The crescent-shaped pendant from the 11th century pictured above entered The Met collection in 1915 through a bequest by the American lawyer and Egyptologist Theodore M. Davis. At the time, it was believed to be a Byzantine object and was labeled a work of “European decorative art” in a Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin supplement dedicated to Davis’s collection, published in 1931.
That designation changed in 1983 with new scholarship by Marilyn Jenkins, then an associate curator of Islamic Art at the Museum, and Manuel Keene, formerly a research associate in the same department. That year, they published a catalogue of The Met’s Islamic jewelry—”a little-studied subject,” they acknowledged—in which the pendant, now recognized to be from Fatimid Egypt (909–1171), was prominently shown in full color against a striking red background.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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So much of majestic art is still hidden from the Fatimid times and other treasures in the bed of the oceans too, am
sure they will all be retrieved and displayed at the Aga Khan Museum. Reminded me of the movie Titanic, and later an old woman who had survived was interviewed as to the events leading to that disaster and the saphire heart shaped pendant.
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