Phoenix Ancient Art S.A.

This delightful silver and gilded bowl decorated in animal style patterning is quasi-hemispherical in shape and ornamented with a rich floral pattern-backing to its animal design. The bowl was raised from sheet by hammering. The item was totally gilded inside, and partially gilded on the outside under the lip, which was subsequently engraved with a foliate design as the only exterior decoration.

The walls of the bowl duplicate a forest during the hunt, as it is frequently depicted in much 14^th and 15^th Century, which could have been copied, to some degree, in designing this bowl. Ebulliant, stylised blooms are interrupted by the animals which gambol across them. The decoration is a pure example of so-called hatayi (or Cathay) floral forms in the Ottoman reconsideration of their original design. The stylisations derive from those of imported Chinese blue and white porcelain, taken into early Turkish period metalwork, and transformed to Ottoman taste. Across these stylisations run six animals, three bulbous lions rendered in relief and three gilded prey animals worked in the flat. The prey animals could have been intended for gazelles, but for the fact they have triple toes rather than divided hooves.

The bowl’s central medallion consists of a ground of hatayi flowers in profile, across which two arc-form stems of two such blooms, terminating in paired, interlocking hooks, seemingly their roots. This bold concept of two crossing ‘C’-forms suggests a whimsical treatment of a heraldic motif possibly belonging to the owner.

A single cast element of some nature, now lost, was formerly mounted on a swivel pin in the bowl’s interior. Of this, only the hole for the pin, now missing, remains.

The design of this important bowl is a contribution to knowledge about the development of design on bowls of its type. No other bowl of its type, displaying running animals, has ever come to show them so starkly placed against this particular, rigid chinoiserie, rumi-hatayi design form. Rumi-hatayi design is widely used on bowl ornamentation but normally without figurative additions. Yet there is a long Balkan and indeed Islamic tradition for bowls to carry on their walls the representations of animals pursuing or following others through arcades, nets, or large scrolls rather than upon the unusual, pure floral ground represented here. These bold forms may and do, often contain animals and birds, the composite perhaps simulating Paradise to our forbears, or the joys of the hunt.

The design of this bowl continues a Central European and Byzantine tradition for enlivening the surfaces of silver drinking vessels with representations of animals in pursuit. Such quasi-hemispherical cups, with or without animal ornamentation, were commonly used for drinking wine in the Balkans, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean from the 14^th through the 16^th Centuries. The vessel type remained popular in the newly Islamic spheres of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary, where the type remained in use before and after the Ottoman conquest (Kingdom of Bosnia in 1463 and Dukedom of Herzegovina in 1489). This type of hemispherical vessel, when it came to be produced in the Islamic sphere, continued to employ certain Renaissance details, such as a central laurel wreath substituting for a base ring.

Methods of manufacture of this kind of drinking bowl were certainly taught in the metalworking centres of the Dalmatian towns of Split, Dubrovnik and Kotor throughout the fifteenth Century. After the Ottoman conquest, a great number of silversmiths of this region joined the court workshops of Istanbul. It is not surprising that Ottoman art carries many traces of Dalmatian metalworking technique, combined with imported Iranian design forms such as the rumi-hatayi patterning shown here.

This bowl belongs to a high period of Ottoman court manufacture, around the middle of the 16^th Century. A bowl with overall rumi-hatayi patterning similar to that on exam, is now in the Budapest National Museum and dated to 1537 by its inscription, also naming a historically known Cardinal of the Dubrovnik silversmithing family, ‘Utesinic’.

A second bowl in the Archaeological Museum, Sofia, is dated by inscription to 1569. It carries purely hatayi design fitted into trilobes, which are of the dimensions of those encircling the central medallion of our bowl. This bowl is further stamped with the tughra hallmark of the Sultan Selim II (1566-1574), and carries the statuette of a crouching deer which was originally designed to swivel upon a pin. The remainder of its body, pinned to the ornamental central medallion, indicates what may have once been attached in the centre of this present bowl.

Finally two bowl of Dubrovnik manufacture, which are versions of ‘Paradise’ bowls made without Islamic influence, along the Dalmatian coast. The first, in private ownership in England and dating to the 15^th Century, carries a Dubrovnik hallmark of the head of St. Blase and illustrates dogs pursuing rabbits through ornamental vine scrolls round the outer walls. In the centre is a bear, perhaps the heraldic motif of the owner. The laurel wreath surrounding the centre of this bowl is similar to that on our bowl, subject of this report.

The second bowl, now in the Museum of Decorative Arts, Belgrade (inventory no. 2907: Radjokovic-Milovanovic 1981). This bowl, highly Renaissance in style, dates from the middle of the 16^th Century, as does our bowl. It illustrates how the circle of lobes surrounding the central laurel wreath on our bowl can relate to Italian designs in use in its time.