Visit to the Louvre

6 May 2014

In the Louvre Galleries

From left to right: Charlotte Maury and Julia Gonnella 

Following on from our Berlin colleagues' (Dr Julia Gonnella and Simone Struth) visit to London in February, a joint trip to Paris was planned and kindly arranged by Charlotte Maury. She had already provided us with an illustrated list of the Herzfeld material (pottery, steatite, glass, mosaic tesserae) despatched from the British Museum in 1922, in exchange for a collection of comparative material excavated in the Islamic levels at the Iranian site of Susa or Shush in Khuzestan, formerly the Elamite capital, which lies to the east of the major Iraqi sites of Babylon, Kish and Nippur. In addition to these they have 104 carved plaster fragments, most of which would appear to have been found in Samarra too, some of which are illustrated in Herzfeld's archives in the Smithsonian and published in Henry Viollet's 1911 publication, Un palais musulman du IXe siècle. Charlotte proved to be a most enthusiastic guide and endlessly patient with all our questions.

We met in the Louvre last Tuesday, 29 May, when the museum is closed to the general public, so it was a delight to have the entire Islamic galleries to ourselves once we had emerged from the depths of their reserves where most of the material is kept. Although navigating the route to the museum was complicated by heightened security due to the highest in the land visiting an inaugural exhibition of their latest project, the 'Louvre Abu Dhabi', see http://www.louvre.fr/en/louvre-abu-dhabi-exhibition-app for details.

 A mixture of red porphyry, yellow stone and some gold leaf-coated stone  tesserae together with multicoloured glass millefiori tile fragments

In the Reserves

 Red porphyry tesserae, some of which were rounded rim fragments, indicating that these are recycled bowl fragments

Crude mosaic fragment with glass tesserae (some with gold leaf) embedded in gypsum plaster base , accession no. OA7735/54 - unfortunately this is without a Herzfeld

 I-N locus number

There is apparently no record indicating who chose this 'representative collection'. Three media are conspicuously absent: wood, carved stone architectural pieces and painted plaster. As with every visit to the Herzfeld collection new aspects are observed. Many of the Louvre's tesserae are stone and not glass. The red ones must be porphyry, and perhaps the yellow ones some form of chalcedony. Both need to be positively identified. A closer inspection of the red pieces revealed the rounded profile of a rim, indicating that these once belonged to a vessel, recycled perhaps after breakage. There are several pieces of gypsum plaster with tesserae embedded in them revealing a rather crude application. Unfortunately none of these have a Finds Journal number indicating their find spot. They are probably from the mihrab area of the Great Mosque or Malwiyya, to the north-east of modern Samarra.

Lunch break at a traditional French restaurant

From left to right:  Julia Gonnella and Yannick Lintz

Lunch was a welcome and delicious break in a traditional French restaurant behind the Louvre, hosted by Dr Yannick Lintz, the new Director of the Islamic Department. She is equally enthusiastic about the Samarra finds project and graciously agreed to help us in our quest to bring all the information together digitally.

Seminar in the Université de Paris I

Julia Gonnella being introduced by Alastair Northedge

The following evening we all met up again for a seminar organised by Professor Alastair Northedge at the Université de Paris I. He had invited Julia to give a talk to his post graduate students that she had presented in Doha recently and is now published in the Blair and Bloom edited volume God is Beautiful. Several of his students are working on different aspects of Samarra's architecture and decoration: Fatema Dahmani on the wall paintings; Vanessa Rose on the tiles; Iraqi architects Emad al-Faraj and Ahmad al-Gribaoui on  the architecture. Following this we  repaired to a nearby café for refreshments and to continue our Samarra discussions until the proprietors were no doubt wishing we would exhaust the topic and go home! 

                                                                                                   Rosalind Wade Haddon