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Islamic gold sandwich glass: some fragments in the David Collection, Copenhagen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Extract

Sandwich glass is the product of a technique practised from antiquity. Essentially, decoration is achieved by laying gold to a glass surface, patterning this gold in various ways, and then adding a second layer of glass to encapsulate the gold pattern. The technique seems to have been employed only rarely by craftsmen in Islamic areas; certainly surviving examples are rare.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1988

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References

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35 Caiger-Smith, Alan, Lustre Pottery, Technique, tradition and innovation in Islam and the Western World, London, 1985, pp. 3136,Google Scholar suggests that the IXth–IXth century fascination with an all-over-gold effect stems from a wish to evoke “the supreme statue of a ruler, of the court where the riches of the world were gathered in one place, and of the heavenly powers without whose help the court could not have come to be.” Yasin Safadi has commented to me on the identification of gold with the sun as a symbol of God which was popular at this time. The gold letters and solar rosettes in contemporary manuscripts reinforce this idea, while the colour blue, used for the enamel dots on the David Collection fragments, carried a related symbolism.