The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

top: Doors of the Sultan Hasan mosque.
above: Detail of door of the Sultan Hasan mosque.
178 The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo
inlaid, chased or embossed by means of casting or repoussé
work. Chasing involved punching and indenting the surface
without removing the metal, and repoussé was a technique for
embossing forms by hammering thin sheets of metal against a
firm but yielding substance (usually, in the case of vessels, from
the inside out). 20 Repoussé work was often pierced into filigree
patterns, and this technique can be seen in the bosses and lobes
that appear in the radiating patterns in the entrance doors to
Sultan Hasan’s mosque (now installed in the mosque of Sultan
al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh). The quality of metalwork in these and
other doors throughout this mosque, particularly those in the
minbar, is unsurpassed.
Similar repoussé work can be seen in the bronze entrance
doors to the madrasa-khanqah of Sultan Barquq (1384–6) in al-
Mu’izz street. Here the surface is made up of radiating patterns of
twelve- and six-sided figures which spring into relief in the
repoussé bosses, hexagons and lobes. Unlike at the Sultan Hasan
mosque, these surfaces are not pierced but engraved and inlaid
with silver and composed of a varied range of flat and convex lobes
and regular and irregular hexagons, engraved and inlaid with fine
arabesques, lotus flowers and rosettes. Throughout the latter half of
the fourteenth century bronze became more scarce and sycamore
more readily available. For this reason the madrasa doors in the
inner sahn contain less bronze and the doors to the mausoleum are
made entirely of wood. The wooden planks of the madrasa doors
are clearly visible, providing the ground for the copper facing of
open-work arabesques in the central medallions, cornerpieces and
borders. More reminiscent of carpet patterns and contemporary
bookbinding, these finely engraved filigree arabesques have a lightness
of touch in keeping with the fleur-de-lis patterns in the joggled
voussoirs of the door lintel above. 21
Perhaps more remarkable than the technical skills involved
in these door facings is their complexity of geometric design. The
entrance doors of the Sultan Hasan mosque display a typical
Mamluk pattern in which sixteen- and twelve-sided figures are
locked together into one dynamic surface by the intermediary
of overlapping subsidiary polygons. In his book Islamic
Patterns, Keith Critchlow examines a similar design, and the
following analysis is worth quoting because it is pertinent not
only to this particular example (of a minbar), but to Mamluk
geometric design as whole: