Dish

A saucer-shaped dish of Iznik fritware, its rim carrying a floral scroll painted in turquoise and two shades of cobalt blue under a clear lead-tin glaze, made in Ottoman Turkey in the middle decades of the 16th century. It came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1913 bequest of Benjamin Altman, the New York department-store owner whose Rembrandts and Chinese porcelains are far better known than his Ottoman pottery.

For most of the century before this dish entered a museum, pieces of exactly this kind were sold and catalogued under invented names. European dealers who did not know where Ottoman pottery was actually fired called blue-and-turquoise wares like this one "Damascus ware" after the city where some pieces happened to be bought, not made. The error was not corrected with certainty until archaeologists dug into the kiln waste of Iznik itself, decades after this dish had already settled into a Fifth Avenue collector's cabinet.

This record also asks the question the Iznik market forces on every undocumented piece: was it ever suspected of being one of the close 19th-century reproductions that the Florence workshop of Ulisse Cantagalli and the Paris firm of Edme Samson sold into the same collecting world Altman moved in. No source found in this research raises that suspicion about this dish, and the reasons why are worth setting out plainly rather than leaving as an assumption.

What it is

A saucer-shaped dish, 7.6 centimetres high and 39.4 centimetres across the rim, thrown and built from Iznik fritware - a synthetic ceramic body, not a natural clay, made by mixing quartz sand with a small amount of ground glass and a little clay. The Metropolitan Museum catalogues its decoration as "painted in turquoise and two hues of blue under transparent glaze," and dates it broadly to the mid-16th century, giving a working range of 1525 to 1575, a fifty-year bracket that is itself a fact about how this object is known, not only about when it was made.

The dish is large enough to have been made for display as much as use. Iznik dishes of this size were commonly pierced through the footring so they could be hung on a wall, and many surviving examples show scratching from genuine use as tableware as well - the two functions were not mutually exclusive in an Ottoman household or a European collector's cabinet alike.

How Iznik potters built a dish

Iznik fritware, sometimes called stonepaste, is not porcelain and was never meant to pass for it up close, but it was engineered to answer Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from a distance. The body is quartz sand bound with finely ground glass frit and a small proportion of clay; analysis of surviving pieces suggests Iznik potters worked in roughly the same proportions - about ten parts silica to one part frit to one part clay - given in a 1301 treatise on fritware by the Kashan tilemaker Abu'l-Qasim, though no equivalent written recipe survives from Iznik itself. The Iznik version added lead oxide to the frit alongside the quartz and soda used at Kashan, a variation recovered only by analysing the material itself.

The paste lacked the plasticity to be thrown as a single piece on the wheel, so dishes were built by rolling out a sheet of paste over a mould, shaping the underside with a template as the mould turned, and sculpting the foliate rim by hand once the paste had partly dried - a method closer to pressing pastry into a tin than to conventional pottery throwing. The body was then coated in a fine white slip of similar composition, selected to avoid the iron impurities that would discolour the surface, before the design was painted on and the whole piece covered in a lead-alkaline-tin glaze - typically 25 to 30 percent lead oxide, 45 to 55 percent silica, 8 to 14 percent sodium oxide and 4 to 7 percent tin oxide. Unusually, the tin in an Iznik glaze stays in solution rather than precipitating out as the opacifying particles it forms in most tin glazes, which is why the glaze reads as clear rather than milky.

A palette that can be read like a clock

Iznik potters worked in cobalt blue alone for the first decades of fritware production, the ore probably sourced from Qamsar near Kashan in Iran. Turquoise, made from copper oxide, was added to the palette from around 1520. Only afterward did the potters add purple from manganese oxide, and green, grey and black; the bright, thickly applied bole red that became the ware's signature colour was not introduced until around 1560, using an iron-rich slip applied under the glaze.

This dish's catalogued medium is turquoise and two hues of blue, and nothing else - no purple, no green, no red. Read against the standard colour-introduction sequence, that palette matches the years after turquoise joined cobalt blue but before purple and green arrived, which would sit toward the earlier part of the Museum's own 1525-1575 bracket rather than the middle or later part of it. This is an inference drawn from the documented medium and the published chronology, not a redating that any scholar has proposed for this specific dish, and it is recorded here as a research lead rather than a finding; see the open questions below.

A label that lied for seventy years

The genuine dispute attached to this dish is not about who made it but about where, and the dispute was manufactured by the market rather than by scholarship. Until the 1860s, European and American collectors and dealers lumped essentially all Islamic pottery together as "Persian" ware. Between 1865 and 1872 the Musee de Cluny in Paris bought a group of polychrome fritware with a bright sealing-wax red; because the pieces had been obtained on Rhodes, the trade assumed they had been made there and coined the term "Rhodian ware." Separately, pieces sharing this dish's own colour range - blue, turquoise, and eventually sage green and pale purple - were believed to come from Damascus and were sold and catalogued as "Damascus ware." A third group, spiral-patterned sherds turned up during the 1905-1907 construction of a post office in Istanbul's Sirkeci district, became "Golden Horn ware" after the district where they surfaced, not where they were fired.

None of these names described a real production centre. All of them, along with "Miletus ware" - a related but chronologically earlier and technically distinct group of red-clay, white-slipped pottery, named for sherds a German archaeologist found at ancient Miletus in the early 1930s - were eventually traced back to Iznik and, in smaller volume, to Kutahya. Art historians had come to suspect a common origin by the 1930s on stylistic grounds alone, but suspicion is not proof, and the market went on using the old regional names for decades after that suspicion took hold; some of them, "Damascus ware" and "Rhodian ware" among them, are still used by dealers and auction houses today as period style labels even though no scholar now believes they mark a place of manufacture.

Whether the Metropolitan Museum's own early-20th-century cataloguers ever applied one of these regional labels to this specific dish has not been established in this research; the Museum's current online record uses no such term, describing the piece simply by material, technique and findspot. This is recorded as an open question rather than assumed either way.

What the kilns proved

Proof that Iznik itself was the production centre came from the ground, not from the archive, and it came in two separate campaigns decades apart. Oktay Aslanapa's excavations at Iznik in the early 1960s recovered kiln wasters - pottery ruined and discarded in firing, which by definition cannot have travelled - confirming that the earlier, chronologically distinct red-bodied "Miletus ware" had in fact been made locally, alongside Kutahya and Akcaalan in smaller volume. A second, more extensive round of excavation at the Iznik tile kilns ran from 1981 to 1988 and is reflected in the scholarly record of that decade; a 2006 Raman-spectroscopy study of Iznik glazes and shards notes bluntly that "the town of production of these potteries was highly disputed in the 80's and many questions still remain," which is as fair a summary as any of how recently the ground, rather than the showroom, settled the question.

Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby's 1989 monograph, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, drew the excavated and museum evidence together into the typology now used as the field's standard reference, building on the sequential chronology the V&A ceramics keeper Arthur Lane had proposed by style alone in 1957 - Abraham of Kutahya ware to about 1525, Damascus and Golden Horn wares from 1525 to 1555, Rhodian ware from about 1555 to the early 18th-century end of production. That framework, refined rather than overturned by the kiln evidence, is the one against which this dish's own fifty-year bracket, and the possibility of narrowing it, has to be judged.

A Chinese pattern in an Ottoman hand

The floral scroll on this dish's cavetto belongs to a design tradition that begins as an act of imitation and ends as something distinct from what it imitated. Ottoman potters could not make porcelain and were not trying to; what they wanted from Chinese blue-and-white ware was its prestige, not a copy of its designs. Iznik decoration drew on the same Chinese floral vocabulary - the Hatayi repertoire, paired in the earliest Iznik wares with the Ottoman arabesque patterns called Rumi - but reworked it into denser, more contained, more three-dimensional designs than the Chinese originals, a relationship scholars describe as adaptation rather than imitation. By the middle of the 16th century Iznik had its own settled vocabulary of stylised tulips, carnations, roses and hyacinths, promoted at court by the designer Kara Memi, moving decoration away from strict symmetry toward looser, more rhythmic scrolling compositions of exactly the kind this dish's cavetto shows.

There is no evidence that the choice of a floral rather than figural design on this dish carried a specific doctrinal or theological charge; floral and abstract ornament was simply the ordinary, court-promoted decorative language of Ottoman ceramics, textiles and manuscript illumination alike by this date, produced for household and market use rather than for a religious setting. Reading a hidden programme into an ordinary tableware pattern would overstate what the evidence supports; the absence of such a programme here is itself the honest finding.

No signed hand, and why that is normal

No Iznik vessel from this period carries a potter's signature, and this dish is no exception. Design at Iznik was not purely a potter's invention: the Ottoman court kept its own design workshop, the nakkashane, which supplied patterns used across court-sponsored media - textiles, manuscripts, metalwork and ceramics alike - so that a motif on a dish like this one may reflect a court designer's pattern as much as an individual potter's hand. Archive evidence for the ceramic workshops themselves is thin: a 1526 wage register for the Istanbul court names a tilemaker from Tabriz with ten assistants, and by 1566 the number of court-employed tilemakers had dwindled to three, but no comparable roster survives naming the potters of Iznik town itself.

The practical consequence is that even the region of manufacture within greater Iznik production - let alone an individual workshop - is established for most pieces, including this one, by comparison of style, palette and, where available, findspot, not by a signature or a document. The art historian Julian Raby put the resulting caution plainly: for now, he wrote, "we have no choice but to call all Ottoman glazed pottery of the 16th and 17th centuries by the generic label 'Iznik', and to hope that in time we can learn to recognise the diagnostic features of contemporary 'Kutahya ware.'" That caution applies to this dish as much as to any other unexcavated, unexcavated-comparison piece in a Western museum.

Benjamin Altman, the collector

Benjamin Altman, 1840 to 1913, built the New York department store B. Altman and Company from a Third Avenue dry-goods shop into the Fifth Avenue institution that opened in 1906. He began collecting art with a pair of Chinese vases bought for thirty-five dollars in 1882, and over roughly thirty years assembled fifty paintings - including the Metropolitan's first Vermeer and twenty Rembrandts, several since reattributed - along with 429 Chinese porcelains and hundreds of further objects, a collection valued at fifteen million dollars at his death.

Most of his oriental porcelain, according to the standard account of his life, was bought through his friend, the dealer Henry J. Duveen, with whom Altman kept up an almost weekly habit of visiting on Saturday evenings. Altman had a reputation among dealers for demanding precise histories of the objects he was offered, a habit that frustrated more than one seller hoping for an easy transaction. No source found in this research names Duveen, or any other dealer, as the specific supplier of this dish; the general pattern of Altman's oriental porcelain buying through Duveen is documented, but the piece-specific link is not, and this record does not assert one.

How the dish reached the Museum

Altman died on 7 October 1913, shortly after founding the Altman Foundation, and bequeathed his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This dish entered the Museum's Department of Islamic Art with the rest of the bequest and was formally accessioned in 1914 as 14.40.727, one entry among a large group of Ottoman and Persian carpets, porcelains and pottery that came in with the same gift. It is on view today in Gallery 460.

What is not documented, in any source located for this record, is how the dish left Ottoman Turkey and entered the Western art market in the first place, or through whose hands it passed before it reached Altman's collection. That gap sits in exactly the same place as the undocumented decades in most Iznik provenance chains of this period: pieces of this kind moved into European and American collections through the 19th-century antiques trade in large enough volume that individual points of origin were rarely recorded, and this dish's own path before Altman is one more example rather than an exception.

The reproduction question

Genuine Iznik ware was already collectible, and already being closely imitated, while Altman was assembling his collection. In Florence, Ulisse Cantagalli took over his family's pottery works in 1878 and built a business explicitly on high-quality reproductions - Renaissance maiolica above all, but also, by his own firm's account, pieces in the "Islamic and Moresque styles," sold to the same Grand Tour and collector market that prized genuine antique wares and marked with a distinctive singing-cockerel stamp. In Paris, Edme Samson opened a firm in 1845 explicitly to supply reproductions of ceramics already on display in museums and private collections, working across Meissen, Sevres, Chinese famille rose and famille verte porcelain, Hispano-Moresque and Persian-style wares among others; Samson's own blue underglaze mark could be, and in a number of documented cases was, ground or scratched off pieces to pass them as originals, though the firm maintained it never intended to deceive.

No source located in this research suggests that this dish, or its type generally, was ever suspected of being a Cantagalli, Samson or other 19th-century reproduction rather than genuine 16th-century Iznik work. That silence is worth stating plainly rather than treated as an oversight: this is not a piece with a rediscovery story or an attribution reversed after close study, of the kind this record would be flagging if one existed. Three material facts support the plain reading. First, the piece has been in an institutional collection, photographed and catalogued, since 1914, without the kind of undocumented gap in which confusion typically takes root. Second, Altman's own reputation for demanding documented histories, and Duveen's standing as a dealer, both cut against the piece having entered a major collection unexamined. Third, and most fundamentally, the materials are not easily confused under scrutiny: Cantagalli and Samson worked in maiolica, faience and porcelain bodies, chemically and physically distinct from Iznik's quartz-frit stonepaste, and modern non-destructive methods - Raman spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence of the glaze, thermoluminescence dating of the body - can and do distinguish genuine Ottoman material from later European reproduction today, whatever the painted surface looks like to the eye. No record of such a test having been run on this specific dish was located in this research, and that absence is recorded as an open question rather than resolved by assumption in either direction.

In the galleries, among its own kind

This dish did not arrive at the Metropolitan alone. The Altman bequest included several other Iznik and Ottoman ceramic pieces accessioned in the same 14.40 series, among them a Blue-Ground Dish with Floral Design (14.40.732), dated about 1550 to 1560 and already showing the fuller polychrome palette - green and purple added to the blue and turquoise - that would come to define what the trade once called Damascus ware, and a later Dish Depicting a Woman Bust and Floral Decoration (14.40.733), from the first half of the 17th century, made after Iznik's court patronage had faded and the quality of its output with it. Set beside these companions from the same collector and the same gift, this dish reads as an earlier moment in the same sequence: blue and turquoise only, before the fuller palette, before the decline.