Another exceptional lamp now in the museum at Cairo is well illustrated in Schmoranz’s great work (Pl. xi.). This is a smallish lamp of green cloudy glass; the whole of the body and neck, except a plain band at the top, is worked into shallow, wavy ribs. It bears no enamel, but on the surface there are traces of the gilding that formerly covered it: this lamp came from a mosque built in 1363. At South Kensington are two small lamps of colourless glass of somewhat abnormal form without decoration of any kind.
I must finally mention the charming little lamp from the Myers collection (now at South Kensington) which, it is stated, was found in a Christian monastery in Syria ([Plate XXXIV.] 1). The thin clear glass, with pearly patina, the graceful, vase-like form, and, above all, the sparingly applied but quite exceptional decoration, in which the human figure finds a place, distinguish this lamp from the ordinary Cairene type. In this case the treatment of the figures, which, as I have said, are never found on true mosque lamps, closely resembles that on the inlaid metal-ware made at Mosul in the thirteenth century.[[124]]
And this carries us back to the question of the origin of this enamelled glass, and we are brought face to face with quite a number of interesting problems which can only be indicated here. That the application of enamels to glass by the Saracens was prior to the use of similar materials on porcelain by the Chinese, I have already mentioned. It is, indeed, not impossible that this method of decoration may have been suggested to the Chinese potters by specimens of the Saracenic glass which, as we now know, found their way to China at an early date. The use of enamels of very similar constitution on metals had, however, been known in certain parts of Europe since the first century of our era if not earlier, and the cloisonné enamels of the Byzantines had long been famous. In this connection, too, we must not forget the vitrum plumbeum with which the Syrian Jews manufactured artificial gems. It is to materials of this kind, true lead-fluxed enamels, that we must look for the origin of the decoration on Saracenic glass, rather than to the paint-like colours occasionally used by the Romans and Byzantines.
We may safely associate the apparently sudden appearance of this richly decorated enamelled glass with the change that came over the other arts of the Saracens about this time, and Dr. Lane-Poole is probably right in connecting this change with the rise of the Kurdish and Tartar families who played so important a part in the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Art of the Saracens, p. 127 seq.). Nur-ed-din, who ruled at Damascus and Aleppo in the twelfth century, came from the stock of the Beni Zenky, who adorned their coinage with figure subjects taken from both Byzantine and Persian sources. His successor, the great Saladin, came of the Ayubi stock that had ruled in Mesopotamia. Both families brought with them the traditions of Sassanian art and a complete freedom from the religious scruples of the earlier Semitic rulers. A little later the great Monghol invasion of Genghis Khan, who founded a new dynasty in Persia, opened the way to other influences, this time from the Far East. During all this period, the civilisation of the Frankish West was fighting its way into Palestine and Northern Syria. It would be difficult to find a parallel case in history—a case, I mean, of as many exotic influences as were now brought to bear upon Syria and Egypt, at work at the same time and in the same country. In both lands one result was an outburst of artistic splendour. This, in the first country, came to a premature end with Timur’s devastating campaign. In Egypt this glorious period lasted somewhat longer; but already in the fifteenth century the Memlook sultans had returned to the stricter rule of the faith, and by the next century, when after a period of turmoil Egypt fell under Turkish rule, the short-lived art of enamelling on glass was already extinct.
How completely this was so we may learn from an interesting document discovered some time since by the late M. Yriarte in the Venetian archives—amid the inexhaustible store now preserved in the old convent behind the Frari Church (La Vie d’un Patricien de Venise au XVIme Siècle, p. 147 seq.). In the year 1569, Marc Antonio Barbaro—that type of a Venetian noble, the liberal patron of artists and writers—was ambassador at Constantinople. The document in question is a despatch addressed by him to the Venetian senate; on it he has drawn in outline two designs for lamps—one a somewhat depressed version of our old mosque type, the other what M. Yriarte calls a ‘godet-lampe’ of elongated form,—in fact, a version of our ‘spear-butt’ or cup-lamp suitable for fitting into a wooden or metal frame. Barbaro urges the senate to see to the execution at Murano, with the greatest care, of as many as nine hundred pieces after these designs, for the demand came from no less a person than the Grand Vizier himself. There is no reference, in the order for these lamps, to any enamelling: those that are not plain (schietti) are to be decorated in the Venetian way (a reticelli).[[125]]
The old form was, however, kept up in those beautiful mosque lamps of fayence, Rhodian or Damascan in style, of which we have a few rare examples in our museums; these, I think, were made in the days of Turkish rule, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
I shall return in a subsequent chapter to the later glass of the Mohammedans—that of Persia and of India—glass that was for the most part influenced by Venetian models, in part even made by Venetian workmen: it would be hardly possible to treat of this glass before we have said something of its European prototype. We know practically nothing of any mediæval Saracenic glass other than the enamelled ware of Syria and Egypt. The little bowl of amber-yellow glass in the British Museum, enamelled with the figure of an angel, was considered by Franks to be Persian ware of the fifteenth century ([Plate XXVII.] 1). With it we may compare the already mentioned sphere from a lamp-chain in the same collection which is of very similar glass. The decoration of the first object is distinctly Persian, but its origin may be sought, perhaps, in the Tabriz district or even further north in Georgia, rather than in the more southern and eastern districts where, under Venetian influence, a glass industry sprang up in later days.
DRINKING BOWL
PERSIAN OR SYRIAN. FIFTEENTH OR SIXTEENTH CENTURY