Stucco and glass window showing floral ornamentation in a slightly pointed frame of blue rectangles. The floral decoration is composed of two networks of intertwined tendrils with regularly arranged palmettes and half-palmettes in green and red. At the bottom of the panel, the tendrils terminate in spirals. On both sides and at the top of the panel, the tendrils are partially cut off by the surrounding frame. The motif is worked out in relief against a perforated background that lies 3–4mm below the surface of the stucco panel.

Gypsum plaster; colourless glass; coloured glass (two shades of green (one replaced in 2003), light blue, yellow); three shades of red flashed glass (one replaced in 2003)

The window is well preserved and was thoroughly restored in 2003. During this intervention, earlier repairs as well as a thick coat of dark paint were removed. The restoration measures included the cleaning the surface of the stucco lattice (laser cleaning, density: 1.5 J/cm2 at 1064nm), bonding cracks with acrylic resin, and filling lacunae in the stucco lattice with gypsum and/or acrylic fillers. The repairs were retouched with pigmented acrylic emulsion. The original wooden frame was cleaned and reinforced by fixing stainless metal plates on the joints of the frame.

At the time of restoration, most of the original pieces of glass were preserved. The few missing pieces were replaced with new ones, which were attached with cellulose nitrate.

This stucco and glass window shows a floral ornamentation that is very common in the stucco decoration of al-Andalus and the Maghreb, where it is known as sebka. It is rarely found in windows from the eastern Islamic world, especially those from Ottoman Egypt. There, designs with curlicues and flowers are much more common, such as those found in several windows in the collections studied (see for instance IG_41, IG_169, IG_254).

Like other windows of the Benaki Museum (see for instance IG_334, IG_355, IG_357), the design of this window differs considerably from Islamic examples produced in Egypt. It can therefore be assumed that it was designed by a Western architect or made according to the specific wishes of a Western client. Particularly, the ‘reuse’ of an ornamentation traditionally seen in wall decoration follows the transmedial tendencies of late 19th- and early 20th-century Historicist art.

The unusual design as well as the good state of preservation of the window – even before its restoration in 2003 – suggest that it was produced sometime between the late 19th and early 20th century. The window was made according to the traditional technique used in the manufacture of qamariyyāt in Egypt to this day (see Technique).

Another criterion in favour of the proposed date of manufacture is the fact that pieces of glass show the characteristics of cylinder-blown sheet glass, a technique that was uncommon in the Islamic world at that time and more commonly used in Europe. Interestingly, the Hungarian architect Max Herz (1856–1819) states in 1902 that sheet glass was imported to Egypt from Europe from the 19th century, because local sheet-glass production had come to a standstill (Herz, 1902, p. 53).

In 1973, the Benaki Museum in Athens acquired the window along with IG_335 from Ioannis Krystalidis (life dates and biography unknown).