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Alain.R.Truong
28 juin 2012

Peacock dish. Turkey, “Iznik”, c. 1550.

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Peacock dish. Turkey, “Iznik”, c. 1550.

This dish offers the viewer a complex vegetal composition combining elements from the saz repertoire – long serrated leaves, composite flowers and buds – with a more naturalistic style of plant motif – artichoke stems in bloom, flowers with swirling petals, tulips, and perhaps delicate violets. In the center is an errant peacock, lost in this fantastic garden. The decoration is exceptional in all respects: a subtle harmony of blue, turquoise, and pink monochromes, accentuated by the dark green color of the outlines; a surface made uniform through a composition that runs unbroken onto the flange; the superimposing of vegetal forms to create a three-dimensional effect. Most of the vegetal motifs, and the palette of hues, may be seen on other Ottoman ceramic wares from the 1540s and 1550s. Alongside the elements specific to the saz style blooms a more naturalistic style of vegetation: the thick central stem bearing an artichoke flower with a fish-scale pattern can be found on a series of dishes attributed to between 1540 and 1545; as for the tulips, they are to be seen on many dishes from the middle of the century, including pieces ascribed to the circle of the artist Musli; the dainty violets, executed in the same color as the tulips, are more rarely found in ceramics and herald the violets that graced the margins of the Divan-i Muhibbi (1566) overseen by the illuminator Kara Memi. While it is an accepted fact that workshops of the city of Iznik could produce very high quality works, the extreme finesse of this dish and the mastery of its composition also suggest a production from Istanbul, linked to the palace craftsmen (elh-i hiref). Istanbul archives attest to close links existing between the ceramists and ornamentalists working in the palace workshops, and it is highly probably that there was a production outlet in Istanbul itself. The choice of the peacock is therefore perhaps not without significance here: in the Persian culture that spread to the Ottoman court the bird is a symbol of royalty and power.

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