Brass ewer inlaid with silver, featuring 'animated' inscriptions and musician- and moon-figures, Iran, 1220-40.

Ewer (aftabe). Brass, sheet, inlaid with silver. Now with a patina of dark olive brown turning black. Decorated with poetic and benedictory inscriptions, in several different types of script, groups of flying birds, musicians, and seated female figures holding up huge crescent moons. These are probably traditional Persian representations of the 'Planet' Moon. Western Iran, 13th century.

This ewer is one of a group of inlaid metalwork items from the 13th and 14th centuries where a figure holding a cresent moon was used repeatedly in the decoration, and not as part of a cycle of the seven planets. (The Moon and the Sun counted as two of the seven planets in medieval cosmology.) An early example is the so-called Blacas ewer in the British Museum (1866.1229.61), which is dated Rajab 629, equivalent to April–May 1232. This ewer and other specimens from the first half of the 13th century were made in the city of Mosul in the Jazirah (now northern Iraq), and the figure of the Moon was once thought to have been an emblem either of Badr al-Din Lu’lu’, the ruler of Mosul from 1222 to 1259, or of the city itself. The continued us of the motif after the 1250s and in centres of production other than Mosul means this is unlikely, but no other explanation has been offered. (See Julian Raby, The Principle of Parsimony and the Problem of the ‘Mosul School of Metalwork’, in Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen (eds), Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World. Art, Craft and Text. Essays in Honour of James W. Allen, London, 2012, p.32.)

The ewer was purchased in Istanbul in 1897 from Mrs Alice Whitaker, daughter and heir of William Henry Wrench (1836-96). Wrench was British consul in the city when he died, and he had formed a significant collection of Ottoman and Iranian objects while in the consular service. For images of how Wrench displayed his collection in his home in the Pera (Beyoğlu) district of the city, see V&A: PH.331 to 334-1892.

This ewer has a complex, angular form and cheerful decoration in silver. The good wishes in Arabic on the shoulder are in a bizarre style of script in which each upright ends in a human face. The figures between are four musicians. Those on the sides represent the moon.

In Islamic art, objects made from base materials were often transformed by sophisticated forms of decoration. Brassware, such as this ewer, was decorated with inlaid surface ornament.

For larger motifs, metalworkers chiselled out small areas of brass and filled them with thin sheets of silver, gold and copper. They added details by chasing the surface of the softer metals and contrast by using a black filler.

The inlay technique first became popular in eastern Iran in the mid 12th century. It then spread westwards and by 1250 was in use across the Middle East. Its popularity declined after 1500.

381-1897