Women’s faces from a 9th century wall painting at SamarraLittle watercolour paintings show the colou
Women’s faces from a 9th century wall painting at SamarraLittle watercolour paintings show the colour schemes of fragments of an Abbasid wall painting probably depicting naiads (water nymphs), waves represented by wavy blue lines, and water birds, from Ernst Herzfeld’s excavations of House XVI at Samarra, Iraq, in 1911-1913 (on behalf of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin). Samarra was founded by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu'tasim (r. 833-842) in 836 AD to serve as his imperial capital, and abandoned by the Caliph and his court in 892. The wall paintings illustrate a wide range of subjects such as geometric patterns and courtly scenes with people playing music and listening, banqueting and dancing, and animals such as camels and birds.Photographs: FSA A.6 04.PF.21.071 (shows multiple fragments, including a water bird) and FSA A.6 04.PF.21.077 (Freer/Sackler Archive - SIRIS)Paintings: eeh1068_001; eeh1063_001; eeh1057_001 ; eeh1059_001 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: Ernst Herzfeld Papers)You can see hundreds (thousands?) more beautiful little paintings of fragments in a search of the Herzfeld Papers. -- source link
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