Birds are a common motif in Islamic art and appear in numerous mediums, including ceramics, textiles, carved wood, and metalwork. Two delicately painted birds, arranged face-to-face, decorate the center of this stunning gold luster bowl made in thirteenth-century Iran, probably for an affluent urban client. It is unclear what species of bird was intended, but it is possibly a nightingale, popularly known in Persian literature for its unrequited love for the rose and easily recognizable to the literate Iranian urbanite. The inscription around the edge reads, "Perpetual glory and increasing prosperity and triumphant victory and lasting victory and rising good fortune and healthy life and pious living and...wealth and health and long life to its owner."

• Lo Terrenal y lo Divino: Arte Islámico siglos VII al XIX Colección del Museo de Arte del Condado de Los Ángeles. Santiago: Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2015.

• Pal, Pratapaditya, ed.  Islamic Art:  The Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection.  Los Angeles:  Museum Associates, 1973.
• Hess, Catherine. The Arts of Fire: Islamic Influences on Glass and Ceramics of the Italian Renaissance. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2004.