The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

wooden fragments of this period in Cairo are the door soffits found in
Ibn Tulun’s mosque. The decorative scheme of the mosque as a whole,
derived almost exclusively from Samarra style B, was expressed in
stucco, but these wooden soffits represent a significant exception and
they bear a striking resemblance to the wooden panels excavated in
the throne room of the Jausaq al-Khaqani palace at Samarra (836–9).
They display panels and borders covered with linear motifs suggestive
of spear heads, heart-shaped palmettes, vases, volutes and leaves. They
are arranged on the surface and the composition is emphatically style
C, but the carving is shallow and they lack the deeper, incisive
slanting cuts that characterize the distinctive bevelled style of later
Tulunid woodwork.
Examples of this can be seen in the Museum of Islamic Art,
Cairo, which contains a number of important late ninth-century
wooden panels. They demonstrate the development of a strange
fusion of decorative and representational elements. The purpose of
these panels is uncertain, but it is likely that they belonged to the
secular rather than religious domain. In one panel there is a shallow
carved frieze showing decorative scrollwork with leaves and
palmettes under a band of Kufic. The calligraphy reads ‘blessing and
good fortune to its owner’, a sentiment typical of the kind inscribed
on numerous items of decorative art across the whole Muslim
world, particularly pottery. Another frieze depicts two confronted
doves separated by a palmette and surrounded by a convoluted
background of volutes and wing-like vegetal forms. The collared
doves are clearly representational but the background is an ambiguous
fusion of abstracted vegetal elements. Other panels in the museum are
more inventive, suggesting birds and leaves ambiguously spiralling
into semi-abstract designs. Figure and ground are one and the
competing surfaces claim the same contour.
One panel in the Louvre Museum, Paris, suggests a longnecked
bird with a leaf in its beak, rising like a phoenix from the
swirl of volutes at its base. This particular bird motif goes back to
Sassanian Persia, but here the level of abstraction has carried
the design a long way from its ancient roots. Its sinuosity and
asymmetry recalls Art Nouveau. In the Museum of Islamic Art,
Cairo, two similar birds, more symmetrically arranged, back to
back, are divided by a centrally placed palmette. Another bird-like
panel can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York. It has a tall rectangular format suggesting a double-headed
bird with tail feathers. It looks like an embryonic design for the
double-headed eagles which later appear in Persian embroidery,
above: Example of wooden panel, ninth or
tenth century.
The Decorative Arts of the Tulunids and Fatimids 71