This week, the BBC suggested that high heels were originally a virile fashion for men, which followed on the 1599 Persian embassy to Europe. Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto was reported as saying that “the high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear …
This year’s Yarshater lectures were about Images and Decor in the Persianate World. I especially liked Prof Yves Porter’s review of minai. As the professor noted, both minai and lustre pots are not fluid (or food or indeed anything-much)-proof. So the ceramics are not that functional. They just look pretty. Prof Porter created a delightful …
I’ve been visiting the Pergamon in Berlin. And this week I wanted to show you a few of their outstanding carpets. The Pergamon has got lots less on display than the Met. It’s less Iran-centred too. Though I did think it was going a bit far when a case of Safavid ceramics is labelled for …
The French and English commercial envoys both had an audience with the Shah [Safi II] on the 21st of September 1671. They were taken at 8 am from their lodgings by their relative conducteurs, and made to dismount 150 paces from the Royal Palace, before being led in. The Frenchman had his “second”, his surgeon …
What fun I’ve been having at the Met! Amidst all the glamorous masterpieces, I was very pleased to see a tiny moulded horseman – with a hunting cheetah on his horse’s bottom. Old hands on my old blog will surely remember a clip I included in Hunting with Cheetahs (1) from a 1939 film ‘Life …
Pincon wrote of the inhumanity and cruelty of Shah Abbas to his subjects, of how he “cut off their heads for the slightest offence, having them stoned, quartered, flayed alive and given alive to the dogs, or to the forty Anthropophagi and man-eaters that he always has by him”. But Chardin, who not only spent …
I’ve been taking my own advice and enjoying myself looking at the Islamic sales in London. As well as the star tile from Khargird at Christies that I focused on last week, it was also great to see a 1920-21 album of photos of Bakhtiari men at Bonhams. This album includes a photo of Samsan …
This autumn’s London Islamic sales (click here for the links, in alphabetical order, for Bonhams, Christies and Sothebys) include a collection of tiles which are surely from the Khargird madrese in NE Iran. I have a special fondness for this building – and have seriously mixed feelings when I see more of the tiles on …
The new galleries at the Louvre – simply titled: Islam – will be opening on 22 September. They are sited in an exciting new gallery, intended to evoke silk floating in the courtyard. The BBC film here summarises the architectural intent – and feat (there are no obvious supporting pillars). The Louvre collection is both …
All the European visitors to Persia were fascinated by polo. Pinçon (travelling with the Sherleys in 1599) wrote about how: “The King of Persia and his nobles take exercise by playing pall-mall on horseback, which is a game of great difficulty: their horses are so well trained at this that they run after the balls …