyone in the bazaar. As a result, every detail must have a specific significance. The so-called ‘saf’ arrangement of multiple arches usually has a religious significance representing the mihrab for prayer, and carpets with this

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arrangement were typically woven for mosques or other religious buildings.

The vast area stretching from Eastern Turkestan where these carpets were made, to the Caucasus where the man’s costume probably belongs, is, culturally speaking, fairly homogenous. Along with music and carpet-weaving, the main cultural expression has always been story-telling. The Ashiks, traditional story-tellers, travelled to the towns and villages reciting the great epics and stories in their repertoire. The potency of this tradition was revealed when the Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered from twelve cuneiform tablets excavated in Mesopotamia, and it was found that the version recited by the Ashiks had hardly changed over 4000 years. It is

to this tradition that the subject-matter of this carpet surely belongs, illustrating one of the age-old Central Asian stories. The hand gesture of the man suggests he represents a story-teller. On one level, stories were recited as public entertainment; on another, they were credited with encapsulating a deep tradition of wisdom.

Such a story is The Man, the Snake and the Stone, of which this may well represent a variation (see: Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams, Octagon Press, 1988.) ‘When you describe something that has happened once,’ say the story-tellers, ‘you may be describing something that is true. What we are describing is happening over and over again, all of the time, and represents something that is truer than true.’

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1 27 ANT HOLOGY OF POETRY Probably Herat, Afghanistan, early 16th-century ad Size: 22.5 × 15 cm Lacquer binding, circa 1600 ad The manuscript has 36 folios including the flyleaf, on which an inscription in pencil states ‘Mir Ali Recueilles des poesies 36 feuilles’. After folio 18 the order of the pages has been scrambled, no doubt when it was rebound with its present lacquered binding.

The colophon has been erased, replaced with a 19th-century attribution to Mir Ali. The 16th-century attribution in the text is to the calligrapher Mahmud ibn Ishaq, who lived in Herat until he was moved to Bukhara by Ubaydullah Khan after his capture of Herat in 935 (1528–9).

The calligraphy is outstanding, as is the quality of the illumination and the delicate floral decoration in gold of the borders on pink, green, eau-de-nil, light blue, dark blue and cream paper.

This kind of production is usually attributed to Bukhara, possibly due to Mahmud ibn Ishaq’s forced relocation there.

The Mughal emperors had a habit of recording each time they took a manuscript out of their library to read. Thus we know it was in Akbar’s library, and was inspected on various occasions by Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and at least once under Shah Alam.

Being an anthology of Persian poems, it is not surprising that there is no indication that it was looked at by the more fundamentalist Aurangzeb. The manuscript must have been among those brought back by Nadir Shah to Iran after his sack of Delhi in 1151–2 (1739), and was acquired for a son of Fath’ali Shah. Its fate after the death of the Prince is not clear, other than it was still in a Qajar hand in 1274 /1857–8.

Notes and seal impressions: On the opening page (Folio 1r) in the shamsah: ‘For the library of the one of high-standing, exalted office, centre of kingdom with signs of bravery Nizam al-Din Nazar Muhammad Bey, may his power be increased’ At the top left of the Shamsah, a note by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir: ‘God is Most Great. It entered the library of the one in need of Divine threshold, in the Capital Agra on the fifth of ådhar, regnal year 1 (26 November 1605). Nur al-Din Jahangir son of Akbar Padshah, the conqueror, wrote it in the year 1014 (1605)’ A Qajar note below the Shamsah (all names have been deliberately defaced): ‘Following the order of the one whose decree flows, the one whose abode is the celestial globe, firmament his threshold, the Moon his stirrup, the Sun his vaults, the most noble, the exalted, the eminent, shadow of God ..... moreover His Excellency who has minister- ial rank, Minister ..... Prime

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Minister, Mirza [Muhammad Shafi’.....], teacher and administer of the affairs of the beloved son and worthy of the royal crown, an ornament of the throne of the empire .... this anthology was acquired for [the prince] and that was .....’

Muhammad Shafi was appointed Prime Minister to Fath’ali Shah in 1215 (1800–1801) and stayed in his post until he died in 1234 (1818–19). He is said to have failed all missions he led, particularly the one against Russians. He is recorded as someone who accumulated much wealth. (M. Bamdad, Dictionary of National Biography of Iran, 1700–1900, vol 2, Tehran, 1966, pp. 146–7) The seal of a Qajar Prince on the top right hand corner: ‘As Royal destiny/horoscope is favourable, laudable are qualities of Mahmud. 1217 (1802–3)’.

Seal of Mahmud Mirza, 15th son of Fath’ali Shah. He is recorded as a cultured and educated prince who composed a few books on biography of nobles and great men, scholars, poets and Sufis. He was a poet himself with the pen-name ‘Mahmud’. He held governorship of Nahavand and Luristan for many years. After Fath’ali Shah’s death, he was called to Tehran and held under house arrest before being sent to the fortress in Ardabil and then to Tabriz where he is reported as having died in 1835. (M. Bamdad, Dictionary of National Biography of Iran, 1700–1900, vol 4, Tehran, 1966, pp. 51–3).

A døvån of Sa’ib Tabrizi in the Majlis Library in Tehran bore a similar note when Mirza Shafi’, the Prime Minister to Fath’ali Shah who was a teacher of the Prince acquired it for him in 1222 (1807–08).

The manuscript also bears the same seal impression of the Prince.

A Qajar note above the Shamsah: ‘Anthology of poems is by Mir Ali 1274 (1857–8)’.

A Qajar note on the left of the Shamsah: ‘Anthology of poems by a calligrapher in the month of rajab al-murajjab ...’

Notes and seal impressions on the verso of the last folio, as chronological as possible: ‘Collection of poems of properties of Qasim Ali Khan Vali was put in the custody of Khwajah Inayat the Royal Librarian on 20th of the divine month of tør, [regnal] year 38 corresponding to 11 shawwal 1001 (11 July 1593).

Collection in the hand of Khwajah Mahmud [son of] Ishaq. Value ... two (? written in søyåq) muhr .....’

‘It was inspected in the divine month of bahman, [regnal] year 42 (January– February 1596).

An inspection note of Jahangir period: ‘God is Most Great. It was inspected on seventeenth of ådhar first [regnal] year (8 December 1605)’.

Traces of the seal of: ‘Fath [ullah] bin [Abu’l]-Fath’ .

A transfer note of Jahangir period: ‘God is Most Great. It was entrusted to Habibullah from custody of Muhammad Yusif on 25 of shahrøvar [regnal] year 7 (16 September 1612)’.

A transfer note of Jahangir period: ‘It was entrusted to Muhammad Mu’min from custody of Habibullah on 22 bahman [regnal] year 12 (11 February 1617)’.

A transfer note of Shah Jahan period: ‘It was entrusted to [Khwajah] Anbar from the custody of Muhammad Mu’min [the superintendant] of the library on 30 of the divine month of khordåd first [regnal] year (20 June 1628)’.

Seal of: ‘Abd al-Haqq ibn Qasim Shirazi [1037 (1627–8)]’.

‘Abd al-Haqq is the better known as Amanat Khan whose monumental work in the Taj Mahal in Agra has been praised for centuries. He was one of the Persians who moved to India with his father and entered the Royal court. He was honoured with the title Amanat Khan on 18 Urdøbihisht 1041 (8 May, 1632).

Impressions of two seals with his title as an official of Shah Jahan are seen in manuscripts, indicating he must have been involved with the Royal Library most of his life.

An inspection note of either Jahangir or Shah Jahan period: ‘God is Most Great. It was inspected on 15 ådhar [regnal] year 5 (6 December 1610 or 1633)’.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan, undeciphered.

An inspection note of Shah Jahan period: ‘God is Most Great. It was inspected on 19 of the divine month of farvardøn [regnal] year 10 (8 April 1637)’.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan ‘Salih is a servant of Shah Jahan*’ * The name is read from a better preserved impression and next to a similar note in another manuscript.

An inspection note of Shah Jahan’s period: ‘It was inspected on 21 jumådø al-awwal, [regnal] year 21 (13 June 1648)’.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan: ‘Ahmad Shahid, the sincere devotee of Shah Jahan Padshah 18 [regnal year] 1054 (1644)’.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan: ‘Arif the devotee of Shah Jahan’ Seal of an official of Shah Jahan: ‘Itimad Khan, servant of [Shah] Jahan 1063 (1653)’.

An inspection note of Shah Jahan’s period: ‘It was inspected on 25 jumadi al-awwal [regnal year 31 (28 February 1658)’.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan: ‘Inayat Khan Shah Jahani [1068/1658]’.

Seal of an official of Shah Alam: ‘Arshad Khan, born in the Royal household of Shah Alam the conqueror King’.

An unclear inspection note: ‘Inspected in jumadø al-thånø... (?)’.

Note of Shah Jahan period: ‘God is Most Great. It was inspected on 27 of the divine month of ådhar [regnal] year 8 (19 December 1635)’ .

There are also a few faint notes and seal impressions that have not been deciphered.

Seal of an official of Shah Jahan: ‘Sadiq is a devoted servant of Shah Jahan’.

I am grateful to Manijeh Bayani for translating the inscriptions, and providing their historical context.

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1 2 8 T H E CALLIGRA PH ERS ’ CRA F T A collection of Calligraphers’ and Illuminators’ implements Ottoman Turkey, 17th–19th century 20 calligraphers’ knives (kalamtras) 14 burnishing tools (muhur) 7 cutting plaques (makta) The elegant inscription on a 10th-century Nishapur bowl in the Louvre describes knowledge as being something which is bitter to the taste at first, but later sweeter than honey. The same description could well be applied to Islamic calligraphy. It is certainly difficult to appreciate for anyone brought up outside the culture, but its study reveals an art-form of unusual fascination and refinement.

It is the quintessential artistic expression of Islamic culture, and yet it also has many peculiarities not found in the other arts. The anonymity, which envelopes almost all other categories of Muslim artists, does not apply to calligraphers, whose lives and achievements are recorded in numerous detailed biographies. Signed works by many of the masters have survived. Literary treaties in both Arabic and Persian give an unparalleled insight into the ideas embodied by calligraphy. Unlike other Islamic art forms, it did not decay after the 17th century, but continued to be developed and refined right up until the beginning of the last year. The sharpened tip of the calligrapher’s pen was like the apex of a great pyramid of human endeavour. It involved, beyond the calligrapher and the tradition he inherited, many separate groups of specialised craftsmen, who made, dyed, varnished, polished and cut the paper, mixed the ink, ruled the margins and provided illuminations. A variety of implements relating to calligraphy also required the skills of craftsmen in metal, glass, ivory, wood and leather. For Muslims, the Qur’an is literally the Word of God. This belief undoubtedly encouraged scribes to seek to develop suitably beautiful means of transmitting the Word in writing.

The relationship between calligraphy and religion is readily apparent. Apart from manuscripts, many of the panels of writing contain excerpts from the Qur’an, Traditions of the Prophet or sayings of spiritual teachers.

Copying the Qur’an was considered a pious act, and the discipline required to achieve proficiency in writing was deemed to produce results in the character of the person, which were wholly compatible with the aims of religious life. ‘If a man writes Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim [the opening phrase of the Qur’an], and writes it very well and carefully, God will pardon him’, is a Tradition attributed to the Prophet. And in the words of Sultan Ali Mashhadi ‘The foundation of the art of writing consists of the practice of virtue.’ Less obvious than this overtly religious aspect is the close relationship between the art of calligraphy and Sufism. All of the arts and crafts of Islam have been connected in some way with Sufism, but in the case of calligraphy, the evidence of, and to a certain extent the

reason for, this relationship are much clearer. It is as if the traditional institution for the teaching and practice of this art was a mirror-image of the pattern of spiritual teaching employed in so many different guises by the Sufis. Firstly, there was the teacher-pupil relationship, characterised by the immense respect accorded by the pupil to his master.

This was not some kind of typically Eastern peculiarity, as some would see it, but rather the way of aligning a pupil correctly to a situation in which he could learn. The respect implied in the actions of rulers, such as Abu Said B. Oljeytu, who went on foot to the house of the calligrapher Sharaf al-Din, and refused to let him stand in his presence, or Sultan Bayezid who sat holding Shaikh Hamdullah’s inkwell, was surely respect paid to a spiritual man, rather than to an artist. ‘Purity of writing is purity of soul’ seems to reflect the implicit recognition that real mastery of the art of writing required spiritual qualities also. The Sufi teacher who gathered students around him, traditionally orientated them around an activity which had nothing obviously spiritual about it, but was the vehicle by which much could be taught indirectly. This was perhaps the vessel in Rumi’s phrase ‘To boil water you need an intermediary – the vessel.’ An artistic school was an ideal framework, and moreover fulfilled another essential criterion, which was to have a sufficient number of people involved together. Again, in the words of Rumi, ‘The load that can be pulled by forty men cannot be sustained by one man alone.’ The concept of the Silsila, or chain of transmission through which the student was linked with previous masters to the founder of the order or school, was common to both Sufis and calligraphers. The intense discipline and constant practice were undoubtedly conducive to eliminating many of the problems, which Sufis have traditionally insisted must be dealt with before any progress can be made. The Sufi presence among calligraphers is understood by many names, such as Pir Yahya Sufi, Shaikh Suhrawardi (son of the founder of the Sufi order of that name), Maulana Dervish Abdullah, Dervish Ali, etc. In the remarkable versified treatise on calligraphy, written by the great 15th-century master Sultan Ali Mashhadi, he describes how it was an encounter with an Abdal (a ‘changed one’ in Sufi parlance) who was a possessor of Hal (the mystical state), which put him on the path to mastering the art of writing.

It is also interesting to note how many of the works of literature which exercised the talents of both painters and calligraphers, such as the poetry of Nizami, Saadi, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, are Sufi texts.

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so valued in our culture, the artist’s aim was primarily self-perfection, in order to act as a channel to express something higher than ‘himself’. This is not to say that there was no individuality in what a calligrapher wrote, but the development that he underwent, coupled with the discipline and technical mastery which he acquired, gave him access to the sacred, and the ability to translate it.

‘Freedom is the absence of choice’ is a Sufi saying that may appear contradictory, but which seems to indicate that when a deeper level of perception is open to a person, it is possible to know what to do, and so be free from the uncertainties involved in the process of choosing. A similar shift in focus is helpful to understand calligraphy, because, far from being preoccupied with self-expression,

PA PER Samarqand became the first centre of paper production in the Islamic world, after the battle of Thalus in 751 ad, where Arabic forces captured some Chinese paper-makers. Before that, vellum and papyrus were more commonly used, although a restricted amount of paper was imported from China. The Barmekid vizirs of Harun al-Rashid established paper mills near Baghdad in the late 9th century and the industry spread to Cairo, Sana’a and Spain in the course of the next century. Linen and hemp in the form of rags and rope formed the basis of all Islamic paper-making.

Inevitably, the requirements of calligraphy led to the manufacture of extraordinarily fine paper, which provides

one of the delights of perusing an Islamic manuscript. The highly burnished surface was achieved by sizing the paper with vegetable starch or gum to fill in the pores and by polishing on a board. In Mughal India, a broad-ended pestle was used, while in Turkey a glass egg or a bar with a stone fixed to it were preferred. The sizing and burnishing was mainly carried out by the paper dealers or the calligrapher himself. Faint lines to guide the scribe were impressed into the paper by a device called a mastar, a sheet of card stretched with fine silk threads at the desired intervals. The high value given to paper is shown by accounts of calligraphers being rewarded for fine work, by gifts of paper.

PENS The Islamic calligrapher’s most precious implement was his reed pen, and therefore the minutest variations of quality in reeds were of great interest. The best were brown reeds, fine and light, with a hard outer skin and tender inner fibre, which came from the marshes of Wasit in Iraq, India, Egypt and the shores of the Caspian. They needed to be firm to last throughout a long text. Each master had his own technique of cutting, which had four phases, and which varied slightly for writing different scripts. First, the reed was ‘opened’ with a diagonal cut, giving the basic shape to the nib, which was then split. The length of the split depended on the hardness of the reed and ‘weight’ of the writer’s hand. The split was situated either centrally, or

at four-tenths across to compensate for wear on one side.

The sides were then trimmed and finally the nib-end was cut. This was done straight down or diagonally, either to let the hard skin overlap which increased clarity, or to allow the inner fibre to protrude which absorbed ink better. It is said that by cutting the nib obliquely instead of straight across, Yaqut al-Musta’simi added the final ingredients of grace and elegance to the perfect proportions of the letters established by Ibn Muqla. Reed pens were the subject of extravagant poetical metaphors (‘cypresses in the garden of knowledge’), and the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir is said to have made a collection of pens from famous calligraphers.

INK A variety of different recipes existed for producing lustrous black ink, which did not fade. The basic ingredient was soot, added to a heated mixture of water, salt, gum-arabic, grilled gall nuts, iron sulphate and honey. When honey was used to help dissolve the soot, the addition of myrrh was recommended to repel insects. In Turkey, the most prized ink was made with soot from the vents of the Suleymaniyya Mosque, which, apart from its fine quality, was considered to bring with it the Baraka of the place itself. Coloured inks were made with the addition of different metal oxides or

arsenic in the case of yellow, while the so-called recipe of ‘Kufa’ produced dried ink pellets, which were suitable for travel. A wad of raw silk or cotton was placed in the inkwell to absorb the ink and prevent the pen from overfilling.

Great artistry was lavished on the production of inkwells, as indeed on everything to do with calligraphy. Glass, pottery, precious metals and jades were used, but particularly of note are the cylindrical bronze inkwells inlaid with silver and sometimes with gold, which appear from the 13th century onwards.

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KNIVES A good knife was important to the calligrapher, as its tempered steel blade needed to be razor-sharp to cut with the required precision. The examples here come from Istanbul, where in the 18th and 19th Centuries a whole street was occupied by the masters of this craft. The blades are usually stamped with the maker’s signature, some-

times set into a gold or brass lozenge. The highly decorative handles are made of ivory, walrus tusk, horn, agate, jade, wood, tortoiseshell, steel or silver, and some are hollow to contain a much smaller knife for slitting the nib.

The narrower blades were designed for cutting thin pens for very fine scripts.

MAKTA The ‘open’ reed pen was laid on a plaque called a makta, where a raised groove held it in place while the nib was cut.

They are usually made of ivory, walrus tusk, tortoiseshell or mother-of-pearl, materials that are hard but will not damage the blade of the knife. Many of the makers were

affiliated to the Dervish Orders, as shown in many Turkish examples by the presence of Mevlevi and Bektashi turbans in the decoration, and inscriptions invoking Rumi. Some bear the signatures of makers, the best being Fikri, Rasmi and Dede.

BURNIS H ING TOOLS Gold and paper burnishers are among the most attractive implements, remarkable for the way they fit into the hand.

Examples from Turkey, of the 17th–19th Centuries , are in

agate, glass, jade or cornelian, and the handles are of equally diverse materials.

1 29 RED JAS PER PA PER BURNIS H ER Probably Central Asia, 15th century Size: 7 cm high

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13 0 A MUGH AL AGATE PA PER POLIS H ER from the Imperial Mughal workshop North India, Jahangir period, circa 1615 ad Size: 13.5 cm high The inscription on top of the pestle, a circular medallion like a coin is engraved with the inscription ‘Allahu Akbar’ set against a scrolling floral vine. The significance of this inscription is more than a pious invocation, and the explanation for it can be found on a series of coins issued by the emperor Jahangir early in his reign. During the month of Aban in Jahangir’s ninth regnal year, a man came from Aminabad to meet the emperor. He brought it to his notice that according to the Abjad system the numerical value of ‘Jahangir’ and

‘Allahu Akbar’ was the same (equal to 289; see Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri, account for ninth year). The man was rewarded generously by the emperor and a gold coin bearing a portrait of Jahangir on the obverse, and a couplet incorporating the fact on the reverse, was issued shortly thereafter. A series of coins was then issued from Burhanpur without Jahangir’s name but with ‘Allahu Akbar’, a phrase that thenceforth had a special significance for him.

The floral scroll behind the inscription on the pestle is also similar to the floral decoration on the coins.

A craftsman burnishing a sheet of paper on a wooden board.

A marginal painting from a leaf of the Jahāngīr Album, circa 1600–1610 ad. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 54.116.

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131 A MAGNI F ICENT OTTOMAN CABINET Istanbul, 17th century Size: 1.34 m high Wood, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, ivory This style of decoration is typical of the 17th century, more flamboyant than the relatively austere examples of the previous century, and devoid of the rococo elements that crept in a century later. It matches furniture of the same period in Topkapi Palace, and in the Sultan’s lodge and corridor at the Yeni Cami mosque.

The left side is undecorated, so it was designed to fit a specific location. Its elegance is in stark

contrast to the Austro-Hungarian style of furniture that was popular during the later Ottoman period.

Provenance: Lefevre Gallery, Paris Harry Blackmer Private collection, U.K. On loan for the exhibition.

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132 DIDO’S RING

We were invited to dinner by Gill Goldsmith in the autumn of 1979, to celebrate the engagement of her eldest daughter Dido to Peter Whitehead. ‘He’s such an interesting and unusual man,’ she said, ‘you’ll get on well together.’ The Goldsmith clan was there in force, and the dinner was magnificent. At midnight I said to Gill that we were leaving. ‘Have you spoken with Peter?’ she asked. I said there had been no chance, but since he was marrying Dido there would be plenty of opportunities. ‘You have to meet him,’ and taking me by the hand led me to the table where he was sitting on his own. Joining him at the table, I could not immediately think of anything to say, and Peter did not appear to want a conversation either. We remained for a while in awkward silence, until he leant forward on the table and I glanced at his hands. On the third finger of his left hand was a thick gold ring with an eagle’s head. ‘How on Earth did you get that ring?’ I asked, ‘I know the ring, I can’t believe you have it?’ There was a long pause. ‘I’ll tell you how I got it if you tell me how you know about it,’ Peter finally answered.

Two years previously, Diane and I went to Marrakesh.

Venturing out onto the Jemaa al-Fnaa we found ourselves persecuted by an unshakeable swarm of capering youths, offering us hashish, their sisters and a whole host of other local delights. To escape them we ducked into the souk, and running through its by-ways until we had lost them found ourselves in a quiet courtyard. A boy came up and suggested we visit the shop in the corner. As we approached, an elderly man in a karakul hat came out to welcome us, offered us tea, and insisted that we had no obligation to buy anything. We sat and enjoyed his tea, but as we got up to leave, he said: ‘Why don’t you look round my shop, you might find something you like?’ I answered that I had a shop like his in London, and could see there was nothing there for me. ‘You think you know everything!’ he declared, and after I had protested, continued: ‘If I show you something you’ve never seen before, will you stay and have another cup of tea?’

Reluctantly we agreed, and it was at this point that he removed the heavy gold ring from his finger and thrust it into my hand, demanding: ‘Now, what’s that, if you know so much?’ It did not look so old, its eagle head rather reminded me of a fraternity ring, and wedged inside the head was a piece of brown stone, opaque and muddy coloured. I had no idea and told him so. ‘See! You don’t know everything,’ he said triumphantly, ‘now, sit down and I’ll order some tea.’ And as we sat sipping it, he told us the tale of the ring.

The stone inside, he said, had a particular quality, which was that a snake could not come near it. When eagles were ready to nest, they would fly over the High Atlas until

they spotted one of these stones, which they then deposited in their nest to protect the eggs from snakes. In Morocco such stones were deemed to hold great power, and were accordingly greatly valued, and each family that possessed one would pass it down from generation to generation, usually mounted in a piece of jewellery.

I had to admit that his was a terrific story, which more than proved his point. And as a result of this I passed by his shop most days, to sit and talk, or to wander around the souk with him, a procedure that revealed a side of life there that I could never have imagined. Much of it revolved around the Moroccan pharmacies, full of reptiles and other creatures floating in jars of yellowing liquids, and large ceramic containers of herbs, spices, bark, minerals and other unidentifiable substances. It was here that I found an entirely different view of life from our own, but with its own logic and rules. Things invisible to us were a reality for them, within another coherent conceptual structure that dictated the meaning and pattern of their lives. It occurred to me that if magic and the like are not considered mysterious or imaginary, they can become something to be worked with. It just required a shift of focus, which this whole community I was introduced into seemed to have achieved. There was a ragged, tattered heap of a man crouched each day in the opposite corner of the courtyard. He was clearly mad, and I asked one day what had happened to him. ‘He got too involved with the pharmacies,’ came the answer, ‘and lost his mind. We look after him now.’

Those days in Marrakesh were so interesting that I always remembered the ring that made the introduction.

And hence my surprise at seeing it on Peter’s finger.

Peter’s story began much the same. It diverged at the point that he was sitting in Nessi-Bey’s shop drinking his tea, spotted the ring, and asked about it. He then explained that he had come to Marrakesh to find two eagle chicks to be trained for the hunt, on behalf of a Saudi prince. Marrakesh was to be his base while he scoured the High Atlas for a suitable nest from which to steal the chicks. Nessi-Bey was delighted, and insisted that Peter move into his house, instead of the hotel on the Jemaa al-Fnaa where he was lodging. At the moment Peter was removing the eagle chicks from their nest he saw the stone, put it in his pocket, remarking to me that it was covered in eagle shit, which was proof of its authenticity.

When it was time to leave, Peter presented the stone to Nessi-Bey to thank him for his hospitality. In response, Nessi-Bey removed his gold ring, handed it to Peter, and said: ‘This is not a gift, I am lending it to you. You have many problems, this ring will resolve them. Next time we meet you will give it back to me.’ Peter did, indeed, have

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many problems, but when he returned to England they disappeared, and more importantly he met Dido, and their lives were also changed.

At the end of his tale, Peter explained that Dido’s father, Teddy, had given them a bunch of gold sovereigns, which they had melted down to fill two casts of the eagle ring, and the one on his finger was not the original. The original he drew out of his pocket to show me, and said that on his next visit to Marrakesh it would return to its owner.

During 1984 and 1985 I saw Peter and Dido quite often in Saudi Arabia. They lived on the top of the Souda Mountain in Asir Province, where Peter ran a falcon breeding programme, artificially inseminating the females and hatching the eggs in incubators – a tricky business at the best of times since the female falcons didn’t welcome being interfered with in this way. He was working for Prince Khaled al-Faisal, a poet and passionate falconer as well as governor

of the province, who was also my patron at the time for an exhibition I was organising at the King Faisal Foundation.

In 1995, Dido went to stay with her mother in SouthWest France, where one of the obligatory rituals was to leap off the bridge into the Lot River. As Dido resurfaced from the deep water she realised with horror that the eagle ring had slipped from her finger and was lost. Mark Shand, her brother-in-law, was on the bridge, and learning what had happened, found a piece of chalk to mark the exact spot from which she had jumped. Leaving Dido despairing on the bridge, he went to find Gill, who, practical as ever, summoned the local frogman. A crowd gathered to watch, expecting a body at least to emerge, and when they learned that a ring had been lost they howled with laughter. Locating such a thing in such a deep flowing river was impossible. But the frogman did find the ring, and here it is to prove it.

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133 TWO PAIRS OF H ELLENISTIC GOLD EARRINGS Afghanistan, 3rd–2nd century bc Size: 6 cm long Private collection, U.K.

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13 4 H e l l e n i s t ic G ol d Br ac e l et WITH SIGNATURE OF ITS MAKER MESTOR Afghanistan, 2nd century bc Size: coil 86 cm long, diameter 6.8 cm Published: O. Bombearachi, C. Landes, C. Sachs, ‘De l’Indus à l’Oxus Archeologie de l’Asie Centrale’, Monpellier 2003, no. 91 a–b Private collection, U.K.

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135

136

135 GOLD RING WIT H AGATE BEZ EL Central Europe, 3rd–4th century Size: 3.4 cm

13 6 GOLD RING WIT H AGATE INTAGLIO Central Europe, 3rd–4th century Size: 3.6 cm

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137

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137 GOLD RING WIT H AGATE INTAGLIO Central Europe, 3rd–4th century Size: 3.5 cm

138 GOLD RING WIT H AGATE INTAGLIO Central Europe, 3rd–4th century Size: 3 cm

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139 JADE SEAL of PIR-BUDAQ Iran, circa 1454 Size: 3.5 cm diameter Jade mounted in silver Redoubtable warriors and carvers of empire, the Turkmen tribe of the Qara Qoyunlu, pushed westwards by the Mongols, rose to power in the later 14th century in northern Iraq and Azerbaijan. One of their dynasty, Qara Yusuf, opposed Tamerlane, and had to flee first to the Ottomans and then to the Mamluks in Syria, returning to reclaim his realm in 1406. His son Jahanshah ruled as a Timurid vassal. Pir-Budaq

was awarded the governorship of Shiraz, and then of Baghdad. When he proclaimed his autonomy Jahanshah besieged Baghdad, caught and then killed his own son in spite of promising him immunity.

Inscription: ‘Verily God commands justice and goodness, Pir-Budaq son of Jahanshah son of Yusuf Noyan’.

Actual size

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140

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1 4 0 CORNELIAN SEAL OF QUBADH BIN K H ALIL of t h e RAMADAN OGH ULLARI Adana, Turkey, 922 ah/1516 ad Size: 2.9 cm bezel diameter Mounted as a ring in silver The Ramadan Oghullari Turks were part of the Oghuz federation. They made their capital at Adana, and existed as a buffer state between the Qaramanids and the Mamluks, generally favouring the latter.

The Ottoman Sultan Selim I brought them into submission in 1516 on his way to crush the Mamluks in Syria. The family remained as governors of Adana until the early 17th century.

1 4 1 TIMURID JADE SEAL RING Iran, 2nd half 15th century Size: 2.8 cm bezel diameter Mounted as a ring in silver

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1 42 GIOTTO’S CAM PANILE IN F LORENCE An architect’s wood model, circa 1830 Size: 128 cm high The entire flock of pre-modern Western thought, religious, spiritual, artistic and scholastic, seems to have roosted in this remarkable tower. In the 14th century these various species were all alive and comprehensible, but since then most of them have become extinct, and interpretation of such a complex monument is today a largely irrelevant exercise. The tower remains an iconic feature of the architectural landscape of Florence, and of what the city has come to represent for Western civilisation.

Arnolfo di Cambio, the first Master of the Works of the Cathedral, died in 1302, and 32 years later Giotto was appointed his successor in 1334. He was 67 years old, and devoted himself to designing this free-standing bell-tower, of which only the ground floor had been completed by the time of his death in 1337. His plans were nevertheless scrupulously followed by Andrea Pisano, and completed in 1359 by Francesco Talenti, who omitted Giotto’s

spire, thereby reducing the intended overall height by 37.5 metres. Although principally known as a painter, Giotto was also one of the founding fathers of Italian Renaissance architecture, along with Brunelleschi and Alberti.

Apart from the complex mathematical correspondences involved in the geometry of the building, the façade was adorned with panels of sculpture designed to beam out a whole new outlook on the world. It is tempting to draw a comparison with early black-and-white silent movies from Hollywood, which rapidly developed into a powerful world-wide phenomenon. Giotto’s tower and its context projected what they represented, affecting the likes of Trithemius, Paracelsus, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, and many more, and profoundly changed the world in many ways. By comparison, from Hollywood we got Ben Hur and Terminator 2!

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1 43 A GERMAN STATE GLAIVE (KUSE) of a n OF F ICER of t h e BODYGUARD of SIGISMUND F RAN Z , ARC H DUKE OF AUSTRIA Converted to executioner’s use in the city of Algiers Dated 1663 Size: 58 cm Steel, hardwood, wood-lined leather sheath The French inscription in red paint reads: ‘Executioner’s sword found by Captain Muller in the Kasbah during the taking of Algiers…bears the date 1663, was used in particular for the beheading of Christians.’

Captain Muller was under the command of General Count de Ghaisnes de Bourmont at the time of the defeat of Hussein Dey, ruler of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers. This chopper must have been part of the loot captured by the Ottomans during the Austro-Turkish war and siege of Vienna in 1683. Sigismund Franz (1630–1665) was ruler of Austria from 1662 to 1665.

France’s invasion of Algiers in 1830 was initiated by Charles X after the French consul Pierre Deval was struck

in the face by the Dey with his fly-whisk. Their dispute arose from the delay in paying Jewish merchants in Algiers for the delivery of grain for French troops. When defeat stared the Dey in the face, he negotiated his own free passage to Naples, along with his harem and personal wealth, where he lived out his final years peacefully.

We fear, as the media distributes images of grisly beheadings of Christians, that we are slipping back into a time of uncontrollable barbarism. This weapon could serve as a reminder that nothing much has changed; and probably never will.

Provenance: Dr. Ben Harnon Collection, Paris

1 4 4 A . 451 W H ITWORT H PATENT PERCUSSION VOLUNTEER MATC H PRI Z E RI F LE Presented to: ‘F. Hoare, 9th Gloucester Volunteers, The First Prize, For Most Points from 400 to 900 yds., 96 Competitors. Volunteer Officers Course Hythe Decr. 1860.’

By Whitworth Rifle Company, Manchester, No. 1394, Dated 1860 Barrel size: 81.3 cm The papers which accompany the rifle – copies of newspaper reports, letters between gun collectors and historians, biographical details, etc. – make it clear that Francis Hoare’s feat of marksmanship at Hythe that December day in 1860 remained a legendary event. He achieved it with a .577 Long Enfield rifle. It also emerges that the Whitworth patent on this presentation rifle was specifically for the twisted octagonal bore of the barrel, that was originally invented by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The latter ordered a prototype from Westley Richards in 1852 that proved extraordinarily accurate in trials at

Woolwich. Robert Whitworth visited Richards’ shop in 1854 where he saw and examined Brunel’s gun. He then patented the twisted bore of the barrel. Brunel was notoriously negligent about protecting his ideas, and when told about the Whitworth patent, he retorted: ‘What is it exactly he does patent? It cannot be merely the polygon.’ But it was, and from that small beginning there grew a great armaments business. While Brunel died in straightened circumstances in 1859.

Provenance: E.J. & R. Burton Collection

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1 45 JAMBUDVI PA The Jain Psychic Cosmograph, India, circa 1800 Size: 2.40 m square According to Jain cosmology, Jambūdvīpa is at the centre of Madhyaloka, or the middle part of the universe, where the humans reside.

It consists of many continent-islands surrounded by oceans.

Mount Meru is at the centre of the world surrounded by Jambūdvīpa in the form of a circle, containing six mountains dividing the continent into nine zones.

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