This stucco and glass window consists of a sixteen-pointed star enclosing a sixteen-pointed flower. The flower is imperfect, as two of its petals are ‘grown together’, i.e., are not separated by a line. The star is inscribed in a circle with an ornamental upper contour reminiscent of a semicircular arch. The area below the circle is decorated with perforations and two triangles (in the corners).

Coarse-grained gypsum plaster; colourless glass (clear glass as well as glass with a greenish, greyish, or bluish tint); coloured glass (two shades of green, blue, two shades of yellow including an orange colour, two shades of red

The stucco latticework shows cracks and minor losses, but seems generally intact. No pieces of glass are missing. There are signs of earlier restorations. The repairs involved filling the losses with stucco, refixing loose pieces of glass with adhesive, and supplementing the thin plaster layer in which the pieces of glass are embedded with various types of plaster.

This stucco and glass window was produced according to the traditional method used in the manufacture of qamariyyāt in North Africa to this day (see Technique) and represents a motif that was widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period.

There are two comparable examples of stucco and glass windows with the flower-and-star motif in the collections studied, one held at the Medelhavsmuseet (Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities) in Stockholm (IG_166), and the other at the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens (IG_353). A similar window is depicted in Gustave le Bon’s La Civilisation des Arabes of 1884 (IG_192) among other stucco and glass windows from Cairo. The motif is also shown in numerous sketches and paintings (see for instance IG_104, IG_118, IG_444).

The representation of symmetrically designed flowers and stars is a recurring element of Islamic ornamentation across time and media. However, the insertion of a flower within a star is uncommon in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, where star ornamentation is always restricted to purely geometric forms (see for instance IG_170, IG_363, IG_364, IG_366). This diffrence supports the attribution of the window to Egypt.

According to the museum records, the window dates to the 17th century. There are, however, some indications that point to a later production date: firstly, the good state of preservation of the stucco lattice, which would have shown clearer signs of weathering if it had been installed and exposed to the elements for a longer period of time, and secondly, the use of cylinder-blown flat glass (also called broad-sheet). In the Islamic world, sheet glass was usually produced using the crown-glass process, while in Europe, the broad sheet-method was the dominant technique to manufacture flat glass. The Hungarian architect Max Herz (1856–1819) states that sheet glass was imported to Egypt from Europe from the 19th century, because local production had come to a standstill (Herz, 1902, p. 53).

A hand-written letter dated 22 May 1893 to Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832–1904), the then director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provides information on the provenance of the window. The author of this letter, the American architect William Robert Ware (1832–1915), writes that he had acquired this and various other windows in the spring of 1890 from several well-known art and antiquity dealers in Cairo. He mentions [Gaspare] Giuliana, [E. M.] Malluk, [Nicolas?] Tano, and [Panayotis] Kyticas (on their commercial activities see Volait, 2021, pp. 60–64). In his letter, Ware further states that he was told that the windows ‘had been taken from old houses’ and ‘from old mosques, that had been dismantled’, but that he was not able to get ‘any precise information as to their original places’ (Ware, 1893).

In 1893, Ware donated this window as part of a lot of 17 qamariyyāt (IG_169, IG_171–186) to The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Ware, 1893).