Condition
Mended. Probably a pastiche: The neck seems to belong to another vessel and has been glued on the body of another. Iridescence on the exterior; in the grooves and in the interior, incrustation.
Description
Cut-off rim; conical neck, tapering toward the body, covered with 12 vertical grooves. Horizontal shoulder; rectangular body, square in cross section; flat bottom. On the bottom, an annular pontil scar (0.8 cm wide) is visible. On two of the four sides of the body, there are three grooves that drop slightly to the left. The other two sides are covered with two long oblique strokes that form an everted triangle. Two short vertical strokes flank the central strokes in the middle of each side.
Comments and Comparanda
Wheel-cutting and wheel-engraving were popular decorative techniques in Islamic glassware between the ninth and eleventh centuries, as numerous finds from various sites in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Tunis attest. Six categories of cut and engraved objects are defined on the basis of the decoration: scratch-engraved, faceted, with disks and related motifs, with raised outlines, slant-cut, and linear. In the twelfth century cutting gradually went out of fashion, replaced by enameling, the technique that prevailed during the next two centuries in Islamic glassware.
Cutting was employed mostly for the embellishment of colorless vessels of various forms, for example bowls, bottles, goblets, and flasks, although colorful and even cameo vessels occur too. There are indications that quite similar products were made in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt (Kröger, Jens. 1995. Nishapur: Glass of the Early Islamic Period. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art., pp. 116–175; Kröger, Jens. 1999. “Fustat and Nishapur: Questions about Fatimid Cut Glass.” In L’Égypte fatimide: Son art et son histoire, ed. Marianne Barrucand, 219–232. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne., pp. 219–232; Carboni, Stefano. 2001. Glass from Islamic Lands: The Al-Sabah Collection. London: Thames & Hudson., pp. 71–136; Whitehouse, David B. 2001. “Cut and Engraved Glass.” In Glass of the Sultans, exh. cat., ed. Stefano Carboni and David Whitehouse, 155–198. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art., pp. 155–161; Foy, Danièle. 2020. Le verre de Sabra al-Mansuriya (Kairouan, Tunisie), milieu Xe–milieu XIe siècle. Production et consommation: Vaisselle–contenants–vitrages. Archaeology of the Maghreb 1. Oxford: Archaeopress., pp. 85–98). For flasks with square or polygonal body, see comments and comparanda for cat. 390. For flasks with cut decoration that are square in cross section, see comments and comparanda for cat. 392. Also, for similar prismatic flasks, cf. Whitehouse, David B. 2014. Islamic Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, vol. 2. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass., pp. 73–74, nos. 727 and 728. For a vessel with polygonal neck and globular body covered with cut, multifaceted decoration, see Trois millénaires d’art verrier à travers les collections publiques et privées de Belgique, exh. cat. 1958. Liège: Musée Curtius., pp. 52–53, no. 66 (B.A.A.R. 1460). For miniature flasks with cut decoration, see cat. 383, with several parallels from various sites.
Provenance
1979, Edwin A. Lipps, 1922–1988 (Pacific Palisades, California), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1979
Bibliography
Unpublished
Exhibitions
None