Large dish with vegetal decoration

This is a large conical bowl with curved sides that flare out at the top and around the simple rounded lip. A blue and brown decoration stands out against the cream-coloured glaze that covers both faces.

On the obverse surface, the rim is highlighted by a ribbon of four narrow blue lines interspersed with areas of chequered patterns in the same colour, enclosed by two brown edgings. Covering the entire surface is a rosette framed in a circle surrounded by two blue edgings, suggestive of a large flower in bloom. The colours are applied in solid tints or, for the main blue drawing, cross-hatching. The petals in the form of broken arches surmounted by nodules radiate out from a nucleus composed of a hexagon inside a scalloped six-lobed corolla and a six-pointed star. The star’s points are connected to the petals of the rosette, each of which is decorated with a brown almond-shaped motif. Stylised ace of spades-shaped floral motifs with cross-hatching patterns fill the outer intervals between the petals. Springing forth from them are slender brown three-lobed leaves that taper off to sharp tips. Together the floral motifs and leaves form a kind of garland dotted with inverted blue half-leaves that flank the tips of the cross-hatched flowers.

The decoration on the bottom of the bowl is a good illustration of ceramic production in the Hafsid period, when the chromatic range of cobalt blue and manganese brown on a white ground superseded the greens, browns and yellows that had been in vogue during the previous centuries. The soberness of the decoration is the legacy of the fundamentalist rigor of the Almohads (twelfth century), who produced ceramics with foliated scrolls, simple friezes and solid or scalloped arches, rosettes and star motifs. This piece offers certain analogies with other contemporaneous ceramics identified in Marrakech, Bougie and Paterna.[1] A comparative study of potsherds from Bougie and ceramics discovered in Marseille in the early twentieth century, known as the “Marseille era”, which were decorated only in blue, concluded that the two productions were related. “They seem,” says Marçais, “to come out of the same workshop.”[2] In Pisa the San Michele Degli Scalzi chuch is decorated with two pieces in blue and brown from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century that display the same craftsmanship and style as the dishes from Tunis.[3] All these pieces have two essential characteristics: on a white ground, the use of blue for drawing the motifs and brown for outlining them or, as here, for colouring the secondary motifs; and the use of light vegetal decoration with simple or composed geometric shapes. It should be noted that in Egypt, Syria and Turkey during the same period, it was in fashion to use blue and black ceramic on a white or sky-blue ground.[4] The question is whether it is strictly a coincidence or whether it may be possible to consider that tastes in colours were shared in several countries of the Islamic Mediterranean world at the same era.

[2] G. Marçais. Les poteries et les faïences de Bougie. Constantine, 1916, quoted by Daoulatli A. Couleurs de Tunisie, 25 siècles de céramique. Exh. cat. Paris, Institut du monde arabe, 1994. Paris: IMA-Adam Biro, 1994, p. 106

[3] After the fashion of two bowls with geometric and floral decoration that date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, displayed at the Sidi Kacem al-Jelizi Museum, inv A.54 and A.23. See Couleurs de Tunisie, 25 siècles de céramique. Exh. cat. Paris, Institut du monde arabe, 1994. Paris: IMA-Adam Biro, 1994, p. 158, 168

[4] See bowl with bearded Harpy, Syria, early thirteenth century, siliceous paste, painted polychrome decoration under transparent glaze, National Museum of Damascus, inv. A/1436. See also: Bowl with floral decoration, siliceous paste, underglaze-painted decoration, Syria, twelfth–thirteenth century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 56.185.10. (The Orient of Saladin, the Art of the Ayyubids, Exhibition presented at the Institut du monde arabe from 23 October 2001 to 10 March 2002. IMA-Gallimard, 2001, p. 161, 168.)