Fantastic fauna : decorative animals in Moslem ceramics

The series that contains the most numerous examples of the early “Reflet Metallique” comes first, and so we have the Fish.

To a people in whom a few centuries of life in a fertile land had not sufficed to efface the memory of the great desert spaces from whence they came, and of which the sand pressing ever on either side of the verdant Nile valley was a perpetual reminder- the life giving river was the most important factor in the landscape. And who could know the river without attaining to some knowledge of its denizens? True, the fish had been a Christian symbol, but the Moslem fish have a gaiety of disposition, a carefree variety of line and pose that seem more directly descended from the gay little frieze of fishes in the temple of Deir el Bahari, than the rigid sea creatures of early Christian days. Aldous Huxley says somewhere: “Leviathan and Behemoth are God’s emblems for grand occasions, fish are the celestial heraldry for ordinary days.” Here is no drilled symbol, no fixed line, but a collection of living, if at times slightly “stylisé”, creatures perpetually disporting themselves in the transparent shimmering of the lustre ware, the stunning black silhouette, the blues and reds, the chinese crystallisations of master workmen, the yellow and orange of the common pottery. They are coy, they are gay, they are nightmarish, they are graceful, but never are they dull. Even when a very school of diminuative fish chase across a plate, there will be no attempt at mass production, each one will have that indispensable variation which gives individuality and charm.

Next to the broad-rolling Nile the sky was a familiar space to Arab eyes; stars pointed the compass