Tiles that remember fire

Twelve tiles, three rows of four, and not one of them makes sense alone.

Take any single square and you get fragments: half a red arch, the stem of a carnation with no flower, a blue blossom sliced through the middle by the edge. The design does not respect the tile. It runs straight across the joins, so that a scalloped red frame begun on one square closes on its neighbour, and a spray of flowers rooted in the bottom row lifts its leaves into the row above. The panel only reads when the pieces are set together, edge to edge, in a wall.

Inside each arch, a bouquet: red carnations with their petals fringed, cobalt rosettes, long feathery leaves in a sea green that turns turquoise where the glaze pooled. Between the arches the white ground is scattered with more blue flowers, smaller, like the ones that fill gaps in a real garden. Every outline is drawn in a thin dark line. Every colour sits under a clear glaze, painted onto a stonepaste body and fired, which is why the blues still look wet four hundred years later.

That red is the difficult one. Potters at Iznik, in northwestern Anatolia, had learned in the sixteenth century to paint with an iron-rich clay slip that fired to a tomato red and stood up slightly from the surface, so that if you ran a fingertip over it you could feel the colour. Getting it right in the kiln took skill; getting it wrong left it brown or bubbled. Here it holds, in the bold red bands that shape every arch.

Tiles like these were made for buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, the walls of rooms where people lived and prayed and received guests. In Istanbul you can still stand in the Rüstem Pasha Mosque and be surrounded by thousands of them, floor to ceiling, so many that the pattern stops being a picture and becomes the room. In a museum, mounted on a board, the same flowers turn into an object you face from a polite distance.

Something is lost in that move, and something gained. You cannot live with these here. But you can see, closer than any visitor to a seventeenth-century hall would have been allowed, the brushstroke where a painter at Iznik lifted the tip and a carnation petal ended in a point.

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