Richard McClary began his academic career by studying the mediaeval architecture of the Seljuqs and Qarakhanids, as well as other Byzantine and Turko-Muslim polities. From these grandiose walls and the structures of Anatolia dated to between 1000 and 1500, his present book in comparison dwells on the very small and quite short: he presents a study of a particular subset of mediaeval ceramics that were produced during the late twelfth century and early decades of the thirteenth century through existing sherds. In our current age, this mina’i ware—a type of overglazed stonepaste with figural, zoomorphic, epigraphic, geometric, and/or vegetal ornamentation—has become ubiquitous in museum displays and auction houses as indispensable specimens that round out collections of Islamicate arts.
McClary has authoritatively scoped out the surviving shattered and scattered vessels and few tiles that were once turned out in the workshops of Kashan in present-day Iran. In addition to synthesising copious secondary literature on mina’i ranging from archaeological reports to auction-lot descriptions, it is evident that the author has made wide-ranging visits to repositories holding mina’i materials. His book offers insights into the production, decoration, and distribution of these objects in the context of both their original period of manufacture and, more recently, in the modern art market with its preference for intact ceramics; this instigated excessive repairs (and the occasional forgery). Chapters proceed logically, first laying out McClary’s taxonomy to treat the corpus and types of mina’i forms based on decoration and style. Coming from a background in art history, the present reviewer confesses that the ensuing typological references to ‘Style 1c’ fragments, for example, or to a vessel of ‘Style 8ʹ in subsequent chapters read as clinical labels and are difficult to keep track of. However, a table listing the categorisation schema is placed close to the front of the book to facilitate an easy flip to jog one’s memory of technique and appearance.
The book’s contents pair scientific evaluation with stylistic and formal analysis. The work also investigates the provenance of select specimens derived from archaeological excavations, as well as dodgier means. In chapters 1–3, McClary delves into methods of production and he analyses chemical composition and the application of designs on various surfaces. There have not been any primary sources found concerning mina’i that were written in the original period of their manufacture, so sherds ‘act as their own archive’ (p. 311) in being unrestored and ‘unimpeachably original and unaltered’ (p. 316). As the archaeologist and the detective know, complete vessels can be re-envisaged from bowl bases, and the fuller shapes of jugs and ewers can be deduced from small sections or mere handles, so the corpus is quite rich.
The midpoint of the book, encompassing chapters 4 and 5, is arguably the most revelatory as the reader transitions from the physicality of mina’i objects to the conceptual signifiers and iconography depicted on them. Chapter 5 offers a particularly significant contribution to the broader field of Islamicate arts scholarship, as McClary asserts that the figural designs on mina’i ‘can be seen to mark the beginning of Persian miniature painting’ (pp. 58–59). By looking at clay, paper, and fabric sources, McClary issues a clarion call for transmediality and argues for the integration of more ceramic objects into research on arts of the book. Students taking introductory classes or specialised seminars on Islamicate arts and illustrated Turco-Persianate manuscripts would benefit from having this chapter on their syllabus. This is because the author clarifies how the figural designs on mina’i are ‘the antecedent to the style of painting seen on manuscripts’ (p. 193). Surveys of Islamicate book arts tend to stay in their lane and medium, resulting in a papyrocentrism that risks ignoring figural and compositional formulae on ceramics that are closer in scale and chronology to the earliest surviving books, yet the sherds are much more plentiful. It is worth stressing that, in the mediaeval period, ceramic was the cheaper, more prevalent, and portable medium over paper. Although the designation ‘miniature’ has only recently been nuanced and problematised in its usage as a shorthand for illustrations to manuscripts, we do not need to throw the term out altogether. It can, after all, appropriately refer to the size, method of outlining prior to infilling, and adornment of various media—ceramic or paper, for example—employing the technique.
Chapter 6 explains how mina’i left its original Iranian soil to end up in the ground farther afield, and covers the mediaeval diffusion and dispersal of the ceramics. We glean how the objects operated in economies and networks across the Islamicate sphere and beyond. Mass produced and catering to different (but affluent) social strata based on the diverse qualities of execution ranging from the stately to the hasty, mina’i objects were intended for export. In the chapter ‘Made to be traded and to travel’ (p. 205), there is a helpful map that illustrates the extent and scope of mina’i excavated across sites today, found in southern Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Central Asia up to the border with China.
If careful stratigraphy and proper archaeological methods can aid analysis, then the later chapters 7 and 8 involve a very different rationale for piecing together the disparate to create a whole. This approach was physically carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period, vessels were reconstituted and recreated so as to cater to modern buyers who favoured intact works of mina’i. Some were refashioned from various loose sherds and others were made outright from scratch by copying original twelfth- and thirteenth-century models. In the section surveying the transfer of antiquities out of Iran to Paris and places beyond in the waning decades of the Qajar and early Pahlavi Dynasties, scholars of Turco-Persianate arts will encounter familiar Armenian and French names operating in the legitimate sale of Islamicate ceramics, along with a few rogues trading in ‘the cult of completion’ and not the mina’i fragments as they were actually found. Rather than relegating such pieces to the back storeroom and shunning further acquisition and display, McClary counsels the owners of public and private collections to acknowledge the objects’ complex histories and multiple interventions taking place across centuries and centres.
McClary has admirably gathered together a plurality of voices in the secondary sources and the locations of collections he consults. He cites publications that were written mostly by European and Anglophone authors, and his bibliography contains several articles by scholars and museum staff from Iran, Japan, Turkey, and Russia; he also mentions future collaboration with Iranian colleagues as access to objects in the country (hopefully) improves. Given my own interests in how politics and arts come together in the pre-modern past, I wanted McClary to discuss the historical and political context of the late Seljuq era, when the mina’i was originally made, in as much detail as he does for the modern period, when the mina’i wares were originally unearthed and some were later reassembled. It does not matter though, as this can be taken up by other scholars, if it has not already been done elsewhere.
There are a few inconsistencies in Turkish and Persian transliterations (kalem as opposed to qalam, and the Shahnama character Tahmures has a Turkicised name, although the text in which he appears retains its Persian spelling). However, as the author rightfully notes in the first pages, specialists will know the terms and the general reader is not set back by the way in which these words are spelled. It would have been helpful if more of the original Arabic and Persian inscriptions and incomplete lines on the vessels and fragments had been written out, either in their original script or as transliterations. This means that the reader might verify McClary’s translations or match up the typed-out words with their painted counterparts to test their abilities to read what the mediaeval hand recorded. In one case study, McClary claims to read al-Dawla on a rim sherd and suggests that ‘the state’ is commonly repeated in mina’i inscriptions, which makes it tempting to identify the empire’s officials as the consumers of the wares. However, this proves unsubstantiated, as I scrutinised the photograph of the sherd purported to carry the passage. My eyes failed to see the rendered epigraph and thus the intended audience of the wares remains unknown. But, taking in the entire publication, these remarks are only trivialities, for, in endeavouring to ‘provide a solid framework upon which the further study of this iconic yet enigmatic style of medieval Iranian pottery can be built’ (p. 4), McClary’s argument that the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole is a resounding success.
