Fig. 357.—Lattice-work, S.K.M. (L.-P.)
Fig. 358.—Lattice-work, S.K.M. (L.-P.)
In the illustration of a “Street in Cairo” (Fig. 355), two of these meshrebiyas project on brackets from a house front.
A richer style of the lattice-work decoration was used in open panels and balustrades of the pulpits, where the triangles and hexagons that form part of the design are carved on the surface, and inlaid back and front with ivory or ebony.
The houses in Cairo of the purest Saracen style have the best part of the carvings and decoration in the inside; they are generally two or three stories in height, but were much higher in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The lower parts are built of stone, and the upper stories of brick and wood, plastered white.
The lower story has the stones coloured in alternate courses of red ochre and white limewash. The doorways are sometimes decorated by having peculiar voussoirs and interlaced ornament (Fig. 359).
Fig. 359.—Doorway of a Private House. (L.-P.)
There is an illustration of a shop-front in M. Bourgoin’s “Eléments de l’Art Arabe” which is an exquisite example of Saracen work of good proportion and design in its doors and windows. Saracenic ornament, as it appears in plaster, stone, wood, and mosaic decoration, of the mosques, pulpits, and wekālas or khans, deserves special notice on account of its extreme originality of design and treatment, inasmuch as, whatever may be its true origin, we must certainly admit that there is a marked difference between it and the ornament of any other historic style.