Material Characterization of Ceramic Tile Mosaic From Two 17th-Century Islamic Monuments in Northern India

Abstract

Coloured tiles from two northern Indian monuments were analysed for their body and glaze composition. The results suggest that three different groups of tiles were used, all comprising a stonepaste body with alkali glaze. One group has strong similarities to a major Indian glass group, known as high alumina mineral natron glass, while the other two are similar to Western and Central Asian plant ash glazes, although with much lower lime content. The colorants conform with those usually employed in pre‐modern glazes, with lead‐tin yellow Type I and Type II for opaque yellow, copper blue‐turquoise, cobalt blue, manganese purple, and green through mixing of lead‐tin yellow and copper blue.

Characterization of 17th Century Mughal tile glazes from Shahdara Complex, Lahore-Pakistan

“…The EPMA measurements indicated that manganese (1.2%: Table 1) was used to colour the purple alkaline glazes. This is consistent with the historic use of manganese for purplish hues in glazes [3,12,27,30]. In addition, few crystals of iron oxide were also observed in the glaze matrix.…”

“…The presence of lead, tin and zinc in the same ratio as for the S32Y and S82Y yellow glazes (Table 1) suggests that green glazes were made in part from yellow glazes [27]. Regarding the blue colouring agents, the Cu/Co ratio of the green glaze sample differed from the ratios in the S52B and S76B blue glazes.…”

“…Historically cobalt was used in glazes to give enriched blue color [11,12,15,24,25]. Copper added in similar amounts (0.2-0.5%) to cobalt was reported to impart blue colour to some of the Indian glazes [26,27].…”

In situ non-invasive multianalytical methodology to characterize mosaic tesserae from the House of Gilded Cupids, Pompeii

“…In this sense, limestone for the white tesserae and tephritic lava for the black tesserae were identified [11]. On the other hand, other research works [24][25][26] used portable non-invasive techniques in order to characterize in situ the materials used in the decoration objects. Concretely in these latter works [24][25][26] some tesserae from a mosaic located in the Domus of Octavius Quartio (Pompeii) were analyzed with portable instrumentation obtaining interesting results.…”

The Intentional Use of Lead–tin Orange in Indian Islamic Glazes and Its Preliminary Characterization

“…The detection of two varieties of lead–tin yellow type II particles in yellow and green glazes, one with associated silica content and the other significantly with an associated zinc content was first established by the authors (Gill and Rehren ) on the analyses of 17th‐century glazed tiles from two sites in northern India. This was later corroborated by similar findings reported on the analyses of yellow glazes from tiles on contemporaneous monuments in Lahore, Pakistan (Gulzar et al .…”