Lajvardina Pottery Sweetmeat Dish

Sweetmeat dishes were made by joining an upper tray divided into seven compartments and a shallow bowl with a short foot. This dish is a rare example of a ceramic container decorated in lajvardina technique.
Lajvardina wares were named after the Persian word lajvard (lapis lazuli), for their colour combination (gold incrustations on a deep blue over-glaze ground) resembles the texture of the lapis lazuli stone. The entire surface of the dish has been finely decorated with geometric and stylised vegetal motifs painted in red and white with gold highlights set against a dark blue glaze. The seven circular compartments may indicate that such kind of vessels be employed for the setting of the Haft Sin (seven S’s), a traditional table display prepared for the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
Produced in Iran during the reign of the Mongol Ilkhans, lajvardina wares stayed in fashion for a limited period, thus their rarity. Their costly method of production, requiring two firings, is described in the contemporaneous treatise by Abu al-Qasim ‘Abdallah al-Kashani, a Persian author from a potter family of Kashan. Tiles in lajvardina technique have been excavated in the royal complex of Takht-e Suleyman (northern Iran), suggesting that this production might primarily have been destined for the elite market.
A stone-paste sweetmeat dish with very similar decoration but on a turquoise ground is in the collections of the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (F1909.318).