Fragment of Tomb Cover (before 1955): Art, History and Details

Fragment of Tomb Cover (before 1955) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

In ivory on a dark brown ground a large-scale roundel is framed by a frieze of running animals containing a pair of confronted ibex on either side of a tree of life. Above is preserved the bottom portion of an identical roundel, and to either side of the main roundel is a fragment from the upper part of a repeated roundel, interrupted by the inclusion of a vertical inscription band in Kufic lettering.

Object facts

• Title: Fragment of Tomb Cover
• Date: before 1955
• Culture: Iran or Iraq
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: double-face compound twill
• Dimensions: Overall: 78.1 x 66 cm (30 3/4 x 26 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1955.52

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. “A Dated Persian Silk of the Buyid Period.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 43, no. 2, 1956, pp. 19–22.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Woven Treasures of Persian Art; Persian Textiles from the 6th to the 19th Century. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum, 1959.

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.