An Important Italo-Islamic Carved Marble Panel, Sicily or Southern Italy, Circa 11th-12th Century

the black marble of square form carved in deep relief with a central roundel enclosing two confronting birds with entwined necks, upright crescent-shaped wings and scrolling tail feathers

Ex-private collection, Southern Italy

Rich patination to the surface with some old chips and knocks to extremities, as viewed
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This magnificent emblemma panel would originally have been set into the wall of a grand building, either a public edifice, or a private residence belonging to a wealthy, high-status individual. The black marble indicates a prestigious commission. A south Italian or Sicilian provenance is reinforced by an abundance of stylistically-related artworks of the period: notably, near-identical paired birds with entwined necks to be found in the muqarnas section of the painted ceiling of the Capella Palatina, Palermo, dating to the mid-twelfth century and attributed to Fatimid craftsmen from North Africa (see Grube, E., and J. Johns, The Painted Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina, Genoa-New York, 2005, p.49, plate XIII, B7,8-9). 

Parallels can also be drawn with paired birds depicted on a group of Siculo-Arabic carved ivory caskets and oliphants from the eleventh century. For example, a similar pair of birds with entwined necks are carved within a roundel on an oliphant in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, (illus. Kühnel 1971, Tafel LIX, no.62f.); and a related pair of confronting peacocks feature on the cover of an eleventh-century ivory casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum (ibid. XXVII, no.37). Further occurrences of the motif can be seen on ivory caskets in the Louvre (ibid. XVII, no.31), and in the treasuries of Barletta Cathedral (Gabrieli, F., and U. Scerrato, Gli Arabi in Italia: Cultura, contatti e tradizione, Milan, 1979, fig.345), Veroli Cathedral (ibid., fig.483) and Trento Cathedral (ibid., fig 609).

The motif is also found in Iberian ivories and is not limited just to birds: an eleventh-century cylindrical casket, published by Kühnel as from Cordoba and formerly in the collection of the Marquis de Ganay, Paris, has a pair of confronted deer (or possibly camels?) with their necks entwined (Kühnel 1971, XXXI, 38d.).

Furthermore, the motif appears in luxury textiles, which acted as one of the chief media for the dissemination of designs in the early Islamic period. Paired confronting birds with similar long necks and plumage are to be found on a twelfth-century Iberian silk fragment (illus. Baker 1995, p.43) recorded in the Church of St Sernin in Toulouse in 1258. These Iberian textiles often used decorative motifs associated with earlier Sassanian fragments, such as bird motifs and pearl roundels, as well as drawing inspiration from contemporary works of art from Fatimid Egypt, Sicily and southern Italy.