Roundels with King Spearing Lion (prior to 1971): Art, History and Details

Roundels with King Spearing Lion (prior to 1971) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This fragment preserves tangent and aligned roundels arranged in 3 rows. Each roundel depicts a king with an impaled lion at end of a spear; the image is reversed in alternate columns. The roundels have a pearled border. Interspaces are ornamented with a motif composed of four palmettes in an X formation.

Object facts

• Title: Roundels with King Spearing Lion
• Date: prior to 1971
• Culture: Iran or Iraq, in the style of the Abbasid period (750–1258)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: lampas weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 74.2 x 85.7 cm (29 3/16 x 33 3/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1971.25

A detail from the museum

Only one roundel is complete, but 9 other partial roundels are also preserved on this fragment.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1971.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 59, no. 1, 1972, pp. 3–46.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

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.