Cup Decorated with Figures
Unknown · Late twelfth or early thirteenth century (1185-1215)
Around the inside and outside of this small bowl, seated figures in patterned robes face one another in a ring, their round faces framed by dark hair, painted in reds, blues, blacks and touches of gold on a creamy white glaze. Lean close: the walls are only two millimetres thick, and the colours sit on top of the glaze rather than under it. Potters first fired the vessel with its white glaze, then painted the figures in enamel colours and gold and fired it again at a lower temperature. Iranians called the result haft rang, seven colours, and modern scholars call it minai, from the Persian word for enamel.
Minai ware was made in Iran in the decades around twelve hundred, and its court scenes, riders and rows of seated companions echo the paintings in luxury manuscripts of the same period, of which almost none survive. The bowl thus preserves a lost world of Persian painting on a piece of tableware. It was given to the Louvre in nineteen eleven. Notice how the figures are arranged so that whoever drank from the cup always had a company of guests looking back at them.
Did You Know? The figures were painted on top of the finished glaze and fired a second time, a technique whose Persian name means seven colours.
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