Handcrafted White Mother of Pearl Inlaid Moorish Octagonal Box

Handcrafted Middle Eastern Lebanese mosaic marquetry wood box. Small octagonal walnut Syrian style box intricately decorated with Moorish motif desi...

Exquisite handcrafted Middle Eastern Lebanese mosaic marquetry wood box. Small octagonal walnut Syrian style box intricately decorated with Moorish...

Exquisite handcrafted Middle Eastern Lebanese, Egyptian mosaic marquetry wood box inlaid. Small vintage walnut Syrian style box intricately decorated with Moorish motif designs which have been painstakingly inlaid with mosaic shell and marquetry. Great craftsmanship handmade by artisans in the Middle East, Lebanon or Egypt. Dimensions Height: 2.25 in. Width: 6 in. Depth: 4 in. Circa 1950. Great Middle Eastern Islamic Mosaic...

Exquisite handcrafted vintage Middle Eastern style mosaic marquetry inlaid walnut wood footed music box. Handcrafted in Spain in the Moorish Syrian style with red velvet lined and a mirror. Decorative Spanish inlaid Marquetry trinket box intricately and finely inlaid in Islamic geometric designs with marquetry of precious wood decorated with Moorish motif designs which have been painstakingly inlaid with fruitwoods.. Handcrafted in Granada Spain...

Exquisite handcrafted Middle Eastern Lebanese mosaic marquetry wood box. Small vintage walnut Syrian style box intricately decorated with Moorish m...

Moorish style micro mosaic marquetry inlaid jewelry box with lid. Intricate inlaid Anglo Indian box with floral and geometric Islamic Moorish mosaic Sadeli design in a square shape form with mosaic inlay and marquetry, very fine artwork, lined in red velvet. Museum collector piece like the one in Doris Duke Islamic Art Museum. The repeating geometric patterns of Sadeli Mosaic are what give it beauty and richness. This decorative technique is a type of micro mosaic featuring repeating geometric patterns. A highly skilled craft, it has had a long history in India and the Middle East with early examples dating back to the 16th century. In the 1800s, it became popular as a decoration on a variety of boxes, card cases, and chess boards imported from India. Since Bombay became a center of making them, they became known as Bombay boxes...

Nice wooden and mother-of-pearl box from the 1900s. The mother-of-pearl inlays form plant motifs (flowers and foliage), incised to give volume to the different parts. It closes with ...

Vintage Moorish style cigarette music box inlaid with mother of pearl and ebony. Handcrafted using very fine Moorish micro mosaic inlaid geometric ...

A large Turkish mother-of-pearl inlaid chest inlaid throughout to show foliate scrolls and geometric forms, raised on four legs. From the 16th century onwards the dominant influence...

This handled box is a Japanese tabako-bon, or 'tobacco tray,' used to store tobacco and smoking accessories. Believed to have evolved from the traditional...

A wonderful 1920s wood box inlaid with mother of pearl from India. Box is lined with a blue velvet interior and is an inch deep.

An exceptional Indo-Portuguese colonial mother-of-pearl veneered casket with silver mounts India, Gujarat, 2nd half of the 16th century, the silver mounts Goa or probably Lisbon Measures: H. 16 x W. 24.6 x D. 16.1 cm An exceptional Gujarati casket with a rectangular box and truncated pyramidal lid (with slopes on each side and a flat top) made from exotic wood, probably teak (Tectona grandis), covered with a mother-of-pearl mosaic. The tesserae, cut from the shell of the green turban sea snail (Turbo marmoratus, a marine gastropod) in the shape of fish scales, are pinned to the wooden structure with silver ball-headed nails. The casket is set on bracket feet on the corners. The masterfully engraved decoration of the silver mounts follows the most refined and erudite Mannerist repertoire of rinceaux and ferroneries dating from the mid-16th century. The high quality and refinement of the silver mounts and, likewise, the silver nails that replaced the original brass pins used to hold the mother-of-pearl tesserae in place indicate the work of a silversmith probably working in Lisbon in the second half of the 16th century. The Indian origin of this production, namely from Cambay (Khambhat) and Surat in the present state of Gujarat in north India, is, as for the last three decades, consensual and fully demonstrated, not only by documentary and literary evidence - such as descriptions, travelogues and contemporary archival documentation - but also by the survival in situ of 16th-century wooden structures covered in mother-of-pearl tesserae. A fine example is a canopy decorating the tomb (dargah) of the Sufi saint, Sheik Salim Chisti (1478-1572) in Fatehpur Sikri in Agra district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. This is an artistic production, geometric in character and Islamic in nature, where usually the mother-of-pearl tesserae form complex designs of fish scales or, similar to the dishes also made using the same technique, with the thin brass sheets and pins, stylized lotus flowers. The truncated pyramidal shape corresponds, like their contemporary tortoiseshell counterparts also made in Gujarat, to a piece of furniture used in the Indian subcontinent within the Islamic world prior to the arrival of the first Portuguese. This shape, in fact, is very old and peculiar to East-Asian caskets, chests or boxes used to contain and protect Buddhist texts, the sutras. A similar chest is the famous and large reliquary chest from Lisbon cathedral that once contained the relics of the city's patron saint, Saint Vincent. Both match in shape, having the same kind of socle or pedestal and bracket feet, and in their engraved silver mountings, featuring the same type of refined, erudite decoration. Their differences lie in the silver borders that frame the entire length of the edges of the chest (both the box and the lid), pinned with silver nails, and on the lock plate, shaped like a coat of arms in the Lisbon example. Given the exceptional dimensions of the reliquary casket...