Ceramics and Metalwork in Safavid Iran

From 1501 to 1722, Safavid potters, tilemakers and metalworkers made objects for eating, writing, worship and court display. Their materials and processes served different tasks: quartz-rich stonepaste could take painted glazes, tiles joined decorative surfaces to buildings, and a brass (copper-zinc alloy) inkwell could fit into a writer’s penbox. Designs changed as Iranian makers adapted Chinese porcelain, manuscript painting and older regional forms.

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Vessels, glazes and imported porcelain

Many Safavid vessels were made of stonepaste, also called fritware. Its body combined finely ground quartz with fine white clay and a small amount of ground glass. This bright, mineral-rich material was not Chinese porcelain, even when potters borrowed porcelain’s blue-and-white look. They painted cobalt designs beneath a clear glaze, and sometimes arranged Chinese-inspired motifs within Iranian compositions. Chinese porcelain itself also reached Iran: in 1608 Shah Abbas endowed the Safavid dynastic shrine at Ardabil with a large collection, and European trading companies later brought more Chinese wares into the market.

A seventeenth-century Safavid dish in Kyiv, Ukraine, shows black painting beneath a transparent turquoise glaze, a combination found on ceramics conventionally grouped as Kubachi ware. A second ceramic decoration, luster, gave vessels a metallic sheen. Potters painted a metal-bearing compound over a fired glaze and fired the piece again in a low-oxygen kiln, fixing a thin reflective film to the surface. A small LACMA jar from the second half of the seventeenth century uses copper-colored luster for blossoms and scrolling leaves; it may have held ink or sand for blotting it. Its plant designs resemble the decorated margins of contemporary manuscripts.

Tiles turned buildings into decorated surfaces

Tilemakers used ceramic differently when preparing a building’s portal, dome or prayer chamber. In tile mosaic, they cut colored glazed pieces to shape and fitted them together into a larger pattern. The entrance, walls and dome of Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, central Iran, use this painstaking method alongside other glazed tile surfaces and calligraphic bands.

Another approach, cuerda seca (“dry cord”), kept several colors on a tile from running together in the kiln. A seventeenth-century Iranian square tile at the Metropolitan Museum has colored glazes bounded by a dark line made with wax resist. Because the colors could be applied to one tile, this technique was faster and less costly than assembling a mosaic from many small pieces. On the Royal Ontario Museum’s late-seventeenth-century palace friezes, most tiles have mirrored counterparts on the other side of an arch, and the design repeats at other arches. A paper stencil may have helped transfer each outline; painters filled the sections with colored glass pigments before firing fused them to the glazed surface. Figures popularized by the painter Riza-yi Abbasi also appeared in figural tile panels.

Metal objects joined use and ornament

In the first decades of Safavid rule, metalworkers continued shapes and techniques developed under the Timurids, especially in eastern Iran. At Tabriz in northwestern Iran, the first Safavid capital, three dome-lidded inkwells are signed by the same maker, Mirak Husayn Yazdi. Their circular medallions hold radiating cloud-scroll designs, and their more open layout differs from the tightly packed patterns of many fifteenth-century objects.

A sixteenth-century brass inkwell at the Metropolitan Museum shows how a practical writing tool could be made and decorated. Its lid was cast by pouring molten metal into a mold, while the body was worked and engraved, or cut with designs. Silver was inlaid to form vines and animals, with chased floral patterns worked into the background with small tools. The cylindrical vessel fitted into a metal penbox and a soldered seam secured it. Inlay means fitting a contrasting metal into a prepared surface so the design stands out against the brass. Similar small, domed inkwells appear in Iranian metalwork and manuscript images from Tabriz.

Styles shifted during the century. A bowl dated 1535 has engraved and tinned decoration, with its calligraphy more prominent than in earlier examples. Tinning means applying a thin layer of tin to the metal surface. From around the 1560s, western Iranian pieces include slimmer, tapered shapes and a renewed use of engraved figures, while plant and abstract ornament remained common. An early dated example of a new column-shaped lampstand was endowed to a shrine at Samarra, in present-day Iraq, in 1561–62. In the early seventeenth century, vessels and lampstands continued to use repeated foliage and abstract patterns that also appeared in manuscripts and carpets.

Where a vessel was made

The name Kubachi ware comes from Kubachi, a village in Dagestan in the eastern Caucasus, where Iranian ceramics were concentrated in the nineteenth century. Yolande Crowe suggests that some types may have come from Persian Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran, although Safavid-period excavations there have not confirmed a production center. The group includes different wares: early black designs under turquoise or green glaze, blue-and-white dishes, and later pieces painted in several colors using slip, a liquid clay mixture, with Persian floral and animal motifs. Their varied decoration shows Iranian potters adapting more than one visual tradition.

For how royal purchasing and supply were organized, see Court departments. For the wider setting, see Safavid Culture and Arts.