Porch of a Mamluk House in Cairo
Unknown (Cairo) · Fifteenth century
Step under the vault and you are in the entrance of a private house in Cairo under the Mamluk sultans. The porch is built of alternating courses of yellow and white limestone, a striped masonry that Cairene builders used for mosques and palaces alike, and its inner walls and vault are carved with bands of ornament. Two and a half metres wide and three metres deep, it is architecture rather than an object: look up at the cut stone of the vault and at the way the courses of colour turn the corners.
The Mamluks, a dynasty of former slave soldiers, ruled Egypt and Syria from the thirteenth century until the Ottoman conquest of 1517, and their capital was one of the largest and most ornate cities in the world. Private houses of the period, unlike mosques, have mostly vanished, which makes this porch a rare survival. It reached Paris in 1889, the year of the Universal Exhibition, and belongs to the Museum of Decorative Arts, which has placed it in the Louvre's department of Islamic Art. The iron grilles and the wooden frame are modern additions made for its display.
Did You Know? The porch belongs to the Museum of Decorative Arts and is on long-term loan inside the Louvre's Islamic galleries.
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