Title: Cornice Tile
Date: first half of the 13th century AD
Location: Kashan, Iran
Materials: stonepaste body, with moulded relief decoration and lustre over an opaque glaze stained cobalt blue and turquoise
Dimensions: 41 x 47.5cm
Accession Number: POT 1532
Other Notes:
The tile is decorated with a seated female figure under a cusped arch. The crowning frieze bears seated female figures holding cups in their right hands: one figure projects and would have overlapped the adjacent tile. The arch bears an indecipherable inscription.
A related group of frieze tiles, bearing cusped arches with verses from Firdawsi’s Shahnamah, is thought to be from Takht-i Sulayman, the summer palace built for Abaqa Khan in the 1270s, high in the mountains of north-west Iran. Takht-i Sulayman is the best-preserved Ilkhanid secular building and its tiles, incidentally, are among the earliest recorded examples of the use of motifs from Chinese sources in Ilkhanid art.
Bibliography:
J.M. Rogers, The Arts of Islam. Masterpieces from the Khalili Collection, London 2010, cat.233, pp.194–5.
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