These delicate earrings have been produced with fine strands of gold filigree, forming golden domes topped with small balls of granulation. The overall crescent and polylobed shape of these earrings is featured in Persian manuscript painting of the period.
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Title:Earring, One of a Pair
Date:11th or 12th century
Geography:Attributed to probably Iran
Medium:Gold
Classification:Jewelry
Credit Line:The Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, 1980
Object Number:1980.541.10
Pair of Gold Earrings
This pair of earrings (1980.541.9, .10) incorporates a number of features that relate them very closely to the earring pairs nos. 35.29.5, .6, 1970.70.1, .2, and the single earrings 74.51.3607, and 17.192.97. The interstitial areas on the side walls, as well as the interstitial areas along the lower edge of each of the faces, bear the same heart-shape element fashioned of fiat wire seen on no. 74.51.3607. The sheet-constructed hemisphere in the center of each face bears a decoration of granulation very similar to that on the five hemispheres of nos. 35.29.5, .6. The pierced drum of the hemisphere in the middle of the side walls is analogous to those on nos. 1970.70.1, .2.
The closest parallel to the present earrings is a pair in the National Museum, Damascus (5929), which also shares with them a peculiarity of construction. The individual sections of the filigree hemispheres are formed by means of a single wire worked into a kind of figure eight, the upper part of which is smaller than the lower. The wire and granulation work on the Damascus pair, however, is much less elaborate.
As with nos. 35.29.5, .6, 1970.70.1, .2, 74.51.3607, and 17.192.97, the precise provenance of the pair under discussion must remain an open question, for not only do they have parallels with the pair in Damascus, but the borders of the side walls consist of flat wires forming S-curves that terminate in circles similar to those on armlet no. 57.88a–c and the three necklace elements no. 1979.7.2a–c attributed to Iran.
Another feature relating this pair to Iranian pieces is the central hemisphere on the side walls with its close-packed covering of grains very much in the manner of those on armlet no. 57.88a–c. Also favoring an Iranian origin for these exquisite earrings is the prominence and sophistication of the openwork stacked-grain structures. The loops for an outlining of small pearls or stones compare quite closely with the spacers on earring no. 52.4.5. The sixteen-grain openwork pyramids that surmount the hemispheres around the periphery are quite unusual in medieval Islamic pieces but represent the continuation of an Iranian tradition that was approximately two thousand years old at the time these were made; examples with features closely related to both the ring-shape and the pyramidal elements were still being made in Greater Iran in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by Bukharan and Qajar examples (see also no. 91.1.1126).
An earring of the late second or first millennium B.C. from Marlik in the Archaeological Museum, Tehran (7955), has a pyramid configuration of sixteen shot used as downward-pointing termination identical to that seen here. Otherwise the style of the earrings is of course entirely different.
[Jenkins and Keene 1983]
Alice N. Heeramaneck, New York (until 1980; gifted to MMA)
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Islamic Jewelry in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," April 22–August 14, 1983, no. 40.
Jenkins-Madina, Marilyn, and Manuel Keene. Islamic Jewelry in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1983. no. 40, pp. 72–73, ill. p. 72 (b/w).
Allan, James, and Ludvik Kalus. Islamic Jewellery, edited by Michael Spink. London, England: Spink & Son Ltd., 1986. p. 35.
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