PROBABLY SYRIA, 15TH/16TH CENTURY

Window grilles like this, constructed from iron bars running perpendicular to one another and connected at the joints with circular or polygonal joints, were widespread in the medieval Islamic world. Metal examples such as this might have been based on a tradition of making similar window fittings in wood. An unusual ornate example in the Keir collection is ornately engraved and inlaid with silver, gold and niello in the style of metalwork from North West Iran, indicating that this type of window grille appeared across the Jazira and into Iran in the 14th century.

The design of our example is more similar, however, to examples in Syria and Egypt from the late Mamluk and early Ottoman period. Such 'boss-and-bar' window grilles are reasonably common in Mamluk architecture, often with the bosses decorated with heraldic or epigraphic blazons of a building's patron (Luitgard E. M. Mols, Mamluk Metalwork Fittings, Delft, 2006, p.105). Later examples were simpler, with more selective use of decoration, until in the Ottoman period such window grilles were scarcely decorated at all. Nonetheless, grilles of this type remained popular throughout the Ottoman lands: they can be seen in sahn of the Selimiyye and Suleymaniyye mosque, as well as in mausolea, such as those of Mimar Sinan and Shehzade Mehmed. They also appear in surviving examples of vernacular architecture, such as the 'Zekate' house built for an ally of Ali Pasha (d.1822) in Gjorakaster, Albania.

Of the fittings catalogued by Luitgard Mols, ours our most closely resemble those on the mausoleum of Azdamur min Mazid in Aleppo (Mols, op.cit., pp.443-4, nos49/1 and 49⁄2). Though mostly unornamented, each have a few bars at the centre of the grille with flattened bars and bosses for inscriptions and engraved designs. Like ours, one of the window grilles is signed by the craftsman, in that case a certain Yusuf ibn al-Kamal. The grilles are also dated to Rabi' I AH 893/ February-March 1488. As on ours, the decorated bosses feature an eight-part knot design at the centre within an intertwined border, and include pendants similar to that in the middle of the window. Another example of similar design is also in the Mosque of Amir Aybak al-Yusufi, built in AH 900⁄1494-5 AD (Mols, op.cit., pp.445-6, no50/3 and 50⁄4).