Fragment (1200s–1300s): Art, History and Details

Fragment (1200s–1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The Indian technique of patterning a textile by printing with carved woodblocks came to the Mamluk world as a result of trade with India. At Fustat, outside of Cairo, numerous fragments of Indian and Mamluk printed textiles have been found. Fish, repeated to form the entire design of this textile, were an indigenous Egyptian motif.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment
• Date: 1200s–1300s
• Culture: Egypt, Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Block printing on plain weave cotton ground
• Dimensions: Overall: 16.5 x 17.8 cm (6 1/2 x 7 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1929.845

A detail from the museum

The break in the bodies of two of the fish reveals that two blocks were used to print each fish.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pfister, R. Les toiles imprimées de Fostat et l'Hindoustan. Paris: Les Éditions d'art et d'histoire, 1938.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art., 1991.

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.