Iznik began at the end of the fifteenth century with production imitating Chinese blue-and-white porcelain; the Ottoman court's appetite for that porcelain is well known — the Topkapı collection is among the largest in the world. But the Iznik masters did not stay with imitation: they developed a body high in quartz, close to porcelain in whiteness, painted it and covered it with a transparent lead glaze. Colour under the glaze does not wear with use and gains depth.

By the mid-sixteenth century the palette had widened: turquoise, green, purple and finally, in the 1550s, a coral red obtained from an iron-rich clay known as *Armenian bole*. This red is applied thickly so that it will not run beneath the glaze; run a finger over it and the surface is slightly raised. The design language changed in the same period: naturalistic tulips, carnations, roses and hyacinths joined the rumi and hatayi scrollwork — patterns drawn in the court design studio were sent to Iznik and executed by the workshops. That separation of design from production is notable for how art was organised at the time.

In Ottoman architecture tile works not as an object but as a surface: the qibla wall of the Süleymaniye, the almost entirely clad interior of the Rüstem Pasha Mosque, the chambers of Topkapı. Light divides the space through the difference between matte stone and glossy glaze. Production declined in the seventeenth century as court commissions fell away and quality control loosened; Kütahya took over in the eighteenth. Iznik ware was revived in the twentieth century and both traditional and contemporary production continue today.