A CARVED WOODEN DOOR PANEL WITH ARABESQUE MEDALLION
Fustat, Old Cairo, Fatimid Egypt, 10th - 11th century

Of rectangular shape, carved in relief, the front featuring an elaborate almond-shaped medallion with cusped palmette terminals, in-filled with a quatrefoil rosette irradiating vegetal meanders and arabesque designs, reserved against a foliate scrolling ground, with a beaded frieze around the outer edges, 36cm x 16.5cm.

Carved panels presenting similar vegetal motifs as well as lively animal and figural subjects have often been attributed to Fatimid Fustat, based on strong stylistic and decorative analogies with wooden panels on the walls of the sacred enclosures of the Coptic Orthodox churches of Sitt Barbara (Saint Barbara) and Abu Sayfayn (Saint Mercurius) in Old Cairo. Edmond Pauty, a French architect appointed as the Head of the French conservation mission to preserve the Islamic art and architectural heritage of Cairo in the early 20th century, discusses at length the motifs and main features of these wooden panels in his publication Bois Sculptés d'Églises Coptes (Époque Fatimide), Cairo, 1930. He claims that the composition and patterns of the vegetal panels, like ours, are still strongly indebted to Byzantine architectural models (ibidem, p. 15), and makes a distinction between 10th-century panels, characterised by dense and exuberant interlocking vegetal scrolls, and 11th-century panels, characterised by more static foliate composition, often in isolated form, progressively marginalised, and lastly abandoned in favour of geometric patterns (ibidem, p. 25). For a visual comparison, please see plates V and XIII.5 in the same publication.