The Everyday Cat
Cats appear not only in paintings and poetry but also in the most tactile corners of daily life. This gallery presents two objects of everyday use – an earthenware bread stamp and a bronze incense burner – that were crafted with the cat in mind. Though humble in function, these objects remind us that felines have been quite literally pressed into the fabric of daily ritual for centuries: marked in dough, carried in scent.
Bread stamp
Uglazed earthenware with moulded design. Egypt, 8th – 13th century. Radius of 8.1 cm. Museum for Islamic Art, Berlin State Museums, I. 912
Just like the cat itself, stamping bread has a long history. This unglazed-ceramic bread stamp contains decorative elements depicting a moulded cat-like figure and plant. A handle is preserved on the back. The object was likely used to mark bread loaves, thereby playfully transforming a household tool into a tribute to feline form. The stamp would have been pressed into the bread before the loaf had risen, and would have left a relief impression.
Bread stamping served multiple functions. Besides a decorative purpose, stamps could indicate manufacture or official production, a relevant marker when distributing bread in political contexts. Moreover, evidence of stamped bread exists from various religious contexts, for instance Christian liturgical service.
The specific purpose of the cat image remains undetermined. The collection of the Museum for Islamic Art contains further bread stamps with geometric or animal and plant designs. Like the bread stamp descibed here, many of them were acquired for the museum’s collection in 1905 in Egypt by Bernhard Moritz, who served as the director of the Khedivial Library in Cairo (today’s Egyptian National Library and Archives) between 1896 and 1911.
A Note on Provenance
The objects preserved in the Museum for Islamic Art entered the collection through diverse pathways. For instance, they were acquired through excavations, as gifts from external donors or museum staff, traded with other German museum collections, or purchased on the international art market. In terms of the latter acquisition route, the museum often relied on the respective dealer to provide information regarding provenance and provenience, without being able to independently verify this information. Such information was recorded in the museum’s inventory books and is publicly accessible today. In this exhibition, therefore, we have marked data provided by dealers as “allegedly” in order to distinguish it from curatorial and/ or conservation assessments.
Between 1904 and 2014, acquisitions in the Museum for Islamic Art were documented in seven handwritten inventory books. Since 2014, the Berlin State Museums have been using a digital documentation system for inventory processes. However, the handwritten books (also from other collections) have been digitised and are publicly accessible through the link below. The variety of handwriting styles, corrections, annotations, and writing tools present in the volumes demonstrate their nature as continuous working documents throughout the decades.
Upper part of an incense burner
Copper alloy, glass, cast and engraved/ chased. Allegedly from Bujnūrd (Iran), 11th – 12th century. Height 10.5 cm, radius (bottom) 8.1 cm. Museum for Islamic Art, Berlin State Museums, I. 1/73
This feline head in stylised form constitutes the upper section of an incense burner featuring both openwork and engraved or chased ornamentation.The head would have been attached to an elongated body inside which the incense would have been burned. Elegant and expressive, it suggests a setting where fragrance and form unite. The eyes were once inlaid with turquoise-coloured glass, traces of which remain visible in one eye socket.
Comparable examples of lion-shaped incense burners suggest that the head and beck were attached to the body via a hinge mechanism. A significantly smaller lion-shaped fountain figure from eleventh or twelfth-century Egypt in the museum’s collection offers a useful comparison (I. 1959).
The piece is said to originate from Bujnūrd in northeastern Iran in the region of Khurāsān. This city lies near the Ālādāgh Mountains, close to today’s border with Turkmenistan, and has historically been a cultural and strategic hub due to its location on trade and military routes. Incense vessels in the form of felines and birds were produced on a large scale in the Seljuk workshops of Khurāsān. At its height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Seljuk Empire stretched from Central Asia across Iraq, Syria, and parts of Anatolia.
This object was purchased for the museum from the art and antiquities dealership of Saeed Motamed in Frankfurt in 1973. The fate of the incense burner’s further parts remains unknown.
Related Links
The Cat Exhibition
Cats have a long and complex history of interaction with humans. Bringing together a captivating selection of objects from the collections of the Berlin State Museums, this online exhibition proposes a thematic, experimental lens of inquiry – the figure of the cat.
