The Islamic Ceramics display in the Ashmolean Museum includes a fascinating feature on fakery.
The first fake dish included here is boat-shaped – or seems that way. Actually it’s made up, according to the Ashmolean, from pieces of a round bowl.
It’s maybe more difficult to see the fakery in the second dish. It purports to be an Iranian bowl from the late 1100s to early 1200s – but is actually ‘creatively’ reconstructed from more than one dish, made up to look like it’s a rare complete piece, albeit fragmented.
The third dish is, for me, the most interesting. According to the Ashmolean display, it was made in Iran in the 1890s, “one of several copies of a genuine Iznik dish of the mid-1500s”. Iranian potters probably based their work on drawings, apparently made in England as a model for art students (the original dish is now at the British Museum: click here to see it).
This latter sort of fakery reflected then-current racial notions of Aryan (and so Persian) supremacy – which had led to continuing and pervasive confusion over attributions. Put simply, the Iznik ceramics looked good . . so couldn’t possibly have been produced by Turks, but must instead have been made by (Aryan) Persians!
The 1862 Loan Exhibition, for example, (wrongly) styled all of the 51 pieces shown as ‘Persian’. By 1885, the Burlington House Exhibition of Persian and Arab Art did start to recognise the methodological concerns – even if new sorts of mistakes were then made.
The misunderstandings about what ‘counted’ as Persian continued: in 1910, in Munich, one of (only two) ceramic pieces included as ‘sixteenth/seventeenth century Persian’ would now quickly be recognised as Iznik. Even as late as 1931, the Burlington House International Exhibition of Persian Art included the Mamluk Baptistère de Saint Louis – it’s gorgeous . . but it’s certainly not Persian!
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