Bowl with Rooster and Fish
Guiding Questions:
Is what we see what was on the object originally? Or is what we see just a mistake from the repair process? This is very important to understand especially when trying to analyze Middle Ages objects for their historical context. Are we making errors in our interpretation because of errors in the object?
About the Bowl:
Although curators leave some fragments as-is for viewers to see in a museum, or repair them through inference and research, they also recover other fragments to their original form, especially if people have found each individual fragment from the original object. The images in this room introduce the process that goes into repairing various original objects in order to retrieve and recover the form of the original.
This luster bowl is from the 10th century Abbasid period in Iraq, around the time of the origin of luster pottery (Caiger-Smith 1985). It’s dimensions are 5.9 by 23.2 cm and the base seems to bear what scholars claim is an undecipherable inscription of Kufic script.
Curators have repaired this bowl and so it is important to closely analyze the symbols and images on the bowls and be sure that they were made intentionally. It must be noted that this bowl was repaired from 20 fragments. These considerations are important, as Oliver Watson speaks about different ways in which Islamic Art can be either fake (an innocent object that was “improved” in a way to enhance its value), or forged (an entirely non-innocent making of a deceptive object from scratch). After reassembling fragmented pieces in Islamic art, there may be unexplained symbols on the piece that may not appear to be on the bowl. For example, a “10th century Cairo bowl piece was made of earthenware with luster decoration, but showed foreign shards which made the bird turn into a scepter” (Watson 2004). Therefore, it is important to understand the conservation and repair of this bowl, and to be generally skeptical of the designs drawn on the bowl since they may not be an accurate representation of the original design.
This provides further insight to why people may deem the Kufic script undecipherable. Islamic pottery and other Islamic objects often have Kufic inscription on them, some of which are legible while others are fragmented, illegible or pseudo-inscriptions (Jazayeri 2013, 38) Even more interesting is that inscriptions on bowls are often illegible because the image of the writing is more important than the actual meaning (Cassidy 2008, 56). However, could the Kufic script also be undecipherable due to the fact that it has been repaired from 20 different fragments? This is an example of creation of new art that may not have been intentional.