A Kashan lustre star tile with Mongol figure, Persia, 14th century

the centred painted with very strong lustre depiction of a Mongol with bird resting on hand amongst dense foliage, in a cobalt-blue border of reserved naskh inscription, the tile is set in a square wooden frame

Sotheby's Monaco, 21st April 1979

Published in H. Wallis, The Godman Collection. Persian Ceramic Art belonging to Mr F. DuCane Godman, F.R.S; with examples from other collections. The Thirteenth Century Lustred Wall Tiles, London, 1894, Plate XV.1.

slight chip on the upper left triangle, excellent glaze, as viewed
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Inscription

A Persian quatrain ending with: 'In the year...' (then illegible)

This tile exhibits some of the most ambitious techniques developed by the Kashan potters. Kashan was one of the principal and most famous centres for the production of fine pottery and tiles between the twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries. Our tile belongs to the mid-thirteenth to fourteenth century representations of the Persian ideal of beauty, comprising moon-shaped faces, long narrow eyes, and long thick locks of hair. They reflect the stylised Turkic features of Seljuk and Mongol invaders. These physical characteristics are also common to figural scenes in contemporary metalwork and miniature paintings of the fourteenth century (see Porter 1995, p.42, fig.30).  

Particularly noticeable and interesting (to our piece) is the stool on which the Mongol figure is seated. Usually, figures would be depicted seated on the ground and cross-legged whereas our figure is seated on a typical folding chair. Folding chairs were only used by nobles and high ranking individuals in earlier Egyptian and Greco-Roman times and seem to have become the fashion in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Islamic world. Chairs with x-shaped legs can be seen in the famous Dioscorides manuscript of A.D. 1224 and in the miniature in the khitab al-aghani manuscript from the early thirteenth century showing Badr-ad-Din Lu'lu' using the stool as a throne (see Otto Kurz's discussion on folding chairs and Qur'an stands in Richard Ettinghausen [Ed.], Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972, pp.299-314, and figs.4, 5 & 6). Our figure seems to be a high ranking individual based on this particular depiction.

Our tile is very similar in shape, style and theme to one found in the British Museum (AOG 1983.212) also depicting a Mongol in the same attire and with similar features (see Komaroff & Carboni 2002, p.42, fig.38).