Studies in Islamic Painting

Book Description

Ernst Grube’s research on Islamic painting over more than three decades has dealt with materials, issues and problems ranging from 10th-century Egypt through Ottoman Turkey to 19th-century Persia. The studies collected in this volume represent the breadth of his scholarship: they collect and lay new materials before the reader, isolate and define schools of painting as thinking about them coalesces, and propose new interpretations of materials already well-known to scholars and students. Most of these studies are reprinted without major alterations, but additional notes at the end make some essential readjustments. Article 5, a study of a drawing on a so-called ‘Fustat-Fragment’, possibly of 9th-century date, has 50 pages of illustrations of such fragments, not included in the original article and most of them not published before.

Professor Grube brings the methodological approach of a Western Medievalist to the study of a primary form of Islamic art. These articles are all essential reading for anyone interested in painting as a major form of art not only in the lands where Islam held sway but also in Late Classical Antiquity, Medieval Europe and Byzantium.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Three Miniatures from Fustat in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: The Earliest Known Paintings from Islamic Cairo: Realism and Formalism:
• Notes on Some Fatimid Lustre Painted Ceramic Vessels
• A Coloured Drawing of the Fatimid Period in the Keir Collection
• A Drawing of Wrestlers in the Cairo Museum of Islamic Art
• Materialen zum Dioskurides Arabicus
• Persian Painting in the Fourteenth Century: A Progress Report
• The Kalilah wa Dimnah of the Istanbul University Library and the Problem of Early Jalairid Painting
• Miniatures in Istanbul Libraries
• Herat, Tabriz, Istanbul. The Development of a Pictorial Style
• Wall-Paintings in the Seventeenth-Century Monuments of Isfahan
• A Lacquered Painting from the Collection of Lester Wolfe in the Museum of Notre Dame University
• Traditionalism or Forgery: Lacquered Painting in 19th-century Iran
• Notes on Ottoman Painting in the 15th Century
• A Unique Turkish Painting of the 15th Century
• The Siyar-i Nabi of the Spencer Collection in the New York Public Library
• Additional Notes
• Index