Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World

Art, Craft and Text

Venetia Porter, Mariam Rosser-Owen, Venetia Porter, Mariam Rosser-Owen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857733436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The material and visual culture of the Islamic World casts vast arcs through space and time, and encompasses a huge range of artefacts and monuments from the minute to the grandiose, from ceramic pots to the great mosques. Here, Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen assemble leading experts in the field to examine both the objects themselves and the ways in which they reflect their historical, cultural and economic contexts. With a focus on metalwork, this volume includes an important new study of Mosul metalwork and presents recent discoveries in the fields of Fatimid, Mamluk and Qajar metalwork. By examining architecture, ceramics, ivories and textiles, seventeenth-century Iranian painting and contemporary art, the book explores a wide range of artistic production and historical periods from the Umayyad caliphate to the modern Middle East. This rich and detailed volume makes a significant contribution to the fields of Art History, Architecture and Islamic Studies, bringing new objects to light, and shedding new light on old objects.

1

THE PRINCIPLE OF PARSIMONY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE ‘MOSUL SCHOOL OF METALWORK’

JULIAN RABY

Depuis un siècle, Mossoul est célèbre en Occident. Pour les bronzes qu’elle n’a pas créés.

A.S. Melikian-Chirvani 1974

The term ‘Mosul metalwork’ is reassuringly familiar, yet disconcertingly elusive.¹ In a generic sense it presents no issue, as it conjures up for any student of Islamic art images of thirteenth-century brass vessels in a limited range of distinctive forms, profusely inlaid with silver. It is the precision of the word ‘Mosul’ that creates unease, as no one seems any longer willing to specify which objects were made in Mosul and which elsewhere by artists who had emigrated from Mosul.² Scholars over the last fifty years have increasingly treated the issue of attribution with resignation or dubiety; few have been as brave as Souren Melikian-Chirvani and dismissed Mosul’s claims altogether.³

Epigraphic, circumstantial and stylistic evidence exists, however, to permit a more positive stance, and to enable us to attribute a core group of documentary items to Mosul, and others to Damascus and to Cairo. While these can form the basis for further attributions on stylistic grounds, there is, I hope, enough presented here to begin to shape a picture of a metalwork ‘school’ in Mosul, and to identify one of the principal ways in which its techniques and styles were transmitted to Mamluk Cairo. I intend to show that this was a ‘school’ in multiple senses: relationships existed between artists who shared techniques, styles and motifs that they developed over the course of more than half a century; and they transmitted these through apprenticeships; and there was a conscious sense of community that was expressed not only in the persistent use of the nisbah ‘al-Mawsili’, but in the use of at least one, if not two, identifying motifs.⁴

SHIFTING SCHOLARSHIP ON ‘MOSUL METALWORK’

At first it seems almost perverse that there should be any uncertainty about inlaid metalworking in Mosul, as no other group of artefacts from the medieval Muslim world carries so much inscribed documentation, not even the contemporary ceramics of Kashan (see Table 1.1 on pp. 58–66).⁵ Over the course of the thirteenth, and the first decades of the fourteenth centuries we have 35 metal objects signed by some 27 craftsmen who style themselves ‘al-Mawsili’. And we have no less than eight with inscriptions stating that they were made in Mosul or for the ruler of Mosul or for members of his entourage. Current uncertainty is largely a reaction to the reductive assertion at the turn of the twentieth century that Mosul was the principal production centre of inlaid metalwork in the thirteenth century.

Silver-inlaid brasses of the first half of the thirteenth century were among the first Islamic objets d’art to be studied in Europe. Examples reached Europe at an early date, and were accessible, at least in Italy, well before the Orientalist fashion for scouring the bazaars of Egypt and the Levant from the mid-nineteenth century;⁶ and, well before the emergence of art-historical studies, the objects offered iconographic and inscriptional challenges that attracted scholars who were historians, epigraphers and numismatists.

Scholarship on the subject began with the publication of an ideal marriage of a documentary object and literary documentation. In 1828 Joseph Toussaint Reinaud published the collection of the French royalist and antiquarian Pierre Louis Jean Casimir (Duc) de Blacas d’Aulps (1771–1839), which included the only item known – until recently – to record that it was produced in Mosul itself, the celebrated ‘Blacas ewer’ made in 1232.⁷ Reinaud also translated the account by an Andalusian visitor to Mosul in 1250, Ibn Sa‘id: ‘Mosul…there are many crafts in the city, especially inlaid brass vessels which are exported to rulers.’⁸ In the 1840s Reinaud’s friend Michelangelo Lanci published several items of thirteenth-century inlaid metalwork, including the tray in Munich made for Badr al-Din Lu’lu’, the ruler of Mosul.⁹ Mosul’s reputation was assured.

By the 1860s Mosul’s precedence was being questioned. Claiming to have studied several hundred objects and to have found the names of some twenty artists, Henri Lavoix concluded that Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Egypt, and unnamed cities on the Mediterranean coast all produced inlaid metalwork. He provided no details, and tested credence by listing names and places like litanies, and by claiming he had seen works produced for a roll-call of famous twelfth-century rulers, works, incidentally, that have still to surface.¹⁰ He adopted a more nuanced tone some fifteen years later, when he acknowledged that the artists of Mosul deserved an independent chapter in the history of Islamic art: their work, he said, can be distinguished by its figural imagery, whereas in Syria and Cairo the engraver’s burin ‘imprisons itself, by contrast, in ornament and lettering’.¹¹ Lavoix was the first to draw attention to a ewer made by Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Mawsili in Damascus in ‘659/1260’. He made little of this crucial discovery, however, and the object itself disappeared from scholarly sight for the next thirty years.¹²

Mosul was accorded precedence and primacy by Lavoix’s numismatic colleague, Stanley Lane-Poole. Writing in the 1880s and 1890s,¹³ he proposed a Syrian school that was intermediary between Mosul and Mamluk Cairo, but his arguments were slight, and his proposal tentative, especially as he knew nothing of the ewer made in Damascus.¹⁴

A critical point came in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Gaston Migeon’s over-enthusiastic advocacy of Mosul provoked a stern reaction whose influence is still felt today.¹⁵ In the space of eight years, from 1899 to 1907, Migeon reached out to a broad public, publishing a two-part article on ‘Cuivres Arabes’ in the generalist art journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts, organising a major exhibition of Islamic art in Paris, and writing the first comprehensive introduction to Islamic objets d’art. In these he vaunted the role of Mosul, and claimed its production of inlaid metalware ran from the twelfth until the fifteenth century.¹⁶

He acknowledged in the article that his classification of inlaid metalwork was ‘de peu doctrinal’, but three years later – in the 1903 Palais Marsan exhibition – he adopted an even more doctrinaire classification, assigning the metalwork to three families: Mosul, Egypt and Persia. He recognised that other centres, such as Damascus, had competing claims, and tempered his schema with caveats, but his labels and captions were uncompromising.¹⁷ To Mosul he attributed a farrago of items we now know were made in several different regions (Fig. 1.1).¹⁸ The striking differences in technique, material and style must have been obvious to many visitors. Friedrich Sarre, a lender to the exhibition, expressed serious reservations.¹⁹ Even a non-expert, the crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Principle of Parsimony and the Problem of the ‘Mosul School of Metalwork’
• PART 1 METALWORK FROM THE IRANIAN WORLD
• PART 2 IRAN AND INDIA
• PART 3 MAMLUK METALWORK IN FOCUS
• PART 4 EGYPT AND SYRIA: ARTEFACT AND TEXT
• PART 5 THE ISLAMIC WEST
• PART 6 CERAMIC TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION
• PART 7 STUDIES IN LUSTREWARE
• PART 8 PAINTING TRADITIONS AND CONTEMPORARY ART
• Bibliography of James Allan’s Publications
• General Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright