Timurid Art And Culture

The nineteen papers collected in this volume were delivered at a symposium held in Toronto, November 1989 in order to discuss the art and culture of Timurid times. The papers cover the last decades of the fourteenth century and the whole of the fifteenth, in an area of western Asia extending roughly from the Euphrates to the Hindu Kush and to the Altai. Among the subjects covered were: 'Discourses of an Imaginary Arts Council in Fifteenth-Century Iran'; 'The Persian Court between Palace and Tent: From Timur to ‘Abbas I'; 'Turkmen Princes and Religious Dignitaries: A Sketch in Group Profiles'; 'Craftsmen and Guild Life in Samarkand'; 'The Baburnama and the Tarikh-i Rashidi: Their Mutual Relationship'; 'Geometric Design in Timurid/Turkmen Architectural Practice: Thoughts on a Recently Discovered Scroll and Its Late Gothic Parallels' and 'Repetition of Compositions in Manuscripts: The Khamsa of Nizami in Leningrad.

In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter's delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist's likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist's imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist's signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed.

The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions tells the story of the Nurbakhshiya, an Islamic messianic movement that originated in fifteenth-century central Asia and Iran and survives to the present in Pakistan and India. In the first full-length study of the sect, Shahzad Bashir illumines the significance of messianism as an Islamic religious paradigm and illustrates its centrality to any discussion of Islamic sectarianism. By tracing Nurbakhshi activity in the Middle East and central and southern Asia through more than five centuries, Bashir brings to view the continuities and disruptions within Islamic civilization across regions and over time. Bashir effectively captures the way Nurbakhshis have understood and debated the meaning of their tradition in various geographical and temporal contexts. Bashir provides a detailed biography of the movement's founder, Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1464). Born to a Twelver Shi'i family, Nurbakhsh declared himself the mahdi, or the Muslim messiah, as an adept of the Kubravi Sufi order under the influence of the teachings of the great Sufi master Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240). Nurbakhsh's religious worldview, which Bashir treats in depth in this volume, offers a

The essays in this volume bring to light the artistic exchanges that occurred between successive Islamicdynasties and those further afield in China, Armenia, India and Europe from the 12th to the 19th centuries. All the articles present original research, many of them taking advantage of innovative scientific means allowing us to look at already familiar objects in a new light. Subjects include tile production during the reign of Qaytbay, book bindings associated with Qansuh al-Ghuri, depictions of fish on Mamluk textiles, the relationship between Mamluk metalwork and Rasulid Yemen and Italy respectively. A number of the articles are concerned with epigraphic inscriptions found on the buildings of the Fatimid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, examining the inscriptions on the Mausoleum of Yahya al-Shibihi in Cairo, others trace the revival of building inscriptions in 19th century Egypt, and how a Mamluk inscription from the Madrasa Qartawiya in Tripoli is replicated in Istanbul during the Ottomanperiod. The relationship between ceilings of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the MoukhroutasPalace in Constantinople is also explored, as is the unacknowledged debt that European lacquer worksowes to Persian craftsmen. Other topics covered include the architecture of the Nusretiye Mosque in Istanbul, the role played by Armenian architects in the reshaping of Ottoman cities in the 19th century, the role of the hammam in Ottoman culture and representations of beauty on Iznik pottery. Arictles on Port St. Symeon ceramics, the Armenian patrons of Chinese export wares of the 18th century, the history of the art of khatam khari in Iran, the artistic, architectural and literary influences in India between the 15th and 17th centuries, the influence of Timurid architecture in 15th century Bidar and the influence of a 16th century Hindavi Sufi Romance are also included. "