Ceramic 17 - Tile 5

Tile 5

 

Star tile from the British Museum. 14th C, Kashan.

It's getting harder and harder to find good crosses. I tried three different ones for this tile. One of them was a rather floral, skinny cross. I started with a solid background and carved the flowers into it. It really didn't work well. The original was too skinny and I couldn't reproduce the dimensions, even after removing one of the flowers. I guess I was right to avoid animals and such figures. Upon investigation, the tile is Tamurid not what I'm looking for

So I painted over it and carved a more swirly pattern (below). I've only managed to find one, not very good at all, image of this cross and had to extrapolate. I'm rather happy with how it turned out but as the glaze was so thick, this tile has a texture to it.

 

Cross tile from the mausoleum of Imamzada Yahya in Veramin near Tehran. Part of a panel of glazed lustre-ware tiles. State Hermitage Museum. Inv. nos IR 1026-1062. 1097 - 1118.

The other cross on this tile is also a new one. The cross in the image below on the left is the one I used. It's in the Louvre as a panel. The image in the Louvre is small, but there's a good collection of representative images of different regions and art styles at the Walter Chapin Simpson Centre for Humanities.

 

Details of panel made of individual tiles.

Iran, Kashan, 1267 CE/665 AH. Fritware, overglaze lustre with color splashes. The panel if from the tomb of imamazade Djafar at Damghan. Inv. no.: OA 6319. Website (photo shows whole panel). Individual panels can be found here.

It saddens me that so many tiles have been pillaged from the Imamzada Yahya mausoleum. It's good that they are ending up in museums so internet hobbiests like me can appreciate them, but I really think they should have stayed on the mausoleum. I'm feeling particularly annoyed by it at the moment because there's a whole bunch of tiles in Shangri La, Honolulu, a rich woman's beautiful home. There are no good close up images but there's treasure upon treasure there, all hoarded away. It's like taking fossils from the rocks - these are things that will never occur again. They should be left for others to appreciate rather than squirreled away by people who have more resources than sense.

Tile 5. First of the second line.