This drawing of a mullioned stucco window was made by František Schmoranz on 13 February 1871, when he was in Cairo. Beneath the frontal view it shows the layout.

The frontal depiction includes parts of a plain stone wall and a pointed arch decorated with foliate scrollwork with palmettes and split-palmettes in stucco. Inside the arched niche there are three window openings filled with stucco lattices of the same design. The central surface is filled with an intersecting pattern of eight octagons with inscribed circles around a twenty-four-petal flower within the outline of an eight-pointed star and framed by a thin band of lines and circles. The mullioned window is topped by an oculus. Its stucco lattice shows the flower/star surrounded by eight octagons as the central motif.

František Schmoranz’s drawing was disseminated through numerous publications like Ebers’s Ägypten in Bild und Wort of 1879/80, Le Bon’s La Civilisation des Arabes of 1884 (IG_75), or Franz’s Die Baukunst des Islam of 1887 (IG_66). According to these publications, Schmoranz had drawn this window in the early Mamluk mausoleum of the Qalawun funerary complex (built 1284–1285) in Cairo.

The stucco grille documented here was replicated for the Egyptian building group at the Vienna world’s fair in 1873 (IG_412). The only adjustment Schmoranz made was to the outline, giving the windows for Vienna a pointed arch. Photographs of the Egyptian pavilion at the Vienna world’s fair document that three mullioned windows of this design were used on both the front and the back of the minaret annex (see for example IG_458).