Polychrome Tile Panel with Hanging Lamp, Vase, and Floral Motifs

In Qur’an 24:36, the presence of God is likened to a lamp in a niche: "Allah is the light of the Heavens and the earth. The similitude of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp…” This four-part tile ensemble depicts a lamp suspended above a vase of flowers resting on a pedestal. The drawing of the arch, flowers, vase, and pedestal is especially refined and detailed. Identical panels are known in other museum collections, at times in ensembles numbering nearly a dozen individual tiles. In such instances, the naturalistically-rendered flowers emerging from the vase constitute more than just a single tile. This circumstance perhaps explains why the large flowers spanning the upper two tiles in the set at Shangri La are not seamlessly aligned.