May-June 2002 > Features

Masters of Metal

The exaltation of brass, bronze, and steel

"Glory and prosperity" are the first words of a benediction often inscribed on medieval Islamic metalwork, and any civilization that could bear the costs of intricately decorated objects for everyday, secular uses might aptly be characterized as one of glorious prosperity. Thus, Glory and Prosperity: Metalwork of the Islamic World is the title of an exhibition at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, through July 21, of 66 objects, most of them from the museum’s permanent collection and many never before displayed.

Melanie Michailidis, a Ph.D. candidate in architecture at MIT, curated the exhibition and wrote the accompanying brochure that describes the objects and the techniques by which they were fashioned throughout an immense area and the course of 13 centuries. Here are richly detailed inkwells, daggers, ewers, gauntlets, candlesticks, astrolabes, a fountain spout—even, at the gallery entrance, a flywhisk wrought of silver, gold, enamel, and peacock feathers.

Hoarding vessels of silver and gold, or eating and drinking from them, were prohibited by religious sanction, yet such objects were made. Few survive because when hard times came, they went into the melting pot. Copper alloys were safer, either brass (copper and zinc) or bronze (copper and tin), with brass the more common because tin was not mined abundantly in the Islamic world and had to be imported. (If bronze is at least 20 percent tin, it resembles silver when new, and high-tin bronze was popular in early Islamic Iran.) Beginning in the twelfth century, artisans throughout the Islamic world made brass objects inlaid with silver, gold, and copper, in designs that became ever more elaborate. Steel was used at first for arms and armor, but then for household objects, such as a splendid Iranian nineteenth-century ewer with gold overlay in the exhibition. Finally, artisans produced purely decorative sculptures of steel—a pigeon, a pair of roosters, or the pear shown here.

The letters of the Arabic inscription on this pen box, of an utterance ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, end in human heads, a decorative fancy that was declining in popularity when the box was made in fourteenth-century Iran or Syria. The box is unusual in bearing such intricate decoration on its lid and clasps but being elsewhere plain. "There can be no doubt," writes Michailidis, that a brass pen box such as this one, "with its minutely executed designs in silver and gold inlay, was a luxury object of the highest order."

Pear, helmet, pen box: Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Michael Nedzweski;>vase: Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Junius Beebe; lamp: Fogg Art Museum, Junius Beebe

All objects © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University Art Museums