Elements

Four Gold Elements: 1980.541.14, .15, .16, .17

These four elements are to our knowledge unique, repoussé decoration not having been employed on any other extant teardrop-shape elements, and the dome shape being unknown in any guise.

As was the case with the heart-shape elements MMA 1980.541.11, .12, one cannot determine whether these teardrop-shape elements were used as necklace terminals or whether there were many such elements in a particular necklace. Only a few early Islamic objects bear elements of this type. Eighteen such elements on two objects in the Benaki Museum, Athens, are sheet constructed and decorated with granulation, and six other elements on the same two objects are similarly constructed and decorated with wire[1] as is another in the Metropolitan (MMA 1980.541.18) which is very similar to one in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A necklace in the National Museum, Damascus (3976), bears twelve teardrop-shape elements whose upper sections are sheet constructed and decorated with wire and whose lower sections are executed solely in filigree.

The dome-shape elements are, as we have said, unique and were presumably used as caps circumscribing a stone bead. It is impossible to know whether these belonged to the same necklace as the teardrop-shape elements.

The style of the single Arabic word ("glory") in Naskhi script on one of the two teardrop-shape elements places them either in the eleventh century or in the twelfth, but their exact provenance and that of the two dome-shape elements is unknown.

[Jenkins and Keene 1983]

Footnotes:

1. Segall, Berta. Museum Benaki, Katalog der Goldschmiede-Arbeiten. Athens, 1938, figs. 278, 282.

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. 42.

Jenkins-Madina, Marilyn, and Manuel Keene. Islamic Jewelry in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1983. no. 42, p. 75, ill. (b/w).