Palette

• Accession Number:AKM653
• Place:Iraq
• Dimensions:9.3 cm
• Date:10th century
• Materials and Technique:rock crystal, carved

• Decorated with a symmetrical pattern of floral decorations on its four sides as well as on its bottom, this unusual object of rock crystal has no obvious function. Its two circular hollows suggest a painter’s palette or inkwell, but using it for such a purpose would seem to defeat the intricate decoration and beautiful transparency of the whole. Indeed, vessels and objects carved of rock crystal were highly valued between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since this very hard material is especially difficult to work with, only highly skilled craftsmen could carve such an object from a solid block of quartz.

Further Reading

Early production and use of rock crystal can be traced to the 9th-century Abbasid court in Samarra and Baghdad.[1] According to the Persian polymath Abū ’r-Raiḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī (973–1048), its raw materials originated in East Africa, Madagascar, and even Kashmir. Transported through the port of Basra, these materials found their way into Abbasid workshops and, in turn, into a variety of objects.[2] With the rise of the Fatimid Empire (909–1171), Cairo soon established it own rock crystal workshop, which produced pristine vessels for the caliphal court and ultimately rivalled its Abbasid predecessors.[3]

Technical and stylistic features of this rectangular palette in the Aga Khan Museum Collection suggest it is not the product of a court workshop. The design of its floral decorations with palmettes and half-palmettes is much more closely related to a number of small flasks and bottles that can be attributed to the large-scale rock crystal industry within the Abbasid empire (750–1258). Since the sudden presence of rock crystal carvers in Cairo can be most likely explained by an influx of craftsmen from Abbasid territory, Fatimid production must be seen as an extension of that earlier tradition. While the Fatimid court workshop indeed developed its own stylistic features, commercial workshops might have continued to work in well-established decorative motives.

Objects like this palette were most probably produced for a wealthy urban elite, and it seems impossible to sharply distinguish here between pieces carved by Abbasid craftsmen and those carved by Fatimid craftsmen.[4] The Fatimid rock crystal industry suffered a premature collapse, most likely when rebellious troops looted Cairo’s caliphal treasury between 1067 and 1069.[5] In the aftermath, the markets were flooded with hundreds (if not thousands) of rock crystal vessels, making further commercial production inefficient.

In the following centuries, many of those rock crystal carvings found their way into European church treasuries.[6] Rock crystal already had numerous theological and symbolical connotations in the Christian tradition, and vessels made of this transparent material became suitable containers for the relics of saints and other revered figures. Not until the 13th century did European craftsmen begin to master the carving of rock crystal. Several more centuries passed before European craftsmen could compete with their 10th-century counterparts from Baghdad and Cairo.

— Marcus Pilz

Notes
1. Pilz 2019
2. Kahle 1936, 131–4; al-Biruni´s report about the wide ranging rock crystal trade is confirmed by archeological findings on the Comoro Island Mayotte (Pradines 2013) as well as the discovery of a 10th-century shipwreck in the Java Sea (Liebner 2014, 173–8).
3. Only two surviving vessels can be safely attributed to a Fatimid workshop. One at the treasury of San Marco in Venice bears in its inscription the name of the Caliph al-Aziz (r. 975–96), while another one (Florence, Museo degli Argenti) could be dated by its inscription to the first decade of the 11th century (see Rice 1956). A third object, a polished crescent (Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum), bears only a crudely carved inscription mentioning Caliph al-Zahir (r. 1021–36).
4. There must be a clear distinction between the workshops producing outstandingly delicate objects for the Caliph and his closest courtiers and the commercial workshops and craftsmen who worked for a wealthy elite in a technically less sophisticated manner. While the first ones had access to almost unlimited sources of materials and were therefore able to carve extremely complex vessels with walls as thin as 1 mm, the latter ones seem to have worked on a much smaller scale, using smaller chunks of material and working on a less risky technical level.
5. Shalem 1998, 65-7.
6. Ibid., 37-55, 72-98.

References
Kahle, Paul. “Bergkristall, Glas und Glasflüsse nach dem Steinbuch von el-Beruni.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 90 (Neue Folge 15) (1936), 322–56.
Liebner, Horst Hubertus. “The Siren of Cirebon. A Tenth-Century Trading Vessel Lost in the Java Sea.” PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2014 ISBN: 9780857318799
Pilz, Marcus. “Beyond Fatimid. The Iconography of Medieval Islamic Rock Crystal Vessels and the Question of Dating.” In Seeking Transparancy: The Medieval Rock Crystals. Proceedings of a conference held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, eds. Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem. Berlin: Reimer, 2020 (in press).
Pradines, Stéphane. “The Rock Crystal of Dembeni. Mayotte Mission Report 2013.” Nyame Akuma. Bulletin of the Society of Africanist Archeologists 80 (2013), 59–72.
Rice, David S. “A Datable Islamic Rock Crystal.” Oriental Art 2, no. 3 (1956), 3–12.
Shalem, Avinoam. “Islam Christianized: Islamic portable objects in the medieval church treasuries of the  Latin West.“ Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang, 1998. ISBN:9783631338995