David Whitehouse is the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass and has embarked on the ambitious task to publish comprehensive catalogues of ancient and Islamic glass in his institution. The Roman, Sasanian, and Post-Sasanian publications are on the shelves (Roman Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, vols. 1–3, 1997, 2001, 2003; Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, 2005), while the present review deals with the first of three volumes dedicated to the glass holdings from the Islamic world. This book is entirely devoted to cut and engraved objects; the two volumes that will follow include undecorated, pressed, mold-blown, stained, and gilded and enameled works.

Islamic glass showing cut or engraved designs was cold-cut. That is, it was created in the lapidary technique by means of a rotating wheel or a sharply pointed tool after the glass vessel or blank was shaped and reached room temperature. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it belongs to the early Islamic period, with all objects in this catalogue ranging between the eighth and the eleventh centuries (with a few exceptions in which their date is uncertain since they might be either pre-Islamic works or later imitations of early Islamic objects: cat. 46, 116–117, 207, 215, 242, 284, 293, 469, 486, 491). The catalogue is broadly divided into three uneven sections: the first includes 44 objects with scratch-engraved ornament; the second studies 447 monochrome objects with wheel-cut ornament; the third addresses the so-called cameo glass, which was typically created with two overlaid translucent colors, and includes 96 pieces. The catalogue also has three appendices, which address objects that do not fit into the first three broad categories but show the same decorative techniques: Appendix 1 studies the celebrated Corning Hedwig Beaker, a colorless relief-cut work that may have been created following Islamic traditions (see below). Appendix 2 is an unusual polychrome fragment with light purple, greenish-blue, and colorless glass that does not have an immediate comparison with any of the cameo works. Appendix 3 includes seven relief-cut fragments and a small waste from a lapidary workshop which are not made of glass but of rock-crystal; the carving and cutting techniques of the two materials are very similar, as is remarked several times by Whitehouse. The fragments were mostly acquired by the Corning Museum from the Smith Collection, where they might have been initially mistakenly catalogued as glass fragments due to the similarity between rock-crystal and transparent, colorless glass, or they may have been collected for comparative purposes. Needless to say, given the high percentage of breakability of glass over the centuries, the great majority of the works in the catalogue are small fragments while most of the complete objects are reconstructed from fragments. Indeed, the intact works are only 40 out of a total 595.

The catalogue presents itself as an exhaustive visual record and verbal description of the entire collection of Islamic cut and engraved glass in the Corning Museum. All objects and fragments are illustrated in good color reproductions throughout the catalogue, sometimes with multiple views for the most important objects. Corresponding drawings in scale 1:2 are inserted at the end of the book, thus providing an invaluable illustration of all-round details that would be otherwise too difficult to render in photographs. Inexplicably, only two objects out of 595—fragments cat. 456 and 507—are not illustrated, either through a photograph or a drawing. The text of each entry, although of varying lengths depending on importance, is treated equally: catalogue number, title, “tombstone” information (dating, accession number, dimensions, color, decorative technique), narrative description, and present condition; most entries include a “Comment” field, which also functions as a substitute for footnotes or endnotes. Previously published works have a final bibliography field.

The essential usefulness and value of the catalogue, therefore, are in that it provides a complete visual and descriptive record of one of the most comprehensive and important collections of cut and engraved Islamic glass. This is a very welcome addition to a small number of similar contributions that studied and published collections or archaeological finds of Islamic glass almost in their entirety, such as Carl Johan Lamm, Das Glas von Samarra, vol. 4 of Die Ausgrabungen von Samarra, Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst (Berlin: Verlag Dietrich Reimer/Ernst Vohsen, 1928); idem, Mittelalterliche Gläser und Steinschnittarbeiten aus dem Nahen Osten, Forschungen zur islamischen Kunst, 5 (Berlin: Verlag Dietrich Reimer/Ernst Vohsen, 1929–30); Ray Winfield Smith, Glass from the Ancient World: The Ray Winfield Smith Collection (Corning: Corning Museum of Glass, 1957); Christopher Clairmont, Catalogue of Ancient and Islamic Glass, Based on the Notes of C. J. Lamm (Athens: Benaki Museum, 1977); Jens Kröger, Glas, vol. I of Islamische Kunst: Loseblattkatalog unpubliziert Werke aus Deutschen Museen (Berlin: Museum für Islamische Kunst, 1984); Jens Kröger, Nishapur: Glass of the Early Islamic Period (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995); George T. Scanlon and Ralph Pinder-Wilson, Fustat Glass of the Early Islamic Period: Finds Excavated by The American Research Center in Egypt, 1964–1980 (London: Altajir World of Islam Trust, 2001); Stefano Carboni, Glass from Islamic Lands, The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001); Sidney M. Goldstein et al., The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 15, Glass: From Sasanian Antecedents to European Imitations (London: The Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions, 2005); George F. Bass et al., Serçe Limanı, vol. 2, The Glass of an Eleventh-Century Shipwreck (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University, 2009). All these works, like Whitehouse’s, acknowledge the importance of releasing in the public arena—mostly for the benefit of specialists and students of glass rather than for general readership—the largest possible amount of data and visual information for future reference. The reason is simple: the study of Islamic glass is still in an early stage of its development, and thus unanswered questions in terms of origin, attribution, dating, workshop locations, market value, and social significance are still predominant in the current literature. It is paramount, therefore, to publish as many objects as possible with the aim to create a “database” from which future generations of glass scholars and Islamic art students will be able to extract analytical information and advance the field.

The specialist reader and the reviewer can feast her or his eyes over the visual richness of the holdings, musing over well-known masterpieces (the obvious Corning Ewer [cat. 522] but also, to name a few, the pale blue scratch-engraved bottle [cat. 34], the Falcon and Ibex bowl [cat. 296], and the green bowl with birds and “tree of life” motifs [cat. 490]); re-discovering less-known but remarkable works (the fish-shaped saucer [cat. 120], the beaker with arcade [cat. 175], the globular bottle with rosettes [cat. 267], the bowl with birds [cat. 303], the bell-shaped bottle with hares [cat. 369], the fragmentary canteen [cat. 388], the fragment with lions [cat. 397], and the overlay fragment with cabochons [cat. 585]); and discovering previously unknown interesting ones (in the case of the present reviewer, the facet-cut bowl [cat. 46], the pitcher with raised disks [cat. 140], the bowl with menorahs [cat. 147], the fragment with kite-shaped motifs [cat. 291], the fragment of beaker with bird [cat. 330], the ovoid bottle [cat. 363], the facet-cut cameo fragment [cat. 493], and the double-overlay fragment [cat. 526]).

The “Comment” field represents the section of text in each entry where Whitehouse provides comparative examples and bibliographic references related to the vessel’s profile and/or decoration (he uses many of the catalogues listed above as useful tools, in particular Kröger 1995, Carboni 2001, and Goldstein et al. 2005); explains details of the cutting technique and design and the reason why a fragment belongs to a specific area of the vessel’s body (often quoting the only earlier study of the collection of cut glass in Corning: Prudence Oliver [Harper], “Islamic Relief Cut Glass: A Suggested Chronology,” Journal of Glass Studies 3 (1961): 9–29); points out whether the fragment has a known archaeological provenance (a number of them were gifted by the American Research Center in Egypt and were excavated in Fustat [Old Cairo]) or just a reputed one (the Corning Ewer was acquired by Edmund de Unger in Tehran); further elucidates the reasons behind the dating suggested in the ‘tombstone” information, which usually widely covers two centuries (for example, “9th to 10th century”).

Whitehouse’s command and knowledge of the growing literature on Islamic glass is impressive and his cross-references to works in other published collections will be extremely useful for future studies that focus on specific groups of vessels. What is conspicuously missing in his analysis throughout the catalogue, however, is his own suggestion of the possible place of manufacture of the works and/or a critique of other scholars’ attributions in the published literature. A good example is provided by the short introduction and the comments to the first group of “Objects with scratch-engraved ornament” (Section A, cat. 1–44): the text provides a synthetic summary of the literature on this diagnostic group, a description of colors and shapes, its wide distribution as we know it from archaeological finds, and a chronology deriving from it. Widely believed to be of Iranian origin until Carboni (2001, 76–81) and Kröger (in Goldstein et al. 2005: “Scratched Glass,” 140–49) pointed out the reasons why its origins should be sought further west, probably in Syria, Whitehouse seems to maintain instead a neutral position not only by avoiding an expression of his own opinion on this matter but also eluding its mention altogether. On the one hand, it is possible to understand Whitehouse’s reluctance to take a position and infer, through its silence, that it is too early to offer attributions of origin whereas it is more appropriate to focus on description and dating at this stage. His tacit critique, however, inevitably results in a missing voice within a small group of scholars that are indeed discussing this matter publicly, and it is a pity not to hear his opinion. When the present reviewer was offered the splendid opportunity to write the catalogue of the Islamic glass holdings in Kuwait (Carboni 2001), he approached his task twofold: paramount was to provide a visual and descriptive record of the entire collection but also to offer interpretations, suggestions, and attributions in order to create a narrative text that would represent an attempt at a short history of Islamic glass. Admittedly, such an approach is based on a good deal of interpretation of the available data in addition to an analysis of factual information; it can therefore be open to criticism, and some of the attributions will probably be proven wrong by future scholars. This is a risk that in my opinion was worth taking and provides the main point of difference with Whitehouse’s perspective in this catalogue.

The only entry in which Whitehouse has expressed his opinion on a place of origin is in appendix 1, devoted to the Corning Hedwig Beaker. Here, his text is mainly devoted to the various attributions of the place of manufacture of this group of colorless, thickly relief-cut beakers that has fascinated scholars for many decades. Given their hybrid nature, the Hedwig beakers have been assigned an origin in the Islamic world, the Latin East, the Byzantine areas, Novogrudok (Belarus), Central Europe, Southern Italy, or Sicily in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The Sicilian theory seems now to be the leading one following recent chemical analyses and rock-crystal comparisons. It is therefore good to read that Whitehouse believes that, “it is attractive to attribute the Hedwig beakers to Sicily, perhaps during the reign of William II,” offering further proof of his inclination through historical arguments about their distribution in Central Europe. Personally, I feel less certain about the attribution of the Hedwig beakers to Sicily than I am of the attribution of the Corning Ewer to Iran, but it is comforting to see that Whitehouse has taken a stand at least in this case.