# The Wade Cup with Animated Script > Unidentified metalworker, eastern Iran (Khorasan) or Azerbaijan - region disputed - c. 1200-1221 (Cleveland Museum of Art catalogue, following R. Ettinghausen's 1957 case for Khorasan before the Mongol destructions of 1221-22); alternatively 'the third decade of the thirteenth century' (c. 1221-1230) in D. S. Rice's 1955 monograph, which argued for Azerbaijan or the Caucasus > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-khorasan-or-azerbaijan-metalworker-1200s/wade-cup-cleveland/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-24 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified metalworker, eastern Iran (Khorasan) or Azerbaijan - region disputed - **Date:** c. 1200-1221 (Cleveland Museum of Art catalogue, following R. Ettinghausen's 1957 case for Khorasan before the Mongol destructions of 1221-22); alternatively 'the third decade of the thirteenth century' (c. 1221-1230) in D. S. Rice's 1955 monograph, which argued for Azerbaijan or the Caucasus - **Medium:** Brass, cast, inlaid with silver (silver inlay now partly lost) - **Dimensions:** Overall height 11.5 cm (4 1/2 in.); diameter 16.1 cm (6 5/16 in.) - **Object type:** Islamic metalwork - **Period:** Late Seljuq or Khwarazmian-era Iran, early thirteenth century. The Cleveland Museum of Art's own period label, 'Iran, Seljuq period of Iran (1037-1194),' predates the object's own catalogued date range of 1200-1221 by several years; Great Seljuq authority in Khorasan had already given way to the Khwarazmshahs by about 1200, so the label and the date range sit awkwardly together in the museum's own record. This is noted as a minor cataloguing inconsistency, not a scholarly claim about the object. - **Current location:** Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, Gallery 116 (Islamic) - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A small footed brass bowl, 11.5 centimetres high and 16.1 in diameter, cast in one piece and inlaid all over with silver, most of it now lost. Below the rim runs the most celebrated single inscription in Islamic metalwork: a band of good wishes to its owner written in letters built entirely from human figures and animals, the fullest development of what is called animated script. Below that, bands of confronted and processing beasts frame the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the interior floor carries four sphinxes revolving around a knot of fish.The cup is unsigned, undated and names no owner. It surfaces on paper for the first time in a February-March 1943 exhibition catalogue at the University of Michigan, and was bought later that same period by the Cleveland Museum of Art from Heeramaneck Galleries in New York, using a fund established by the bequest of J. H. Wade, a museum trustee who had died in 1926. D. S. Rice's 1955 monograph placed it in Azerbaijan around 1221-1230; Richard Ettinghausen's 1957 review-article in Ars Orientalis, running to forty pages, contested almost every point and built a ten-strand case for Khorasan around 1200 instead. The dispute was never formally resolved by a third study, and the Cleveland Museum's own current catalogue quietly follows Ettinghausen's date without committing to either scholar's region.Nothing about the maker survives: no name, no workshop mark, no city. What is known instead is the milieu - a small group of dated comparanda, a metalworking culture destroyed within a generation by the Mongol invasions of 1221-22, and two of the twentieth century's leading Islamic art historians reading the same unsigned object and reaching different conclusions from the same evidence. ## 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. 1163-1221-unknown** Unidentified metalworker and first owner `[disputed]` (manufacture) Region and date are both scholarly disagreements rather than documented facts. D. S. Rice (1955) argued Azerbaijan or the Caucasus, c. 1221-1230; Richard Ettinghausen (1957) argued Khorasan, probably Herat or Nishapur, c. 1200 and before 1221. No inscription on the object names a maker, patron, place or date. - **unknown-by 1943** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented between manufacture and 1943. Whether or when the piece left Iran or Afghanistan, and by what route, is not recorded in the sources consulted. - **by 1943-1943** Unrecorded lender `[documented]` (exhibition) First documented appearance: 'Metalwork from Islamic Countries', Rackham Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 25 February - 11 March 1943, where the cup was, in Ettinghausen's own words, 'first briefly described and illustrated'. The lender is not named in the sources consulted; it is not confirmed here that the lender was Heeramaneck Galleries. - **unknown-1944** Heeramaneck Galleries, New York (Nasli Heeramaneck) `[documented]` (dealer stock) The only named private holder in the museum's own provenance record, dated by the museum '?-1944'. Sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art. No date is given for when Heeramaneck acquired it. - **1944-present** The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio `[documented]` (purchase) Accessioned 15 December 1944 as 1944.485, purchased from the J. H. Wade Fund, an endowment established by the bequest of J. H. Wade (died 1926) rather than a personal acquisition by Wade himself. Exhibited within weeks at the museum's own Islamic Art show (3 November 1944 - 2 February 1945) and repeatedly thereafter. Still in the collection, Gallery 116 Islamic. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This object has never been offered at public auction. It was bought privately from Heeramaneck Galleries, New York, with the sale completed by the accession date of 15 December 1944. No purchase price has been published in the sources consulted; the only figure that could exist is a dealer's invoice. There is accordingly no hammer price and no buyer's premium to separate. ## Exhibitions - Metalwork from Islamic Countries, Rackham Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 25 February - 11 March 1943 (pre-acquisition; lender not documented in sources consulted), 1943 - Islamic Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 3 November 1944 - 2 February 1945, 1944-1945 - For Modern America from the Ancient Near East, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 24 February - 21 March 1948, 1948 - Exhibition of Persian Art, Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East, Rome, 31 May - 30 September 1956, 1956 - Sept mille ans d'art en Iran (The Exhibition of Persian Art: 7000 Years of Art in Iran), Petit Palais, Musee des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, 19 October 1961 - 31 January 1962, 1961-1962 - Object Lessons: Cleveland Creates an Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 7 June - 8 September 1991, 1991 - Art of the Islamic World (Islamic art rotation), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 21 May 2021 - 31 May 2022, 2021-2022 ## Literature - 1955, D. S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Paris: Editions du Chene, 1955. Portfolio, 40 loose pp., 31 text figures, 20 plates. - 1957, Richard Ettinghausen, 'The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Its Origin and Decorations', Ars Orientalis, vol. 2, 1957, pp. 327-366. - 1958, The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH, 1958. Mentioned and reproduced, cat. no. 708. - 1966, Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966. Reproduced p. 209. - 1969, Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969. Reproduced p. 209. - 1978, Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Reproduced p. 265. - 2001, Sally Ruth May, Jane Takac and Barbara J. Bradley, Knockouts: A Pocket Guide. Cleveland, OH, 2001. Mentioned no. 73, p. 118; reproduced p. 70. - 2012, David Franklin and C. Griffith Mann, Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH, 2012. Reproduced pp. 102-103. - 2014, Sheila Blair, Text and Image in Medieval Persian Art. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Mentioned p. 107, note 65. - 2015, Louise W. Mackie, Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th-21st Century. Cleveland; New Haven: Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2015. Reproduced and mentioned p. 33, fig. 1.17. - 2016, Irvin Cemil Schick, 'The Content of Form: Islamic Calligraphy between Text and Representation', in Sign and Design: Script as Image in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (300-1600 CE), Brigitte Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, eds. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016, pp. 173-194. Reproduced p. 177, fig. 9.2. - 2021, Meghan E. Strong, 'Art of the Islamic World', Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 61, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 28-30. Reproduced and mentioned p. 30. - 2023, Corinne Muhlemann, Complex Weaves: Technique, Text, and Cultural History of Striped Silks. Affalterbach: Didymos-Verlag, 2023. Mentioned and reproduced pp. 78-79, figs. 41-42. ## Open questions - Which region made it: Khorasan (Ettinghausen, 1957) or Azerbaijan/the Caucasus (Rice, 1955)? No third dedicated study has been located that revisits the question, and the Cleveland Museum's own current catalogue does not choose between them. - What is the cup's precise date within the broad window of c. 1163 to 1221 that the comparative evidence allows? Ettinghausen himself called his 'sometime around 1200' only a tentative conclusion pending further dated comparanda. - Who was the cup made for? The rim inscription addresses only 'its owner', naming no one, unlike the Freer pen case (Majd al-Mulk) or the Peytel Cup (two named sadrs). - What does the foot inscription actually say in full? Ettinghausen describes it only as 'a brief formula of good wishes' in human-headed naskhi; no source consulted publishes a complete transliteration or translation. - Where was the object between its manufacture and its first documented appearance in a 1943 Ann Arbor exhibition catalogue? No owner is recorded for the intervening centuries. - Who lent the cup to the 1943 Ann Arbor exhibition, and was that lender Heeramaneck Galleries? The catalogue's lender is not named in the sources consulted for this record. - What did the Cleveland Museum of Art pay Heeramaneck Galleries in 1944? No price has been published; there was no auction. - Has the alloy ever been analysed instrumentally? Ettinghausen declined to compare it to related pieces in 1957, and no metallurgical study of this specific object has been located since. ## Sources - [1] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1944.485, The Wade Cup with Animated Script. Tombstone, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance, exhibition and citation history, and CC0 images, read via the museum's Open Access API (object id 123985) and its public catalogue page. - [2] Richard Ettinghausen, 'The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Its Origin and Decorations', Ars Orientalis, vol. 2 (1957), pp. 327-366. Read in full from the digitized volume of Ars Orientalis vol. 2 (1957) on the Internet Archive (identifier arsorientalisart21957univ), OCR text. - [3] D. S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Paris: Editions du Chene, 1955). NOT read directly; the 1955 portfolio was not located in a digitized, openly accessible form. Rice's arguments and specific wording as cited in this record are taken from Ettinghausen's 1957 review-article (source 2), which quotes and paraphrases the monograph at length, and from Gaston Wiet's contemporary review (source 4). Flagged for replacement with the monograph itself. - [4] Gaston Wiet, review of D. S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Syria, vol. 34 (1957), p. 194 onward. - [5] HathiTrust catalog record for 'Metalwork from Islamic countries: [exhibition] Rackham Building, February 25-March 11, 1943', University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Consulted for bibliographic confirmation of the exhibition's dates and venue only; the catalogue text itself was not read, and no claim about who wrote its introduction or who lent the Wade Cup to it is made in this record. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Bobrinski Bucket', for the names given in that object's inscriptions (caster, inlayer, patron, recipient), its date and place of manufacture, and its present location. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with N. I. Vesselofski's original 1910 publication or a specialist study. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Nasli Heeramaneck', for the dealer's biography. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with an obituary or the LACMA collection history of the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection. - [8] 'WADE, JEPTHA HOMER II', Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, for J. H. Wade's dates (1857-1926), his role as a museum founder and trustee, and the establishment of the J. H. Wade Fund. - [9] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1985.22, Jug (Nishapur, Khurasan, 12th century). Used for the comparison plate. - [10] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1945.27, Twelve-sided Ewer with Sphinxes and Human-Headed Inscriptions. Used for the comparison plate. - [11] The Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1948.308, Feline Incense Burner (Khurasan, Seljuq period). Used for the comparison plate. --- 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.