AN OTTOMAN POTTERY TILE WITH AN AERIAL VIEW OF KAABA AND THE MASJID AL-HARAM COMPLEX IN MECCA Ottoman Turkey, first half 18th centuryAN OTTOMAN POTTERY TILE WITH AN AERIAL VIEW OF KAABA AND THE MASJID AL-HARAM COMPLEX IN MECCAOttoman Turkey, first half 18th century Of rectangular shape, painted in green, cobalt blue, turquoise, bole-red and black against a milky-white ground, decorated with Kaaba, one of the holiest and most sacred places in Islam, standing in the centre of the Masjid al-Haram complex in Mecca with its seven minarets and domed outer walls enclosing the sacred compound, mounted on a later black frame, 40.5cm x 30cm including the frame. Tiles like this one painted in the typical Iznik pottery palette featuring Kaaba and the sacred precinct of Mecca were a favoured production among Ottoman tile workshops. Several examples were produced as part of a larger artistic material corpus related to the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every pious Muslim should perform at least once in their lives, and also considered one of the five pillars of Islam. These tiles have now entered major museum collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 2012.337) New York and the Benaki Museum Athens, testifying their importance and value in the development of Ottoman ceramics. Although their exact function is still unknown, it has been suggested they could have been intended to decorate walls in houses or palaces, possibly marking the status of an owner as someone who has performed the pilgrimage. Some of these tiles are still found in situ in mosques, usually on the qibla wall, helping the practitioners in visualising the direction of their prayers (Venetia Porter (ed.), Hajj. Journey to the Heart of Islam, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.118). Blair and Bloom suggest that the majority of these Kaaba tiles were probably produced between 1640 - 75, given that the earliest known example present on the eastern wall of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul is dated to 1642 (S. Blair and J. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250-1800, London, 1994, p. 247). The number of minarets would welcome a late 17th-century dating, considering that the seventh minaret was only added to the haram during the reign of Sultan Ahmed I (1603 - 1617). However, the perspective used here is different from the flattened view present on most of these Kaaba tiles. Indeed, the composition is depicted here with bird’s-eye view, a perspective that entered the Ottoman artistic vocabulary via the Western pictorial tradition predominantly in the early 18th century, as the tile in the MET suggests. Osman Ibn Mehmed, the potter who crafted the MET'S Kaaba tile of the MET, was active in the first half of the 18th century as was the Tekfur Sarayi in Istanbul, a less well-known Ottoman ceramic workshop that produced a number of these tiles with aerial views. With all this in mind, it seems plausible for our lot to have a similar dating. A similar lot with flattened view and dating to the second half of the 17th century was successfully sold at Christie's London, 4 October 2012, lot 243. Dimensions 40.5cm x 30cm including the frame