The Museum · the collection

# Turquoise Bowl with Lute Player and Audience

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

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.](https://othermindset.com/assets/museum/turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player-full-a557935f.jpg)](https://othermindset.com/assets/museum/turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player-full-a557935f.jpg)

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.

[Sit with it in the galleries →](https://othermindset.com/museum#work-turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player)

## 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](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451444)

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

[← Wheat Fields](https://othermindset.com/museum/wheat-fields) · [The whole collection](https://othermindset.com/museum#h-collection) · [Embroidered Raffia Pile Cloth →](https://othermindset.com/museum/kuba-raffia-pile-cloth)

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](https://othermindset.com/museum/turquoise-bowl-with-lute-player.md)

This page as markdown.

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