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Feathered with illustrations, a deep dive into the meaning of this half-lion, half-bird creature over millennia of human history. Griffinology is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature’s many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over five thousand years, representing power, transcendence, and even divinity. It explores the history and symbolism of griffins in art, from their appearances in ancient Egyptian magic wands to medieval bestiaries, and from medieval coats of arms to modern corporate logos. The use of the griffin as a symbol of power and protection is surveyed throughout history and into modern times, such as in the Harry Potter series. Beautifully illustrated, this book should appeal to all those interested in monsters, magic, and the mystical, as well as art and history.
Kalīla wa-Dimna is one of the best-known texts of medieval Arabic literature and counts among the most illustrated works in the Islamic world. The extent of the corpus and its journey through the ages make it the ideal material for a reflection on the evolution of iconography in Islamic art. The studies gathered in this volume edited by Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Aïda El Khiari and Annie Vernay-Nouri, showcase a wide diversity of approaches that convincingly crosses textual investigation, codicology, iconographical study, and physico-chemical analyses. They explore new tracks, either by devoting themselves to the examination of unknown or rarely studied manuscripts, or by proposing inno...
This book argues that the provenance of early modern and medieval objects from Islamic lands was largely forgotten until the "long" eighteenth century, when the first efforts were made to reconnect them with the historical contexts in which they were produced. For the first time, these Islamicate objects were read, studied and classified – and given a new place in history. Freed by scientific interest, they were used in new ways and found new homes, including in museums. More generally, the process of "rediscovery" opened up the prehistory of the discipline of Islamic art history and had a significant impact on conceptions of cultural boundaries, differences and identity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in the history of art, the art of the Islamic world, early modern history and art historiography.
Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.
For the cultural history of the Islamic World, writing has long been recognized as a highly important form of art, as calligraphy has traditionally held a particular place in the perception of Islamic elites and their artistic practices. The culture of calligraphy was intimately connected with the production of prestigious book manuscripts, but reached a climax in the creation of single-leaf calligraphies that were also highly appreciated by collectors in centres of Islamic culture from the Ottoman Mediterranean to post-Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran and Mughal India. At the same time, writing by its very nature fulfilled its age-old functions of encoding verbal language as text.The pres...
The fourteen articles in this volume bring together some of the latest research on the cultural, intellectual and commercial interactions during the Renaissance between Western Europe and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire. The articles contribute to an exciting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary scholarly dialogue that explores elements of continuity and exchange between the two areas, and positions the Ottoman Empire as an integral element of the geo-political and cultural continuum within which the Renaissance evolved.
The Kitāb Naʿt al-Ḥayawān is the earliest of a group of illustrated manuscripts dealing with the characteristics of animals and their medicinal uses. The present study considers both the confluence of textual traditions within this work and the stylistic and iconographic relationships of its illustrations, which make it a key witness to early thirteenth-century Arab painting. After a re-evaluation of previous approaches, emphasis is placed on relating image to text, on stylistic affiliations, and on the modalities of production, supported by technical analyses undertaken for the first time. In elucidating the particular context of this unique manuscript, the study contributes to our understanding of a critical period in the development of Middle Eastern painting and art.
"In conjunction with exhibition The Art of Southeast Asia from the SOAS collections gallery, Brunei gallery, school of oriental and African studies, SOAS, University of London, 28 May 2014- 2 September 2016." -- T.p. verso.
This first supplement to Islamic Art takes as its subject the painted ceilings of the 12th-century Palatine Chapel in Palermo, Italy.