Metallic lustre constitutes one of the major inventions of potters in the Islamic world. Initially applied to the decoration of glass, notably in Egypt, this highly sophisticated technique, based on the use of metallic oxides and two successive firings—the second carried out in a reducing atmosphere—first appears with certainty in Iraq in the ninth century,before spreading more widely to Fatimid Egypt and Ayyubid Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Introduced into Iran during the Seljuk period in the late twelfth century, where it reached an exceptional degree of technical refinement, the lustre recipe appears to have been kept secret within a small number of families. The city of Kashan subsequently established itself as the centre of the Persian ceramic industry.

Within this Seljuk-period Iranian production of lustreware, three styles were identified by Richard Ettinghausen and more precisely named by Oliver Watson: the “monumental style,” the “miniature style,” and the “Kashan style.”

The “monumental style” is the earliest of these three to appear and can be dated to the last three decades of the twelfth century. It is characterized by large-scale figural motifs—human or animal—or vegetal designs, generally depicted in reserve against a plain lustred ground.

This manner of painting, which does not appear on any dated pieces, shows the closest affinities with the lustrewares produced in Egypt and Syria during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. On this basis, the “monumental style” has often been cited in support of the so-called “migration theory,” which seeks to explain the introduction of lustre technology into medieval Iran through the geographical movement of potters fleeing the economic collapse of the Fatimid state in Egypt.