Court and craft: a masterpiece from Northern Iraq

Nice exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery focusing on a wonderful 14th century bag made in Mosul in Northern Iraq.

The bag itself is beautiful. It is in brass with silver and gold inlay and has a hinged lid. It would be a really useful, practical bag shape even today. The show looks at what the bag might have been for and how it fits in stylistically with other work from that place and time.

The show also uses it to illustrate court life as the motif on the top is a court scene and I particularly like the display where they had an enlarged picture of the scene with example of objects in it in front and highlighted in the picture. They also showed other works which had been made for that court such as a beautiful copy of the Qur’an.

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