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A Sixteenth-Century Iznik Dish

Tuesday 27th October, 2009 - Friday 30th April, 2010

Price: Admission Free

This beautiful dish is wonderfully evocative of the sixteenth-century Ottoman court culture in which Iznik ceramics flourished. As the centre of Turkish ceramic production, Iznik supplied the tiles and dishes which decorated the palaces and mosques of the great empire of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566).

Key to the popularity of Iznik ceramics was the strong, clean white ground which allows the coloured slip (clay diluted with water) decoration to shine bright. This type of ceramic was produced in part to emulate and compete with the fine white porcelains imported from the Far East by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The technique of making porcelain was unknown to the Iznik craftsmen at this time, instead they recreated its aesthetic appearance by coating the brown fritware body in a white slip.

The turquoise background at the centre of the dish, is a perfect foil for the fantastical stylised peacock amidst flowers and foliage. The delightful decoration in the border, comprising split palmettes interwoven with flowers and leaves, both frames and extends the peacock’s flower-bedecked domain. The distinctive red, standing out in relief, was a recent addition to the Iznik palette, which became more vivid from around the mid-sixteenth century.

The coloured slip decoration was applied either freehand or with stencils. A dish now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and another at the Musée national de céramique, Sèvres, France, show the same central peacock motif. The repeated image on these three dishes suggests they came from the same workshop and, possibly, by the same hand. The nakkashhane (royal school of decorators) is known to have worked closely with the Iznik workshops and produced these types of designs for the potters to use.

This dish is on display in the Porphyry Court on the Lower Ground Floor.