Bottle with a Globular Body

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Venice had become the leading producer and exporter of fine glass wares and many such products became fashionable in Persia. These styles and techniques influenced local production, and factories were created in Shiraz producing wares that rivaled the imports from abroad.


These types of wares–with a flared mouth and bulbous body– were produced in vivid blues and greens, illustrating the range of colors employed by glassmakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This bottle may have been used to decant or store wine, or perhaps as a base of a water pipe. Such vessels were admired for their graceful shapes and often were decoratively displayed within niches of private and public buildings in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz.