Mamluk metalwork: geometry in inlaid brass.

The basins, trays, candlesticks and lamps of Mamluk Cairo carry the tradition's geometry in another medium altogether: brass and bronze, engraved and inlaid with silver and gold, the strapwork of a wall reduced to the width of a wire. The constructions are the ones the tile-cutters used. Only the tools changed.

Mamluk metalwork is the body of inlaid brass and bronze made in Egypt and Syria under the Mamluk sultans, between the middle of the thirteenth century and the Ottoman conquest of 1517, and it is one of the great vehicles of Islamic geometric ornament. The pieces are functional: basins for washing, trays and stands for serving, candlesticks and lamps, pen-boxes, incense burners, Qur'an boxes. Their surfaces are anything but plain. Engraved and inlaid with silver, gold and a black compound, they carry inscriptions, roundels, arabesque and, above all, the star polygons, in a medium where a line is a strand of hammered wire and a coloured face is a different metal.

From Mosul to Cairo

The technique came to Egypt from the north. In the first half of the thirteenth century the city of Mosul, in what is now northern Iraq, was the centre of a school of inlaid brass so celebrated that its craftsmen signed themselves "al-Mawsili" wherever they later worked, and the ewers, boxes and candlesticks of that school are among the finest metal objects of the medieval world. The Mongol campaigns of the 1250s and 1260s scattered the workshops, and their masters and their apprentices moved west to Damascus and Cairo, where the new Mamluk court and its emirs became the patrons that Mosul had lost. By 1300 the Cairo workshops were producing pieces for the sultans and for export, and by the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad in the early fourteenth century they had reached a scale and confidence the objects still show.

The most famous single piece, the basin in the Louvre known as the Baptistère de Saint Louis, signed by Muhammad ibn al-Zayn around the 1320s to 1340s, is unusual for its crowded figures of horsemen and huntsmen. The more typical Mamluk surface is geometric and epigraphic: bands of monumental script naming the patron, roundels carrying the sultan's blazon, and fields of star polygons filling the spaces between, often in a radial arrangement that follows the round form of a basin or a tray.

How the inlay was done

The object was first raised or cast in brass or bronze. The design was then engraved into the surface with a graver, cutting the strapwork lines and the outlines of the faces, and the recesses were undercut so that a softer metal could be hammered into them and held by the lip. Silver wire went into the lines; sheet silver and, on the richest pieces, gold went into the faces; and the engraved ground between them was filled with a black compound, so that the bright metals stood against a dark field. The result reads exactly like a coloured tile panel with the palette inverted: where zellige is a dark line between coloured faces on a light wall, inlaid brass is a bright line between metal faces on a black ground.

Very little of the original silver survives on most pieces, because it was prised out and sold in hard times, so museum brasses often show the empty engraved channels where the wire once sat. The geometry survives regardless. It was cut into the brass first, and the inlay only coloured it.

The same constructions, a different scale

A Mamluk tray roundel and a Mamluk stone dado in the Sultan Hasan complex are drawn from the same figures, and the objects make the point better than any argument that the constructions are independent of their material. On a basin the field is often laid out radially, a single rosette at the centre with rings of stars around it, because a basin has a centre and an edge and no wall to repeat along; the studio derives this as the medallion layout, and it produces the same proportions at three centimetres that the wall-tile cutter produced at thirty. On a candlestick the same eight-fold field is stepped into concentric bands around the drum. On an incense burner or a lantern the field is not inlaid at all but pierced, cut clean through the metal so that smoke or light comes out of the geometry, the metal cousin of the stone jaali.

The one thing the metal added is the dot. Mamluk craftsmen liked to punch a field of small silver points into the larger faces of a rosette, and the studio's dot inlay reproduces the effect on the geometry's own terms: a regular field of points inside each major face, spaced from the face's inradius, so that they are as exact as the strapwork around them.

Where to see it

The Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo holds the largest collection, much of it from the city's own mosques. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York each hold basins, candlesticks and Qur'an boxes of the first rank, and most now publish them online at a resolution at which the engraved geometry can be followed line by line. Look for the empty channels where the silver was, and read the pattern from them.

In the studio

The Mamluk Metalwork Series in the studio's social plates renders eight of these registers from the engine: the khatam seal as an inlaid seal, the rosette roundel with silver dots, engraved courses, the pierced lamp and gold strapwork as line only, a two-level damascened seal, the interlocking rosette field and a niello dado. Every one is the same construction the studio derives for a wall, with the colour set swapped to bronze, brass, silver and gold. Open any of them and the geometry underneath is the geometry underneath the basin. Derived, not generated.