Another world The Sackler Museum’s Calderwood Collection opens the door to Islam BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Critics tend to fall into two categories: they’re artists first who also happen to write about their medium, or else they’re writers first. Virgil Thomson was as prolific a composer as he was a music critic; John Coplans began his career as an art critic before he became one of America’s most celebrated photographers. On the other hand, Apollinaire enjoyed a dual career as poet and art critic, and George Bernard Shaw wrote about both theater and photography while producing his own plays. Either a critic’s first love is the art about which he or she writes or it’s writing itself — in which case the criticism frequently belongs to a larger body of literature.

But for most writers, whether they’re literary artists or critics, the physicality of the written word — the shape, the design, and the æsthetics of letters — is beside the point. Alphabets, to the wordsmith, are a means to an end. Can you imagine John Steinbeck fussing about whether the text of The Grapes of Wrath was printed in a serif or sans serif font?

Fortunately, the disregard most writers bring to the appearance of the written word is not shared by visual artists. Paul Laffoley, Lalla Essaydi, Kelly Sherman, and Kathy Bitetti are the first names to spring to mind among those who import written texts into two- and three-dimensional work. Neither is the impulse to treat letters as fundamental designs anything new. Around the same time — the so-called Middle Ages — that Irish monks were embellishing sacred manuscripts with infinitesimally elaborate figures and designs, Persian artisans were crossing the same boundaries, and not just on paper but in ceramics.

Extraordinary examples of those ceramics, some going back over a thousand years, form the cornerstone of the current modest and absorbing exhibit at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, selections (about a quarter of the entire donation) from the Norma Jean Calderwood collection of Islamic art. Calderwood, who taught at Boston College, was the rarest of collectors — both smart and rich, she put her time and her energy where her money went, and that’s reflected in every aspect of the show, from the range and quality of what she procured to the lucid and informative wall texts.

One learns from the exhibit that Persian artisans incorporated aphorisms, prayers of a sort, into the borders and circumferences and concavities of their otherwise exquisitely refined bowls and vessels, pitchers and cups. In early Islam, words attributed to and stories concerning the Prophet Muhammad were systematically gathered by numerous disciples. That compilation is collectively known as Tradition Literature or Hadith, and it "ranks second only to the Qur’an in spiritual authority." Among the unassuming showstoppers in this uniformly delightful and intriguing exhibit are the "epigraphic wares," Hadith inscriptions, that Persian artisans produced, a marriage of utilitarian objects decorated with Arabic letters that spell out observations of poetic, resonant clarity and insight.

At first glance, the cream-colored shallow bowl with its two concentric circles of Arabic lettering suggests neither its age (late ninth or 10th century) nor, for those of us who don’t read Arabic, its meaning. The accompanying wall text informs us that the black letters along the rim spell out the words of the Prophet Muhammad, "Modesty is a branch of faith, and faith is in paradise." Given its place near the lip of the bowl, that’s what you’d read before you took your first mouthful. Then, at the bowl’s bottom, there’s another phrase attributed to Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali: "Greed is a sign of poverty." How such a sentiment relates to a healthy appetite is both puzzling and intriguing.

Nowhere in the exhibit’s literature (a catalogue is in the works but won’t be ready for more than a year; I presume it will appear when more than a fraction of the collection can be viewed) is mention made of the nature of the relation between the epigraphs and the objects on which they’re painted. However, a clue comes in the form of a nearby jug, also from Iran or Uzbekistan and also from the late ninth or 10th century. Its inscription is translated as "The noblest of all things is the well-being of my guest." Across the diameter of another bowl appears the Arabic word for "harmony."

It’s clear that there exists a direct connection between the object and the inscription, and what the jug points to is the likelihood that there were serving pieces intended for company to see as opposed to those you’d keep as a check against both one’s appetite and one’s complacency. A guest isn’t honored who’s reminded of the nature of greed. The marriage of pious, penetrating epigrams with objects of fundamental daily use serves both to elevate the banal and to make commonplace the poetic. The distance we take for granted between sipping from a mug or spooning some stew and an æsthetic or religious or philosophical experience is challenged by these amazing wares, which remind us is that the act of nourishing oneself and slaking one’s thirst has spiritual as well as physical meaning.

Other ceramics are wordless but no less gripping. A deeper luminous blue bowl with a lobed rim has been molded along its edge with human faces, as if to say that to drink or eat from it is to belong to all humanity. And the faces themselves look both mischievous and serene, their slight, inescapable smiles enigmatic and complicated. Another piece sports faces of an entirely different kind. The late-12th- or 13th-century Bowl with Enthroned Ruler and Courtiers, with its far more intricate patterns, its embellished attention to clothing, furniture, gesture, and attitude, points to the ritual and formality of the ruling class. It’s hard to imagine that kind of high-minded fussiness coexisting with any reminder of greed.

One of my favorite pieces — a piece of folk art the likes of which are still being produced in the region with similar colors and in a similar style — depicts a chicken-like bird surrounded by a bold, simple border. Whether the piece was originally intended as a child’s dish, the wide-eyed, comical fowl that looks as if it were racing is just the sort of image to make a reluctant kid finish a meal. Other poultry appear in the exhibit, and they have a very different feel, as with the olive-green Bowl with Cockerel and Fish that dates from the late ninth century. Ninth-century potters, in this instance from Basra in southeast Iraq, produced sophisticated ceramics using luster, which delivered a glistening film to the earthen surface. With its stylized tail and oversized breast against a backdrop of tiny white hatch marks, this rooster seems more mythic than mundane, more dream than barnyard.

In the 1970s, Calderwood shifted her focus to collecting works on paper, and the same scholarship and intelligence that marks her ceramics obtains here as well. One of the masterpieces in the collection, Afrasihyab and Siyavush Embrace (circa 1530), illustrates a truce between the "perpetually warring powers of Iran and Turan (Central Asia), signaled by the two dignitaries embracing." The depth of color, the cobalt blues and rich leafy greens, combines with both interior and exterior vistas — it may be only one page from a folio, but it encompasses multiple, ornate rooms and multiple panoramas — to depict what seems like not only a momentous historical event but an actual slice of the world. Another treasure of similar charm is signed by the most important and influential painter of 17th-century Iran, Riza ’Abbasi. His 1630 Youth Dressed As a Dervish is an emblem of both tranquility and excitement. Imperturbable and fair of skin, the youth appears to be offering someone unseen a flower, and yet his anticipation enjoys the calm of the ocean floor.

"Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art"

At Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum through January 2.