ewer

The table is draped with a Turkish carpet, and the jewelry, the furs, the gold ewers and salvers all insinuate a rising global commodities trade — one of those “commodities” being people like the painter himself.

A dragon curls its tail around the base of a golden, long-neck ewer, its body forming a handle of protruding, pointy scales.

At medieval banquets, a ewer -- an impressive jug filled with rose water -- and basins for slop water would be taken around so that guests could deal with the sticky finger problem.

But they’re irrelevant to counteracting the rupture of a vanished world that, a thousand years ago in China, brought about a stoneware ewer in the shape of a parrot.

We sat at a wooden table near a mural of Jorjadze, who was portrayed in her usual headpiece, watering a tree with rivulets of newspaper that poured out of a clay ewer.