Islamic Glass Perfume Sprinkler

Pale green glass bottle of globular body with raised foot with scalloped splayed base and thin cylindrical neck leading to a flower--like mouth. Applied trails of the same colour and undulating bands of glass at the neck. The glass translucent and featuring extensive weathering.

The zigzag trailing in evidence here originated in the late Roman period in the Eastern Mediterranean regions and links its with other glass objects produced in the preceding six or seven centuries. Trailed motifs such as these diffused from the Levant into Islamic Central Asia during the Seljuk period. The Iranian glassworkers that absorbed the technique innovatively reworked the designs by exaggerating the abstraction of the trailing as can be seen in the flamboyant motifs of our bottle

Mirror of All Ages and Cultures 58 Brook Street, London W1K 5DT –United Kingdom-Tel: 0044 20 7493 7778-Fax: 0044 20 7493 9593 941 N La Cienega Blvd, California 90096-Tel: 001 310 859 8408 58-4 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea 03053, +821034973413 www.barakatgallery.com barakat@barakatgallery.com Islamic Bronze Incense Burner in the Form of a Feline -- LO.1324 (LSO) Origin: Central Asia Circa: 1100 AD to 1200 AD Dimensions: 13.4" (34.0cm) high x 11.6" (29.5cm) wide Collection: Islamic Art Medium: Bronze Price: £2,000,000.00 This beautifully made open--work incense burner is an elite interpretation of a form widely spread across Central Asia in the 11th to 12th centuries. While zoomorphic and anthropomorphic representations were forbidden under Islamic religious law, the so--called “principle of improbability” was employed to create animals that were so far removed from reality that they could not be argued to be in any way representational of nature; thus were the strictures avoided. Unlikely animals were created by manipulation of proportions and postures, incorporation of imagined elements (or those taken from other creatures) and flamboyant decoration using floral and abstract geometric motifs. The current piece takes the general form of a cat (either a lion or a lynx) and displays all of these methods in a technical and aesthetic tour de force.