The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai, is a cast bronze bird with engraved
feathers and a handle in the form of a stylized animal. Such
zoomorphic vessels have a long history going back to Sassanian
times and this bird has two impressive antecedents, a bronze
Persian incense burner in the Berlin-Dahlem Museum (eighth- to
ninth-century) and a cast brass ewer from Iraq in the Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg (796–7). Small animal bronzes appear
throughout the Fatimid period and one delightful example is a
hollow cast bronze hare in the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo. The
hare was a symbol of fertility and good luck, and this example,
with its flattened-back ears, recalls the hares that race the borders
of Coptic textiles, but unlike those uniform creatures, this is full of
sculptural energy and the animation packed into its small crouching
form is quite extraordinary. A feature of many of these animals
is the rich surface decoration, engraved or embossed, covering the
form with a rich mantle of arabesque. Two exemplary pieces are a
beautifully sculptured lion in the National Museum, Copenhagen,
with an antelope in its mouth, and an eleventh-century ass covered
with a vine-scroll and grapes in the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo.
Among other creatures, cast bronze parrots of the Fatimid era
are a feature of the Keir Collection in Ham, Richmond, England.
Their function was uncertain until a lamp chain, using this motif,
was acquired by the collection in 1977. In this intriguing object the
chain passes through the parrot’s body, and below is suspended an
oval openwork bronze ball consisting of arabesques and medallions
containing birds and animal forms. Similar designs were produced in
Persia but the pseudo-hieroglyphs on the back of the parrot indicate
its Egyptian provenence. Of a more utilitarian nature, two ewers in
the same collection relate closely to traditional designs going back to
pre-Islamic times. It is not clear whether these are Fatimid, and they
could possibly date from the Tulunid or Ikhshidid periods. Their
distinctive shape consists of a bulbous body tapering to a tall narrow
neck, from which springs a flared and pointed mouth. The bodies
stand on cylindrical feet, their necks are banded with ring collars and
the rims of the ewers are capped with domical hinged lids. Angling
sharply out from the base of these vessels are S-shaped handles with
rectangular openwork boxes at their centres. The tops of the handles
have thumb rests, one in the form of a lion, and the other being boxshaped
with concave, dice-like circles punched into each side. There
is a similar vessel in the British Museum, found in a Coptic monastery
(ninth to eleventh century), with an antelope-shaped thumb rest.
above: Crouched hare in cast bronze: eleventh century.
The Decorative Arts of the Tulunids and Fatimids 83