Before anyone gets too excited, the title of this post is a direct quote from a preliminary report on the excavations at Qasr-e Abu Nasr (in modern Shiraz, Iran) published in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1934. Joseph Upton uses the term to describe this object, a bronze lid (?) in the form of a man’s head:
I recently looked at it again because I’m planning to do some research on the metal objects from Qasr-e Abu Nasr, and my wife remarked that it looks like Oleg Grabar:
My wife would know, because she was fortunate enough to take a seminar with Prof. Grabar at Princeton (this was long after he had retired from the Institute for Advanced Study, of course). The resemblance is especially apt, since, in addition to his immense scholarly contributions to the study of Islamic art, Grabar also did important work on Sasanian art, notably his 1967 catalogue on Sasanian silver for an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Perhaps he felt at home with the subject because he had a distant ancestor at Qasr-e Abu Nasr.