Two small birds are perched within the tangle of carnation, tulip, and hyacinth stems on this colorful plate. A popular literary Ottoman literary trope, bird and flower designs were a pervasive decorative element on Iznik pottery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This artwork is meant to be viewed from right to left. Scroll left to view more.
Artwork Details
Use your arrow keys to navigate the tabs below, and your tab key to choose an item
Title:Dish Depicting Two Birds among Flowering Plants
Date:ca. 1575–90
Geography:Made in Turkey, Iznik
Medium:Stonepaste; polychrome painted under transparent glaze
Dimensions:H. 2 3/8 in. (6 cm) Diam. of rim: 11 3/16 in. (28.4 cm)
Classification:Ceramics
Credit Line:Gift of James J. Rorimer in appreciation of Maurice S. Dimand's curatorship, 1933–1959, 1959
Accession Number:59.69.1
Ceramic Dish
By the 1580s the Iznik potters began to produce original pottery with a wide variety of highly innovative and sometimes quite mannered or quirky designs that often had little to do stylistically with the professional design atelier in Istanbul. This polychrome Iznik dish with a scene of birds among flowers, contained within the familiar late rim design of tight spirals, is such a work, but in all likelihood there is an implied narrative behind the simple floral composition that is not readily apparent to the twenty-first-century viewer.[1]
The central tondo contains five main "actors": a bird, probably a nightingale, facing right; a rose immediately to the right of the bird; a honeysuckle to the right of the rose; a spray of hyacinths below the honeysuckle; and a tulip in the center of the plate—all growing from the same clump of leaves. A smaller bird and a spray of six-petaled flowers, both bit players, round out the cast. The lead characters are most likely the rose and the nightingale, which together were popular allegorical subjects of love poetry for Ottoman poets of the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. Other flowers, such as tulips, carnations, honeysuckles, and hyacinths, also frequently played roles in such poetry, and it seems highly plausible that the Metropolitan’s dish represents a visualization of this popular Ottoman literary trope. In his "The Rose and the Nightingale" of about 1563, the poet Fazli (d. 1563) evoked the realm of the King of Springtime: "’Midst his blest dominions none uttered wail, / Save it were ‘mongst the flowers the sad nightingale."[2] The seventeenth-century poet Neshati (d. 1674) wrote: "We are desire hidden in the love-crazed call of the nightingale / We are blood hidden in the crimson heart of the unbloomed rose."[3]
Because of their great cost and beautiful decoration, Iznik dishes like this one were seldom used for serving food and were instead displayed in the built-in cupboards found in many Ottoman domestic living rooms (such as the Damascus Room in the Metropolitan; no. 1970.170), where their poetic meanings would doubtless have served as a subject of conversation.
Walter C. Denny in [Ekhtiar, Soucek, Canby, and Haidar 2011]
Footnotes:
1. See Denny 2004, pp. 173–97.
2. This rather quaint nineteenth-century English translation was taken from Gibb, E[lias] J[ohn] W[ilkinson]. Ottoman Literature: The Poets and Poetry of Turkey. New York and London, 1901, p. 99.
3. Andrews, Walter G., et al., eds. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology. Austin, 1997, p. 131.
[ Brimo de Laroussilhe, Paris, until 1959; sold to MMA]
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Art of Imperial Turkey and Its European Echoes," November 17, 1973–March 3, 1974, no catalogue.
Washington. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. "The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent," January 25–May 17, 1987, no. 199.
Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago. "The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent," June 14–September 7, 1987, no. 199.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent," October 4, 1987–January 17, 1988, no. 199.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Helmut Nickel. "The Ottoman Empire." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26, no. 5 (January 1968). p. 207, ill. no. 21.
Jenkins-Madina, Marilyn, Suzanne G. Valenstein, and Julia Meech-Pekarik. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art." In Oriental Ceramics: The World's Great Collections. vol. 12. Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1977. no. 271, ill. interior and profile.
Atil, Esin. The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Washington, DC: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987. no. 199, pp. 272–74, ill. (color).
Atasoy, Nurhan, and Julian Raby. Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, edited by Yanni Petsopoulos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. no. 484, pp. 245–46, ill. (b/w).
Denny, Walter B. Iznik: the Artistry of Ottoman Ceramics. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. pp. 173–97.
Ekhtiar, Maryam, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Haidar, ed. Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1st ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. no. 214, pp. 287, 305–6, ill. p. 305 (color).
Using objects from the Met's collection, Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff traces the stylistic connections across centuries of time and culture that inform his own work.
The Met's Libraries and Research Centers provide unparalleled resources for research and welcome an international community of students and scholars.
The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can connect to the most up-to-date data and public domain images for The Met collection. Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.
Feedback
We continue to research and examine historical and cultural context for objects in The Met collection. If you have comments or questions about this object record, please complete and submit this form. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments.
The Met's collection of Islamic art is one of the most comprehensive in the world and ranges in date from the seventh to the twenty-first century. Its more than 15,000 objects reflect the great diversity and range of the cultural traditions from Spain to Indonesia.
