Balustrade Fragment with Animals from the residence of Hajji Hasan ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad (1303–4): Art, History and Details

Balustrade Fragment with Animals from the residence of Hajji Hasan ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad (1303–4) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This architectural relief shows a lion attacking a bull surrounded by other predators pursuing their prey, with scrolling vegetal motifs filling the spaces between. Scenes of powerful predators in the act of hunting and capturing other animals echo the royal imagery of pre-Islamic Iran. This piece was part of a balustrade in a private home; the owner and construction date are known from another fragment from the same building. The building was embellished when the Mongols controlled Iran, and the relief shows a continuity in style from carvings made during the preceding Turkic Seljuk period (1037–1194). Under Turkic and Mongol rule in Iran, Islamic injunctions against making figural imagery were loosened.

Object facts

• Title: Balustrade Fragment with Animals from the residence of Hajji Hasan ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad
• Date: 1303–4
• Culture: Iran, Hamadan, Ilkhanid period (1256–1353)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 66.7 x 83.8 x 10.6 cm (26 1/4 x 33 x 4 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Islamic Art
• Department: Islamic Art
• Accession number: 1938.15

A detail from the museum

This balustrade and two others, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris, are from a building probably in the city of Hamadan, Iran.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Comparable material: End of Balustrade in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, object number: 32.15.1.
• Upton, Joseph. "Persian Sculptures of the Fourteenth Century." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art vol. 27 no. 9 (Sept. 1932).
• Hollis, Howard. "An Iranian Balustrade." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 2 (February 1939): 18.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.