Oblong stucco and glass window showing a repeating flower and star ornamentation composed of five eight-petalled flowers, which are inscribed within eight-pointed stars and lined up in a row. Four-petalled floral motifs in red are set between the eight-pointed stars.

The latticework is painted with brown paint and possibly a dark varnish (see Research).

The window has been restored and is preserved without its original wooden frame (see Technique and Research).

Gypsum plaster; colourless glass; coloured glass (green, blue, dark yellow, two shades of red flashed glass), brown paint, varnish; textile (cotton fabric).

The stucco and glass window is in good condition: the plaster lattice is intact, and the glass does not show any losses or defects.

According to the results of an in-depth examination of the stucco and glass windows in the Delort de Gléon Collection carried out in 2008, all the windows have been restored five times since their acquisition in Cairo, involving the reinforcement of the fragile plaster lattice with textile, cotton fabric in most cases (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–25, 32). The fabric, which is perforated according to the design, was inserted between the back of the latticework and the glass and fixed to the panel with glue. In the process, the original plaster layer fixing the pieces of glass to the back of the panel was completely removed – together with the pieces of glass – and replaced with a new plaster embedding layer for the pieces of glass. There are no remains of the original plaster layer.

The most recent restoration was carried out after this detailed examination, in around 2009 (Fellinger et al., 2022). In the course of this last restoration, several pieces of glass were replaced; the new pieces are incised with the date ‘2009’.

This stucco and glass window corresponds iconographically and technically to one of the standard types of qamariyya widespread in Egypt during the Ottoman period. Windows of this type aroused the interest of the British architect James William Wild (1814–1892), who captured several such windows schematically during his stay in Cairo in the years 1844–1847 (IG_436, IG_440, IG_448).

Symmetrically arranged flowers and stars are a recurring element of Islamic ornamentation across time and media. However, the insertion of a flower within a star is uncommon in the western Islamic world (al-Andalus and Maghreb), where star ornamentation is always restricted to purely geometric forms (see for instance IG_170, IG_363, IG_364, IG_366). This distinction supports the geographical classification of the window.

Several qamariyyāt within the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris havenot only identical ornamentation, but also an identical distribution of coloured glass (IG_13, IG_14, IG_38), which suggests that they were produced at the same workshop and are most probably part of a larger group. Owing to the oblong shape of the stucco panel, the Louvre specimen discussed here has just one row of flowers and stars. This corresponds to the panel’s use as a framing element within a window composed of several panels. The colours and material properties of the glass and the stucco latticework – although heavily restored – suggest that the window dates to the late 19th century. This assumption is supported by the results of an analytical study of glass from two stucco and glass windows from the Louvre collection (OA 7466/7, OA 7466/25) conducted by a team from the Musée du Louvre (Fellinger et al., 2022).

As to its provenance, the window is one of 39 qamariyyāt supposedly bought in Cairo by the architect Ambroise Baudry (1883–1906) for the French civil mining engineer and art collector Baron Alphonse Delort de Gléon (1843–1899) (Bailly et al., 2008, pp. 16–24). They adorned the Ottoman salon of Delort de Gléon’s hôtel particulier, purchased in 1883, at rue Vézelay 18 in Paris (Volait, 2005, pp. 131–134; Volait, 2009, pp. 99–104, 130–135). This is confirmed by several historical photographs preserved at the Département des Arts de l’Islam (DAI) of the Musée du Louvre, which show the windows inserted in the upper parts of wooden mashrabiyyāt (see Linked Objects and Images). The salon was designed by the baron himself in collaboration with the French architect Jules Bourgoin (1838–1908). The creation of orientalizing interiors, composed of original architectural elements and furnishings as well as replicas of the same, was a widespread practice among Western art collectors at the time (Giese, 2016; Volait, 2016; Giese, 2019).

Based on the photographs mentioned and the presumed date of the windows, one may assume that the windows were created especially for Delort de Gléon’s Arab-style interior and had never been part of a historical building in Cairo. The complete history of these windows however, including possibly multiple reuses and several restorations, is difficult to reconstruct. Based on the unpublished study by Bailly et al. (2008) and our own observations, it seems that most of the windows have been cut from their wooden frames. Extensive repairs to the stucco grille, as well as the complete replacement of the thin plaster layer for embedding the pieces of glass at the back of the panel, are proof of several restoration campaigns. It is likely that the brown paint on the stucco lattice is not original, but was applied during restoration, with the intention of adapting the windows to new surroundings. The dark varnish is probably also the result of a restoration campaign, possibly before the Louvre exhibition in 1977, and may have been applied to match the colour of the wooden mashrabiyya in which the windows were displayed.

After the collector’s death, the stucco and glass window passed to his wife Marie Augustine Angélina Delort de Gléon, who bequeathed it as part of Delort de Gléon’s collection of Islamic art to the Musée du Louvre in 1912 (Delort de Gléon, 1914).