Oblong stucco and glass window showing symmetrically arranged flower and star ornamentation composed of twelve-petalled flowers that are inscribed within twelve-pointed stars. The three whole and two half stars, which are lined up in a row, are flanked on each side by a bicolour frame with a diamond pattern. Three-petalled floral motifs in green are set between the twelve-pointed stars.

The latticework is painted dark brown (see Research).

The window has been restored and is preserved without its original wooden frame (see Technique and Research). The window is reinforced with a layer of textile inserted between the stucco grille and the plaster layer on the back of the panel in which the pieces of glass are embedded (see State of Conservation and Restorations).

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

The stucco and glass window is in good condition: the plaster lattice is intact; 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, probably cotton fabric (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 layer of off-white plaster. There are no remains of the original plaster layer used to embed the pieces of glass.

The most recent restoration was carried out after this detailed examination, in 2009–2010 (Fellinger et al., 2022). In the course of this restoration, several pieces of glass were replaced; the new pieces are incised with the date ‘2010’. The repair plaster used to attach the new pieces is white and can easily be distinguished from the off-white plaster used in the previous restoration.

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 (IG_170, IG_363, IG_364, IG_366). This distinction supports the geographical classification of the window.

Owing to the oblong shape of the stucco panel, the Louvre window 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. It has a design identical and dimensions almost identical to stucco and glass window OA 7466/38, also held at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The two must therefore be a pair of windows most probably made at the same workshop. 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 possible 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 backs of the panels, 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.

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).