Fakes or fabrications?

Last week, the blog focused on the story of Bizhan and Manizheh and how it is represented on the Freer beaker. This week, a little more from Dr Marianna Shreve Simpson’s fascinating Khalili Lecture. After saying that she thought that a mina’i (overglaze enamel ceramic) fragment in the Khalili collection also showed scenes from the …

See more

Looking at the world through a wine cup

This week’s Khalili Memorial lecture was entitled ‘The Cosmic Cup in Medieval and Later Persian Art’.  Since there’s not enough space in one posting to go through everything that Dr Marianna Shreve Simpson talked about, this week’s blog will concentrate especially on the Shahnameh story of Bizhan and Manizheh (here in verse, here in prose), …

See more

Dragons fighting in the air

Three of the men who travelled with the Sherley brothers wrote accounts of their trips.  George Manwaring (who also wrote about the jewels he saw) describes arriving in Kashan in 1589: So that night we went twelve miles to a gallant city called Cason [Kashan], spending time by the way in hawking and hunting, and …

See more