The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

above: Lustre-painted bowl: tenth to eleventh century
(Metropolitan Museum of Art).
92 The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo
used by druggists and alchemists. Much of this
glass is plain, but a significant amount was
decorated by means of hot and cold-working
techniques. Hot-working methods included
moulded, pinched, tonged and trailed decoration.
Moulded decoration was produced by
blowing molten glass into various types of
metal or terracotta moulds, while pinched and
tonged decoration was formed by the action
of pincers and tongs on heated glass. Trailing
was a form of decoration in which strands of
molten glass were wound around the surface
of a vessel. A form of trailing known as marvered
trailing produced very distinctive polychrome
designs displaying parallel wavy and
globular lines, usually in white against a dark
background. It is a technique that dates back
to Pharaonic times, consisting of rolling soft
threads and globules of opaque glass into a
transparent or translucent matrix. Bevelled, faceted and relief-cut
objects employed cold-working techniques such as grinding, drilling,
scratching, wheel-cutting and lathe-turning. Other forms of more luxurious
decoration consisted of lustre-painting, gilding and enamelling.
Among the most eye-catching objects to survive from the
eighth to the twelfth centuries are lustre-painted vessels. Possibly
the earliest surviving example is a goblet with a missing stem in the
Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo. Painted in a chestnut-brown on both
the inside and outside is a series of palmettes made up of trilobed
leaves framed in heart-shaped panels formed by stems and leaves.
Above this is a band of scrolling leaves and in the bottom of the
goblet is a rosette. Below the rim, dating this firmly to the eighth
century, is an inscription dedicated to the governor of Egypt, Abd
al-Samad ibn Ali (722–802).
Another lustre-painted object displaying an inscription is a
shallow dish dating from the eighth or ninth century in the Kuwait
National Museum. It has flared sides inside painted with a Kufic
inscription reading ‘Blessing and well-being from [the food] eaten
[from the dish] … I shall tell you a story, the essence of which lies
in the moment my eyes were embellished with kohl when I saw the
gazelle with a curving neck.’ 23
Three lustre-painted vessels from the Fatimid period are also
worth noting. Dating from the ninth or early tenth century is a