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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Sandwich glass is the product of a technique practised from antiquity. Essentially, decoration is achieved by laying gold to a glass surface, patterning this gold in various ways, and then adding a second layer of glass to encapsulate the gold pattern. The technique seems to have been employed only rarely by craftsmen in Islamic areas; certainly surviving examples are rare.
1 Washington, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art 43.1, formerly in the Kevorkian Collection. Et. Combe, Sauvaget, J., Wiet, G., Répertoire chronologique d'épigraphie arabe, Vol. V, Cairo, 1934, p. 127,Google Scholar no. 1877. Sourdel-Thomine, Janine, Spuler, Bertold, Die Kunst des Islam, Berlin, 1973, p. 239,Google Scholar no. XXVIII. Atil, Esin, Chase, W. T., Paul Jett, Islamic Metalwork in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1985, p. 266.Google Scholar Whilst the ewer is felt by the last writer to lack a clear provenance and date, it is widely accepted as Buyid and from the time of the Amir mentioned in its inscription (Bakhtiyār ibn Mu'izz al-Daula who ruled in Iraq from A.D. 967–977), in the manner cited by Grube, Ernst J., The World of Islam, London, 1966, p. 20, fig. 5.Google Scholar
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11 Gold sandwich glass tiles, made in much the same technique as was used for gold mosaic tesserae but with simple geometric decoration, were excavated at the Syrian locality of Maaret al-Nu'man, north of Hama; these are not unlike others found in and around Syria from various localities which flourished between the IXth and XIIth centuries. Philippe, Joseph, Le Monde byzantin dans Vhistoire de la verrerie, Bologna, 1970, pp. 54–57.Google Scholar Gold sandwich glass tiles of a different sort, from around the IXth century, have been found at Samarra and elsewhere. This type has an undecorated layer of gold sandwiched between clear glass the top layer of which is moulded into small rectangles. Lamm, Carl Johan, Das Glas von Samarra, Berlin 1928, p. 118,Google Scholar Fig. 66, no. 398. A similar fragment from Egypt is in the Ashmolean Museum; inventory no. 1913, 160; unpublished.
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35 Caiger-Smith, Alan, Lustre Pottery, Technique, tradition and innovation in Islam and the Western World, London, 1985, pp. 31–36,Google Scholar suggests that the IXth–IXth century fascination with an all-over-gold effect stems from a wish to evoke “the supreme statue of a ruler, of the court where the riches of the world were gathered in one place, and of the heavenly powers without whose help the court could not have come to be.” Yasin Safadi has commented to me on the identification of gold with the sun as a symbol of God which was popular at this time. The gold letters and solar rosettes in contemporary manuscripts reinforce this idea, while the colour blue, used for the enamel dots on the David Collection fragments, carried a related symbolism.
