Possible date attribution for Persian shield

[rand]

Originally Posted by Jens Nordlunde

Hi Rand,

Sorry for the late response. It is always difficult to recognise flowers cut in steel, first it can have been difficult for the artist to show the flower in its correct form, and second we must consider the possibility of artistic freedom, which could change the look of the flower considerably. When you look at floral decoration, you should also take an interest in the leaves, as they would have been easier to make, and therefore more like in nature, and I don’t think the artist would use a lot of his ‘freedom’ to change the leaves – but one can never know. There are at least three different flowers on your shield, and one could be a rose, but I am not quite sure.

The scales around the inscription are strange, and have, maybe, only been made for decorative reasons. In some places in India the fish is holy, and there they could have used a scaled decoration, but I don’t know if it was holy anywhere in Persia.

Jens

Hey Jens,

Very much like your insight for using the leaves of the foliage as an important ingrediant in the recipe for identifying flowers because of their more likely true to form concept. The rose would have also been my guess for the flowers in the central section of the shield, but I more associate the rose with Persia than India, that was one of my original reasons for the shield Persian.

What may be something to consider is the gradual accumulation of line drawing motifs used on arms decoration to form a gradual timeline of both style and decoration. For example it seems the Chinese influence on Islamic arms is greatest during the late 15th and 16th century as that is where you first see the Chinese cloud motif and other very dstinctive floral designs transitions and these would be very apparent when comparing designs.

Your take on the possible association of the fish scale uniquely to India as a holy motif is very intrigueing because I had thought this more likely a Persian shield, now my eyes are open to the now seemingly more likely origen as India. It seems now that getting a translation of the inscription is the next step to see if there is anything else also possibly unique to India as that would certainly make that attribution very solid for this shield.

Thanks Jens,

rand