A fine and rare Abbasid lustre bowl with stylised vegetal decoration, Iraq, 10th century

of shallow round form with lightly sloping edges on a short foot, the earthenware body painted with a golden lustre on an opaque white glaze with an abstract vegetal design comprising of four petals filled with a wavy line, between four stylised leafy stems, a leafy scroll to exterior

Perpetual Glory. Medieval Islamic Ceramics From the Harvey B. Plotnick Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.

O. Pancaroglu, Perpetual Glory. Medieval Islamic Ceramics from The Harvey B. Plotnick Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, p.55, no.15.

Overall in fairly good condition, lustre bright, once broken with associated restoration, some flaking to areas of restoration and re-glazing on surface, small rectangular chip to part of bowl visible on reverse, as viewed.
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The decoration on this dish, with its highly organic yet abstracted design, refers back to the tradition of earliest lustre ware of the first Abbasid period, in which potters experimented with designs based on the more antique model of the 'palmette-tree' motif.

The scholar Ernst Grube describes the development of such a design from the "possible floral form to a totally abstract pattern of high complexity which, at times, achieves a density and integration of all parts of the pattern, so that an identification of the individual elements from which the design was originally derived becomes almost impossible" (Grube 1976, p.48).

This certainly appears to be the case in this dish, which, in its delicate rendering of the stylised palmette forms, retains the concept of the naturalistic palmette tree. The four stylised petals that at first seem like geometric elements, become vegetal through the use of a simple wavy line.