# Head for a Feline Incense Burner > Unidentified Khurasan metalworker, Seljuq period - 1150-1200 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/khurasan-seljuq-metalworkers/head-feline-incense-burner-cleveland/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-12 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified Khurasan metalworker, Seljuq period - **Date:** 1150-1200 - **Medium:** Copper alloy, cast, engraved, chased, and pierced - **Dimensions:** Overall height 36 cm (14 3/16 in.); length 33.7 cm (13 1/4 in.) - **Object type:** Islamic metalwork - **Period:** Islamic, Seljuq period, Khurasan (Iran), 12th century - **Current location:** The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gallery 116 (Islamic Art) - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A cast copper-alloy head, 36 centimetres high, made in Khurasan in Iran in the second half of the twelfth century and pierced through with an openwork palmette pattern so that incense smoke could escape. It is a fragment rather than a complete object: the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired it in 1948 alongside a complete feline incense burner with its own, considerably smaller head, which means this larger head belonged to a second, larger vessel whose body has not been identified in any collection.A Kufic inscription on its neck and spine quotes a Qur'anic verse urging believers to set aside business for Friday prayer, one register within a well-documented Seljuq tradition of animal-form incense burners that also included, on other surviving examples, inscriptions naming actual patrons and, in one case, a metalworker's signature and a date. This head carries neither; its own maker, patron and original body are all unknown, and its only secure history begins with its sale by Heeramaneck Galleries of New York to the Cleveland Museum in November 1948.The animal it represents has been called a lion in the museum's own 1957 scholarly publication and a probable caracal or lynx in the museum's current catalogue description, a genuine unresolved point in the object's own cataloguing history rather than a settled fact either way. ## 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. - **1150-1200** Made in Khurasan, Iran, by an unidentified metalworker or workshop `[documented]` (origin) Regional and period attribution given by the Cleveland Museum of Art and consistent with the wider published corpus of Khurasan zoomorphic incense burners. No maker's name survives on this piece. - **1200** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, findspot, export date, or intermediate history is documented for roughly seven and a half centuries between the piece's manufacture and its appearance at Heeramaneck Galleries in New York by 1948. How and when it left Iran is not recorded in any source consulted. - **-1948** Heeramaneck Galleries, New York (Nasli Heeramaneck) `[documented]` (dealer sale) The Cleveland Museum's own provenance record lists Heeramaneck Galleries in brackets as the source of the sale, the museum's own notation for a dealer transaction rather than a named private prior owner. No purchase price, and no record of how Heeramaneck himself acquired the piece, is given in the sources consulted. - **1948-present** The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio `[documented]` (accession) Accessioned 3 November 1948 using the John L. Severance Fund, together with the complete companion vessel (1948.308.a) and a tail (1948.308.c) in the same transaction. On permanent display in Gallery 116, Islamic Art. ## Open questions - What body did this head originally belong to, and does that body survive anywhere, unrecognized as part of the same original object? No source consulted identifies it. - Why do this head (1948.308.b) and the tail (1948.308.c) accessioned alongside it carry identical listed overall dimensions in the Cleveland Museum's own Open Access data? This may be a genuine coincidence of scale or an artifact of the underlying database, and the sources consulted do not resolve it. - Is the animal a lion, as curator Dorothy Shepherd's 1957 title for the companion vessel states, or a caracal or lynx, as the museum's current catalogue description suggests? No source read for this record settles the question with species-specific argument. - Where and from whom did Heeramaneck Galleries acquire this piece before selling it to Cleveland in 1948? No dealer chain, findspot, or export history is documented in the sources consulted. - What did the Cleveland Museum of Art pay for the 1948 accession? The museum's 1949 Annual Report Bulletin (vol. 36, no. 6) is cited by the museum's own catalogue as covering this acquisition but was not accessible for this record. - Has any metallurgical or compositional analysis of this specific head been published? The museum's own technique field describes it only as 'copper alloy' without further specification. - Does the full text of Dorothy Shepherd's 1957 article, 'A Lion Incense Burner of the Seljuk Period', contain a fuller account of the accession's own collecting history or dating argument than the secondary summaries available for this record? The original article sits behind a paywall not accessible in the time available for this research. ## Sources - [1] The Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API, object record for object ID 126090, accession 1948.308.b, 'Head for a Feline Incense Burner' (title, culture, technique, dimensions, inscription and translation, provenance, exhibition history, did-you-know note, and share_license_status CC0, checked directly at the time of writing). - [2] The Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API, object record for object ID 126089, accession 1948.308.a, 'Feline Incense Burner' (the complete companion vessel, its own head dimensions, and alternate title 'Lion Incense Burner'). - [3] The Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API, object record for object ID 439544, accession 1948.308.c, 'Tail for a Feline Incense Burner'. - [4] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection page and Open Access record for the cover accession 1948.308, 'Feline Incense Burner', including its full citation list (Shepherd 1957, Ghirshman 1961, Kuhnel 1963/1970, Grabar 1968, Melikian-Chirvani 1968, Baer 1983, Mackie 2015, Gertsman and Rosenwein 2018) and exhibition history (Petit Palais, Paris, 1961-62; Binghamton, 1975; Cleveland, 1975; Cleveland, 2021-22). - [5] Wikipedia, 'Incense Burner of Amir Saif al-Dunya wa l-Din ibn Muhammad al-Mawardi', for the Metropolitan Museum's signed and dated 1181-82 CE comparandum, its maker Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali, and its scale relative to the wider Khurasan corpus. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the Metropolitan Museum's own curatorial publication. - [6] Christie's, Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Including Oriental Rugs and Carpets, auction 21891, lot 20, 'A Bronze Incense Burner in the Form of a Feline, Khorasan, North East Iran, 12th Century', catalogue essay citing the Hermitage example signed by 'Ali ibn Muhammad al-Salihi, the Khalili Collection example, and the lynx-versus-lion morphological argument (perky face, pricked ears, tapering moustache). Auction house catalogue text, used here only for its comparative corpus discussion, not for any price or sale claim about this record's own object. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Nasli Heeramaneck', for the dealer's biography (born Bombay 1902, active in New York from the 1920s until his death in 1971) and the later disposition of his own collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum, New Delhi, and Yale University. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with an archival or scholarly account of Heeramaneck's dealing business specifically. - [8] Musee du Louvre, collections database, 'Felin (caracal) brule-parfum', ark:/53355/cl010315017, for the Louvre's comparable Khurasan Seljuq caracal incense burner, its inscription, and its 1933 acquisition from Jean David-Weill. - [9] Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access API, object record for object ID 451042, accession 51.56, confirming isPublicDomain status and image assets for the Amir Saif al-Dunya wa'l-Din comparandum used as a context image in this record. - [10] Dorothy G. Shepherd, 'A Lion Incense Burner of the Seljuk Period', The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 44, no. 6 (1957), pp. 115-118. Cited via the Cleveland Museum's own catalogue citation and secondary summary only; the original article, held on JSTOR, was not accessible within the time available for this research and is flagged here for direct consultation. --- 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.