When we consider that there is no evidence of the use of cobalt by the Chinese for the decoration of their porcelain during Sung times, that indeed the use of colour apart from that of the glaze as a means of decoration appears to have been then unknown; but that, on the other hand, not long after the turmoil of the Mongol invasion and domination--a period during which the two countries, China and Persia, were so closely connected--we find the use of cobalt as a decoration _sous couverte_ firmly established, we may, I think, regard it as not improbable that it was from the Persians that the Chinese learned the new method of decoration.[38]
The influence of the Saracenic art of Western Asia is indeed now for the first time to be seen in other directions, and we shall find it cropping up here and there during the whole of the following Ming period. It was the source of many new forms which we see now for the first time in China: the graceful water-vessels, for instance, with long necks and curved spouts, copied from the Arab _Ibraik_. Again, we find this influence at times in the _motifs_ of the conventional floral patterns found on Ming porcelain, though these patterns, indeed, are always mere counterchanges, as it were, upon a field of an unmistakable Chinese stamp (PL. VI.). All these changes were doubtless regarded as anathema by the Chinese censors, who reminded the rash innovators that the great men of old were content with simple materials and forms, and that they in their wisdom rejected all such meretricious ornament. For it was seriously maintained that had they thought it desirable, these old sages could have commanded all the resources of the later potter, not only the larger field he could draw from for his designs and colours, but the improved paste of his porcelain as well.
On the other hand, the Chinese influence at this time on Persian art was small. By a careful search we may find at times a dragon or a phœnix amid unmistakable Chinese clouds on the spandrel above the arch of a Persian prayer-niche of the fourteenth century, or forming the centre of a star-shaped tile. But the great invasion of Chinese wares and Chinese schemes of decoration belongs, as far as the fictile art of the country is concerned, to a later period, that of Shah Abbas in the early years of the seventeenth century.