IZNIK
We are currently enjoying a mild winter, but even so, I miss my garden and the flowers that provide me with inspiration during the growing season. My front beds are full of clusters of emerging daffodil tips, but instead of giving me joy, their presence this early worries me. The holly trees are bright with berries and there are flashes of color from other fruiting species, but those flashes are only tantalizing pinpoints. I need more. Last weekend I sought floral inspiration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly refurbished Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.
The galleries cover many countries, ethnic groups and time periods, but one of the common themes is a tradition of painstaking embellishment of all kinds of objects–from complex carpets to everyday vessels. Color and stylized images abound in head-spinning abundance. I focused on the floral motifs, which are everywhere in the galleries. My favorite flowers decorate the tiles and pottery vessels from Iznik in Turkey.
Iznik, known historically as Nicaea, was founded in the fourth century B.C. Perched by Lake Iznik in northwestern Turkey, it has been a walled city since ancient times. Until recently it has been primarily an agricultural town, but in the 17th century Ottoman Empire it was an artistic center, producing vivid pottery used to decorate mosques, palaces, homes and public buildings.
You may not know the name “Iznik,” but you have probably seen reproductions or pictures of Iznik pottery, especially in the form of decorative tiles. The pieces are composed largely of quartz and quartzite, giving them a hard, bright quality. At the height of Iznik’s popularity, artisans took images, including familiar flowers, and translated them into decorative motifs. Jewel-like tones of blue, turquoise, green and red stood out against white backgrounds. Tulips abound on Iznik objects, as do carnations and hyacinths. Other flowers also dance over the tiles and vessels, but some are too stylized to identify definitively. Graceful leaves and curling vines repeat throughout the designs.
The elegant tulips of Iznik tiles are far removed from bulbous modern-day favorites. They most resemble contemporary lily form varieties like ‘Ballade’ and ‘White Triumphator,’ with tall, slender blossoms that narrow at the petal tips. Almost all the Iznik tulips are portrayed with the petals tightly closed. If those blooms were to leap from the tiles and open up, the slender petals would become reflexed or curved back, corrupting the elegant silhouette favored by Iznik artisans.
Iznik carnations or dianthus are easily recognizable because of their characteristic ragged or “pinked” petal edges. Popular in gardens for millennia, dianthus, in the forms of carnations, cottage pinks and sweet William, still shine in today’s cottage gardens. Cultivated varieties of the common carnation, Dianthus caryophyllus, were used by the Romans for medicine and improved by later breeders including the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Now they are standard in florist’s shops and flower markets everywhere, beloved for their good looks, sweet scent and long-lasting natures.
The origins of the Iznik style lie in the blue and white Chinese Ming dynasty porcelain favored by Turkish sultans. Originally the decoration on Iznik pottery was strictly cobalt blue and white, like its Chinese forebearers. Over the course of the sixteenth century, turquoise was added to the designs, followed by shades of green and finally, red. The colors still shine in the Iznik pottery on display at the Metropolitan Museum.
Iznik pottery reached a peak of popularity in the sixteenth century era of Sulyeman the Magnificent. A traveler in the seventeenth century reported that there were 300 pottery workshops in the town. According to the website run by the Republic of Turkey, the Iznik products were exported via the island of Rhodes, which was, at the time, controlled by the Turks.
As the Ottoman Empire declined, so did the popularity of Iznik pottery. By the twentieth century, the town had become a shadow of what it was during the height of its fame. It was burned to the ground in 1920 during the Turkish war of independence, but was later rebuilt and resettled. In 1989, a cultural revival began and in 1993, the Iznik Foundation was launched to facilitate research into Iznik history, sponsor archeological digs, recreate traditional pottery-making methods and spearhead a rebirth of the pottery industry. Now the flowers dance once again on pottery manufactured in Iznik and students are mastering ancient techniques.
My daughter brought two modern Iznik tiles–one with tulips and the other with carnations–back from a trip to Turkey. I prop them up on my desk now to remind me that beautiful things, like tulips and Iznik tiles, may fade away for a time, but they always return.