Two Timurid cut-mosaic tiles, Central Asia or Persia, 14th/15th century

Ex-collection Princess Maria Romanoff (1931-2023), USA

Princess Maria Romanoff (1931-2023), born Princess Maria Valguarnera di Niscemi, studied jewellery design in Philadelphia, Paris, and Wichita, before settling in New York. She was a celebrated designer of women’s costume jewellery under the name of Mimi di N Design, and in the 1960s and 1970s, her designs were featured on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1973, she married HIH Prince Alexander of Russia, great-nephew of Czar Nicholas II. 

The Timurids were ambitious in their architectural patronage and were responsible for the construction of many religious institutions, such as mosques, madrasas, mausoleums and Sufi shrines. This architectural patronage was made possible by the transfer of artists and architects to the Timurid capital of Herat. By the fourteenth century sophisticated techniques had been developed in the Persian world which utilised pieces of cut-tiles joined with plaster to form complex multi-coloured mosaic panels (Wade 2006). Such techniques would be enhanced and used in the adornment of Timurid religious architecture, and mosaic tilework became integral to the architectural aesthetic of the Timurids by the late fourteenth century.

The present tiles are each composed of small pieces, cut to shape and glazed in monochrome in one of five different colours (cobalt, turquoise, ochre, aubergine, and white). Identical tiles are in the MET Museum (acc. no.1975.350.6), and the Louvre (inv. no.D 15113). The Louvre tile is accompanied by four smaller pentagonal tiles decorated en suite, and another of these smaller pentagonal tiles is in the Art Institute of Chicago (inv. no.1925.87). This allows us a better understanding of their original formation and intended decorative scheme, with a geometric tessellated interlace of the tiles themselves juxtaposed with the curvilinear vegetal motifs and arabesques of their mosaic decoration. For further examples of Timurid cut mosaic tiles, see Sotheby's, London, 25 April 2018, lots 106 to 110.