A RARE DECCAN, RING DEPICTING DEPICTING TWO BIRDS, INDIA, 17TH CENTURY, INDIA

拍品描述

A RARE DECCANI GOLD RING WITH CONFRONTED BIRDS, INDIA, 17TH CENTURY Of substantial form, the plain oval hoop rising to a raised bezel of deeply lobed, chalice-like profile, the underside of the bezel supported on a beaded collar. Flanking the bezel on either shoulder, a pair of birds rendered in the round, their bodies curling back on themselves in tight scrolling volutes, the heads turned inward toward the bezel with rounded beaks and prominent eyes. Beneath each pair, a further smaller bird's head emerges from the shoulder of the hoop, joined by twisted wire collars that read as ropework. The bezel itself is now vacant, retaining traces of the original bedding compound within the setting, indicating the loss of a hardstone or glass inset. The confronted birds at the shoulders are the defining ornament. Their tightly coiled bodies, sharply defined beaks, and paired arrangement place them within the wider Indian goldsmithing vocabulary of paired avian guardians flanking a central jewel, a scheme understood as auspicious and protective. Whether read as parrots, the messengers of love in Indian poetic convention, or as hamsa geese, vehicles of Brahma and Sarasvati and emblems of discernment, the confronted pair carries the sense of the bezel-stone as an object of value requiring symbolic guardianship. The lobed cup of the bezel, echoing a lotus calyx, reinforces the reading, presenting the lost stone as if seated within an opened flower. Gold of this weight and working, with figural sculpture executed in the round and secondary detail in twisted and beaded wire, belongs to the tradition of high-status Deccani jewellery produced under the courts of the Qutb Shahi, Adil Shahi, and later Mughal-affiliated sultanates of the Deccan plateau. The region's access to indigenous gold, together with the diamond mines of Golconda and the sustained appetite of its rulers for gem-set ornament, sustained a goldsmithing culture in which the mount was conceived as a sculptural object in its own right rather than as a passive setting. The choice of high-carat gold, worked to a weight that sits deliberately on the hand, signals a commission at the courtly rather than the mercantile level: gold at this scale in seventeenth-century India was reserved for patrons of standing, and the survival of such a ring intact, with its figural shoulders undamaged, is uncommon. This ring exemplifies the sculptural conception of the bezel-mount in seventeenth-century Deccani goldwork, where the setting is treated as a small architectural composition of lotus calyx and guardian birds rather than as a plain collet. It stands as a courtly survival of a tradition in which the value of the stone was answered by the invention of the mount that held it. Dimensions: Diameter of face: 1.8 cm; internal diameter: 2.2 cm

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