Bottle with landscape decoration Iran, late 17th to early 18th century. Stonepaste, painted decoration under a transparent, colorless glaze.

This bottle still has its original, typically Iranian appearance – a pear-shaped body and a long neck. It is decorated with a landscape painted in light blue against a white ground, with the outline of the drawing painted in a slightly darker blue. A cypress motif entwined in the branches of a flowering tree is displayed four times on the body, separated each time by a flowering stem emerging from the ground-line, which in turn is symbolized by a series of small arcades. There is a band of stylized medallions at the base of the neck, which is adorned with a number of floating knots in the Chinese style. A narrow band of small leaves, simplified in the extreme, and framed by borders, highlights the lip. The iconography is taken from an important Iranian cultural theme. The cypress entwined with a flowering branch is a love metaphor, frequently encountered in Persian poetry and the arts of the book. The cypress tree evokes the supple but vigorous figure of a young man – and sometimes that of a young woman – and is always a synonym for beauty. The flowering branch which delicately enlaces the cypress requires no comment. This graceful, refined theme is frequently encountered in Safavid art. It appeared early in the arts of the book and in textiles. In the field of ceramics, where the theme seems to have emerged later, as attested by this bottle which can be dated to the end of the seventeenth century.