The Golden Disk of Heaven: Metalwork of Timurid Iran.

• Author: Simpson, Marianna Shreve

The past few years have seen a spate of studies on the arts and culture of Iran and Central Asia during the fifteenth century, as well as a number of publications on Islamic metalwork. This book joins these two flourishing research fields and makes a fine contribution to both.

At the core of this specialized study is a corpus of some forty metal (bronze, brass, copper and copper alloy) vessels and other utilitarian objects dating from the time when the house of Timur controlled Iran and Transoxiana (1370-1507), and another seven from the decades immediately following the dynasty's demise. These are presented in catalogue form, with a series of chronologically arranged entries that include technical data (medium and technique, shape, dimensions) and bibliographic citations. Of particular value are the transcriptions and translations of each object's inscriptions, which sometimes yield makers, names and dates. Many of the inscriptions are poetic, and some even self-referential, such as the evocative (and understandably irresistible) verses around the neck of a copper alloy salt (cat. no. 26) that refer to the bucket as "the golden disk of heaven." It is a shame that the careful attention paid to the inscriptions is not extended here to other elements of the object's decor, such as compositional schemes and decorative motifs. More systematic descriptions in the entries would have been especially useful given the often indistinct reproductions that illustrate the text and do little to assist independent study.

Komaroff's corpus provides both important new documentary and visual evidence for the evolution of Timurid metalwork and an essential resource for future scholarship. The accompanying chapters are bound to make a more immediate impact. Here the author traces Timurid developments through a broad historical and art-historical continuum, first looking back to earlier formal and technical developments, as formulated in the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Iranian provinces of Fars and Azerbayjan during the mid-twelfth century through the third-quarter of the thirteenth (ch. 1), and then turning to the earliest Timurid metalwares from the shrine of Khwajah Ahmad Yasawi in Kazakhstan (ch. 2). Whereas the discussion of historical antecedents in the first chapter is quite succinct, the Timurid conquest of Khurasan and Transoxiana and the events surrounding the establishment of the Khwajah's shrine are set forth at length. Similarly the shrine...