Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
A stark contrast is used between the ground of the blue glaze and the figures in white. Details are added to the figures through incised lines that create the scaled body of a running qilin — a mythical Chinese creature with the body of a lion and fire emerging from its shoulders — the feathers of flying birds, the petals of flowers and veins of leaves, and the forms of a rock. The decoration corresponds to the centre and well of the dish without any framing borders. The qilin runs at the centre with a pheasant in mid-air behind it, the two animals bracketed at top and bottom by a peony branch and a lingzhi fungus and bamboo shoot growing next to a rock. The well has two phoenixes in flight, facing opposite directions, and sprays of chrysanthemum and lotus flowers, the four elements running in a circuit around the well. The decoration on the dish represents another possible source for Timurid artists as well as a way of arranging groups of figures into loosely defined spatial units. Such compositions were adapted to contemporary Timurid book bindings.
David J. Roxburgh
• Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
• Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
