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The Notes and Sources section introduces several new texts, including a Neo-Latin poem that challenges recent modifications to the Alhambra’s iconic Fountain of Lions, and a hitherto undeciphered Persian chronogram poem, which sheds valuable light on the production sites of luster-painted ceramics in the Safavid period. Also featured is a sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle describing Ottoman construction projects in Mecca within the context of diplomatic relations between Istanbul and Gujarat.
The Notes and Sources section introduces several new texts, including a Neo-Latin poem that challenges recent modifications to the Alhambra’s iconic Fountain of Lions, and a hitherto undeciphered Persian chronogram poem, which sheds valuable light on the production sites of luster-painted ceramics in the Safavid period. Also featured is a sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle describing Ottoman construction projects in Mecca within the context of diplomatic relations between Istanbul and Gujarat.
The next three articles concern Ottoman Tunisia: Youssef Ben Ismail traces the rise of the fez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considering the commercial and cultural history of the red felt cap with a focus on Tunisian merchants. Sihem Lamine interprets the Zaytuna minaret in Tunis (built in 1892) as a colonial object that signaled a shift in power from the Ottomans to the French protectorate through its neo-Almohad style. Ridha Moumni’s article on Tunisian archaeological history (Part II) likewise critically examines a French colonial project, the Bardo Museum, and demonstrates that native Tunisians had already laid the groundwork for the museum through archaeological and collecting efforts earlier in the nineteenth century.
Twentieth-century photography is featured in the following two essays, the first of which (by Sabiha Göloğlu) dissects the relationship between photography and painting in analyzing Miʿmarzade Muhammed ʿAli’s (d. 1938) oil-on-canvas painting of Mecca and Medina. Jacobé Huet appraises Le Corbusier’s Le Voyage d’Orient, published in 1965 and based on a 1914 typescript of his earlier travel notes, showing how the author’s late edits transform his youthful approach to traditional Mediterranean architecture.
In the Notes and Sources section, Anaïs Leone presents new data for reconstructing the luster tilework decoration of the tomb chamber of ʿAbd al-Samad’s shrine in central Iran. The final essay, by Ignacio Ferrer Pérez-Blanco and Marie-Pierre Zufferey, is an exhaustive study of the five muqarnas capitals in the Alhambra. By sculpting these capitals and comparing them to the proportions of muqarnas profiles in seventeenth-century Spanish carpentry treatises, the authors advance a formal understanding of “Western” muqarnas capitals and establish geometrical relationships that have long been unclear.
The next three articles concern Ottoman Tunisia: Youssef Ben Ismail traces the rise of the fez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considering the commercial and cultural history of the red felt cap with a focus on Tunisian merchants. Sihem Lamine interprets the Zaytuna minaret in Tunis (built in 1892) as a colonial object that signaled a shift in power from the Ottomans to the French protectorate through its neo-Almohad style. Ridha Moumni’s article on Tunisian archaeological history (Part II) likewise critically examines a French colonial project, the Bardo Museum, and demonstrates that native Tunisians had already laid the groundwork for the museum through archaeological and collecting efforts earlier in the nineteenth century.
Twentieth-century photography is featured in the following two essays, the first of which (by Sabiha Göloğlu) dissects the relationship between photography and painting in analyzing Miʿmarzade Muhammed ʿAli’s (d. 1938) oil-on-canvas painting of Mecca and Medina. Jacobé Huet appraises Le Corbusier’s Le Voyage d’Orient, published in 1965 and based on a 1914 typescript of his earlier travel notes, showing how the author’s late edits transform his youthful approach to traditional Mediterranean architecture.
In the Notes and Sources section, Anaïs Leone presents new data for reconstructing the luster tilework decoration of the tomb chamber of ʿAbd al-Samad’s shrine in central Iran. The final essay, by Ignacio Ferrer Pérez-Blanco and Marie-Pierre Zufferey, is an exhaustive study of the five muqarnas capitals in the Alhambra. By sculpting these capitals and comparing them to the proportions of muqarnas profiles in seventeenth-century Spanish carpentry treatises, the authors advance a formal understanding of “Western” muqarnas capitals and establish geometrical relationships that have long been unclear.
The volume begins with an overview by Finbarr Barry Flood of the architecture, calligraphy, epigraphy, painting, and portable arts of pre-Mughal Islamicate South Asia. Pre-Mughal court culture has always played second fiddle to the overwhelming hegemony and brilliance of the Mughal dynasty but in its regional heterogeneity it is more than worthy of study. This is followed by two essays examining manuscript illumination: Cailah Jackson, 2017 winner of the Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize in Islamic Art and Culture, discusses two manuscripts illuminated by Mukhlis ibn ʿAbdallah al-Hindi in thirteenth-century Konya; and Denise-Marie Teece treats the early sixteenth-century Safīna manuscript (Biblioteca Reale Ms. Or. 101), its illuminator Ruzbehan al-Modhahheb, and its unique six-page preface. A Byzantine stole with embroidered Arabic inscriptions in the collection of Vatopediou Monastery on Mount Athos is the subject of the fourth essay by Nikolaos Vryzidis. The volume’s seven essays conclude with three investigations into Ottoman art history: the blue-and-white tiles of the Baba Naqqaş style of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as prominently displayed in the Muradiye Mosque in Edirne (Patricia Blessing), the architectural book Risāle-i Miʿmāriyye of the seventeenth-century Caʿfer Efendi and in particular his notes on surveying and the architect’s cubit (Gül Kale), and the evolution of the late sixteenth-century Ottoman custom of requiring the sultan to be victorious over the non-Muslim enemy and to only use spoils from the holy war in the construction of a sultanic mosque (Samet Budak).
The Notes and Sources section continues with Bill Hickman’s analysis of the tantalizing calligraphed tiles of the now destroyed mosque built for the Sufi shaykh and poet Eşrefoğlu Rumi (d. 1469?), and two communications about artifacts on British soil: a wooden box, believed to have contained the heart of Abbot Roger de Norton (d. 1291), with an Arabic inscription that is now deciphered by Barry Knight, 147 years after its discovery; and a gorgeous Persian luster bowl in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which when subjected to UV examination, revealed that it was a product of extensive repair, or “restoration,” over the centuries. A systematic examination of the bowl and its remarkable history by Francesca Leoni and her colleagues uncovers a level of fakery of antiques that, it is suggested, might be prevalent in museum ceramic collections.
The volume begins with an overview by Finbarr Barry Flood of the architecture, calligraphy, epigraphy, painting, and portable arts of pre-Mughal Islamicate South Asia. Pre-Mughal court culture has always played second fiddle to the overwhelming hegemony and brilliance of the Mughal dynasty but in its regional heterogeneity it is more than worthy of study. This is followed by two essays examining manuscript illumination: Cailah Jackson, 2017 winner of the Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize in Islamic Art and Culture, discusses two manuscripts illuminated by Mukhlis ibn ʿAbdallah al-Hindi in thirteenth-century Konya; and Denise-Marie Teece treats the early sixteenth-century Safīna manuscript (Biblioteca Reale Ms. Or. 101), its illuminator Ruzbehan al-Modhahheb, and its unique six-page preface. A Byzantine stole with embroidered Arabic inscriptions in the collection of Vatopediou Monastery on Mount Athos is the subject of the fourth essay by Nikolaos Vryzidis. The volume’s seven essays conclude with three investigations into Ottoman art history: the blue-and-white tiles of the Baba Naqqaş style of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as prominently displayed in the Muradiye Mosque in Edirne (Patricia Blessing), the architectural book Risāle-i Miʿmāriyye of the seventeenth-century Caʿfer Efendi and in particular his notes on surveying and the architect’s cubit (Gül Kale), and the evolution of the late sixteenth-century Ottoman custom of requiring the sultan to be victorious over the non-Muslim enemy and to only use spoils from the holy war in the construction of a sultanic mosque (Samet Budak).
The Notes and Sources section continues with Bill Hickman’s analysis of the tantalizing calligraphed tiles of the now destroyed mosque built for the Sufi shaykh and poet Eşrefoğlu Rumi (d. 1469?), and two communications about artifacts on British soil: a wooden box, believed to have contained the heart of Abbot Roger de Norton (d. 1291), with an Arabic inscription that is now deciphered by Barry Knight, 147 years after its discovery; and a gorgeous Persian luster bowl in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which when subjected to UV examination, revealed that it was a product of extensive repair, or “restoration,” over the centuries. A systematic examination of the bowl and its remarkable history by Francesca Leoni and her colleagues uncovers a level of fakery of antiques that, it is suggested, might be prevalent in museum ceramic collections.