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Bowl with drinkers, Nishapur, 10th Century
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar

A larger image of this Bowl with drinkers, Nishapur, 10th Century. Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar.

Title: Nishapur Bowl
Unknown, Iran, 10th Century
Creator: Unknown, Iran, 10th Century
Date Created: 0900/1000
Diameter: 23.3 cm
Type: Bowl
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar
Google Art Project

Perhaps the earliest surviving depiction of an incontestably black person in Islamic art is a colorful bowl produced in Nishapur in northeast Iran around the tenth century.³³ It depicts a huge, centrally placed, frontal figure holding a falcon while diminutive attendants offer wine (on the left) and food in a dish (right). The right-hand figure is entirely black but for his red neck and white hands.³⁴ From the phrenological point of view he is strongly differentiated from the other attendant, whose outsized, heavy, noseless, rectilinear head dominates and overbalances his whole body; his uncomfortably elongated arms and legs are also out of proportion. The African, by contrast, exhibits no such troubling asymmetries. He has a notably small and delicately proportioned head, with a snub nose and a short, curved beard. Their bodies too are very differently rendered. The Persian attendant is static; the African's pose is mobile, indeed dynamic, with a dancing gait, outstretched arms (his left hand grasps a ewer), and an overall impression of fluid, limber movement. Note as well the digital dexterity displayed by the way he holds the dish aloft. Somehow the artist has endowed him with a joie de vivre that his colleague plainly lacks.
R. Hillenbrand, 'The Image of the Black in Islamic Art: The Case of Painting', in The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, eds D. Bindman, S. P. Blier, and H. L. Gates, (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), pp.215-53