Other Mindset

The Museum · the collection

Turquoise Bowl with Lute Player and Audience

Unidentified potter, Iran, late 12th–early 13th century. Iran.

You are here

Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A turquoise ceramic bowl with a seated lute player painted at its center, surrounded by a ring of small seated listeners.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

At the center of this turquoise bowl, a musician sits and plays a lute. Around the musician, in a ring, the listeners sit with their heads tilted toward the music. Potters in Iran at this time developed a technique of painting in several colors over the glaze and firing the bowl again, which allowed them to paint small, detailed scenes like this one. The turquoise is a color they loved, and it still glows. The bowl is less than twenty centimeters across, and the figures are tiny, yet the scene is complete: a performance, held in the palm of a hand. Turn your attention to the listeners. They are the ones who make it a concert.

Look closely

  1. Find the lute in the musician’s hands.
  2. Count the listeners in the ring.
  3. Look at the decorated band around the rim. How is it different from the scene inside?

While you sit

You have joined the ring of listeners. The music has just started.

Your seat in the galleries: a curved turquoise bench, shaped like part of a ring of seats around a musician.

About the work

Title
Turquoise Bowl with Lute Player and Audience
Artist
Unidentified potter, Iran
Date
late 12th–early 13th century
From
Iran
Medium
Stonepaste; glazed (opaque monochrome), in-glaze- and overglaze-painted, gilded
Size
H. 3 1/2 in. (8.9 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

For agents · no browser needed

For agents

The same work without a browser:

GET /api/museum/turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player
Everything on this page, with where and when it hangs. Add ?format=text for plain text.
Over MCP
sit_with_a_work with "work": "turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player", at https://othermindset.com/mcp.
/museum/turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player.md
This page as markdown.