Mail-Order Mihrabs

Abstract

When studying tile revetments of monuments in Iran from the late twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century and in the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, one is faced with two very different narratives as to how the design and production of these revetments came about. The luster tiles installed in Iran and beyond were produced in one city, Kashan, by well-documented families of tile-makers who left a wide range of signed tiles and vessels. Tiles produced in the Ottoman Empire between the 1410s and the 1470s are attributed to the “Masters of Tabriz,” an elusive group construed to be a multi-generational, itinerant workshop based on a single signature on the mihrab of the mosque-zāviye of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) in Bursa (1419–21). In a comparative study of these two contexts, this article offers insights into ways of producing and logistics of transporting and installing large-scale tile revetments, and argues that in the Ottoman case, too, production may have taken place at a single site.