# Dish > Ottoman Iznik potters (workshop unidentified) - Mid-16th century (Metropolitan Museum range: 1525-1575) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/iznik-potters/iznik-blue-turquoise-dish-met-446648/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-27 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Ottoman Iznik potters (workshop unidentified) - **Date:** Mid-16th century (Metropolitan Museum range: 1525-1575) - **Medium:** Stonepaste (fritware), painted in turquoise and two hues of cobalt blue under a transparent lead-alkaline-tin glaze - **Dimensions:** H. 7.6 cm (3 in.); Diam. 39.4 cm (15 1/2 in.) - **Object type:** Ceramic - **Period:** Ottoman Turkish, 16th century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Islamic Art, Gallery 460 - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1525-1575 (Museum's dating range)** Iznik potters, Ottoman Turkey (workshop unidentified) `[documented]` (manufacture) Origin at Iznik is not disputed today; the town itself was confirmed as the production centre for this class of ware by kiln excavation (Aslanapa, early 1960s and 1981-1988), following decades in which pieces of this kind were sold under invented regional names such as Damascus ware. The precise decade of manufacture and the specific workshop are not established for this individual object. - **-by 1913** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, dealer or route of export from Ottoman Turkey is documented for this dish between its manufacture and its presence in Benjamin Altman's New York collection. This is a genuine gap, not a smoothed-over assumption. - **by 1913-1913** Benjamin Altman, New York `[documented]` (private collection) Held in Altman's collection at his death on 7 October 1913. Much of Altman's oriental porcelain was bought through the dealer Henry J. Duveen, but no source found in this research names Duveen, or any other specific dealer, as the supplier of this particular dish. - **1913-1914** Estate of Benjamin Altman `[documented]` (bequest) Bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the bulk of Altman's collection following his death. - **1914-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (accession) Accessioned 1914 as 14.40.727, Department of Islamic Art. On view in Gallery 460. ## Open questions - Which of Iznik's several 16th-century workshops, now archaeologically distinguishable from one another, actually produced this dish? No kiln-waster or petrographic comparison has been published for this specific object. - Does the dish's documented blue-and-turquoise-only palette, read against the standard colour-introduction chronology, allow its date to be narrowed within the Museum's own 1525-1575 bracket toward the earlier end of that range? No scholar has published such a redating for this piece; this record notes the possibility without asserting the conclusion. - How and through whose hands did the dish leave Ottoman Turkey and enter the Western art market before it reached Benjamin Altman? No source located in this research documents any owner or dealer before Altman. - Did Henry J. Duveen personally supply this dish to Altman, as he supplied much of Altman's other oriental porcelain, or did it reach Altman by a different route? No source confirms either possibility. - Has this dish's body or glaze ever been tested by thermoluminescence, X-ray fluorescence or Raman spectroscopy to confirm 16th-century Ottoman manufacture, or to rule out a later Iznik-style reproduction? No published test result for this specific object was located. - What label, if any, did the Metropolitan Museum's own early cataloguers apply to this dish before current descriptive practice - was it ever called 'Damascus ware' in-house, as pieces of this general type commonly were in the trade at the time it was acquired? ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection database, 'Dish' (object 446648, accession 14.40.727), including the Museum's public Collection API data (medium, dimensions, credit line, dating range, department, gallery, and CC0/Open Access status). The live object page itself was blocked by an automated bot-checkpoint during this research and could not be fetched directly; data cited here is drawn from the Museum's own API endpoint and corroborating indexed copies of the same official text. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Iznik pottery', for the fritware and glaze chemistry, the pigment-introduction chronology, the Damascus/Rhodian/Golden Horn/Miletus ware misnomer history, Arthur Lane's 1957 chronology, and Julian Raby's quoted caution on the 'Iznik' umbrella label. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Atasoy and Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (1989), and Lane's original 1957 article. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Miletus ware', for the 1930s Friedrich Sarre excavation at Miletus and the subsequent correction of that misattribution. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the excavation literature. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Benjamin Altman', for Altman's biography, his collecting through the dealer Henry J. Duveen, and the 1913 bequest to the Metropolitan Museum. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the Metropolitan Museum Journal v.3 (1970) article 'The Benjamin Altman Bequest' by Francis Haskell. - [5] Oktay Aslanapa's early-1960s and 1981-1988 Iznik kiln excavations, as reported in Wikipedia's 'Iznik pottery' and 'Miletus ware' articles. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Aslanapa's own excavation publications. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Ulisse Cantagalli', for Cantagalli's Florence workshop, its reproductions in 'Islamic and Moresque styles' from 1878, and its market and reputation among European collectors. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Sheila Forbes's published research on Cantagalli. - [7] Philippe Colomban, Veronique Milande and Lionel Le Bihan, 'On Site Raman Analysis of Iznik Pottery Glazes and Pigments', arXiv, 14 December 2006, for the confirmation that Iznik's production town was 'highly disputed in the 80's', the glaze-chemistry classification method, and the Raman/XRF authentication approach. - [8] Wikipedia, 'Edme Samson', for the Paris reproduction firm founded 1845, its range of copied wares, and documented cases of its maker's marks being removed to pass reproductions as originals. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a specialist study of Samson ceramics. - [9] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection database, 'Blue-Ground Dish with Floral Design' (object 446649, accession 14.40.732), Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913. - [10] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection database, 'Dish Depicting a Woman Bust and Floral Decoration' (object 446650, accession 14.40.733), Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913. - [11] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Bequest of Benjamin Altman, used to identify and licence-verify the Commons image files for this dish and its companion pieces from the same bequest (all confirmed CC0 via extmetadata.LicenseShortName). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.