OTTOMAN BALKANS, 18TH CENTURY

It was Marian Wenzel who made the compelling argument that the group of vessels to which this bowl belongs was probably produced in, or by craftsmen from, the Balkans (Marian Wenzel, ‘Early Ottoman Silver and Iznik Pottery Design’, Apollo, September 1989, p.160). The military annexation of the Balkans brought the integration of the rich silver mines of Bosnia and Serbia into the Ottoman Empire, and as a consequence also lured the skilled silversmiths to Istanbul. The Balkan countries were the main source of silver within the Ottoman Empire – Serbia’s richest mine, Novo Brdo, fell to the Turks in 1455 and Mehmet the Conqueror captured Bosnia and therein its biggest mine, Srebenica, in 1463. With that, the Balkan and Ottoman influences in silver work began to mix.
Production of this type of silver began in the early sixteenth century, coinciding with the appearance of animals on Iznik vessels (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, pp.256-258), and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like other silver bowls from this group, the cavetto is decorated with a lively scene of animals and birds in chase including dogs, hares and snakes among others. In keeping with the zoomorphic cavetto the central cartouche displays a lion and bear in combat which is comparable to an eighteenth century Ottoman Balkans silver bowl in the National Museum, Belgrade (inv.no. 1568).