SYRIA OR EGYPT, 8TH/9TH CENTURY

A famous bottle in the al-Sabah collection shares many features with the present example. Made from translucent very dark manganese glass, it is trailed with the same colours as the present bottle, but with the addition of a blue (Stefano Carboni, Glass from Islamic Lands, the al-Sabah Collection, London, 2001, no.75a, pp.296-7; Stefano Carboni and David Whitehouse, Glass of the Sultans, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2001, no.53, pp.136-137). The body of that bottle is a cylinder, but the flaring mouth with its thickened lip is also very similar in form to ours. In his discussion of that piece Carboni notes the way, as here, that sufficiently little of the body colour is left exposed so that it appears visually to be a third marvered colour of equal value to the other two. There are very few comparable pieces that are known. A fragment in the Corning Museum of Glass has similar three-colour marvering to the al-Sabah bottle (inv.no.74.1.48), and a small restored conical bottle with yellow and red marvered trails on a manganese ground was in these Rooms 20 April 1999, lot 519. In his discussions of the al-Sabah bottle Carboni also draws attention to how this technique and colouring is a continuation of the technique and aesthetics of a small number of core-formed Egyptian and Roman vessels, showing the local continuation of the style for many centuries.