Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain ...view. This book situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim patrons by putting them into direct dialogue with written testimonies.
The dominant form of Ottoman pictorial art until the eighteenth century, miniatures have traditionally been studied as reflecting the socio-historical contexts, aesthetic concerns and artistic tastes ...of the era within which they were produced. Begum Ozden Fyrat proposes instead a radical re-reading of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century miniatures in the light of contemporary critical theory, highlighting the viewer’s encounter with the image. Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature employs contemporary concepts such as the gaze, frame/framing, reading and re-reading, drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze to establish the vibrant cultural agency of miniature paintings. With analysis that illuminates both the social and political situations in which these miniatures were painted as well as emphasising the miniature's contemporary relevance, Firat presents an important new re-imagining of this art form.
In this paper, I explore the iconographical relationship between the letters and the support on fol. 157r of the Morgan Gospels, written and illuminated in Westphalia, Germany during the mid-tenth ...century. On the basis of its formal properties and the iconographic meaning it takes, I will give particular attention to the materiality of the Latin text and its cultural and symbolic significance. The folio under study develops a form of ‘agency’. With this perspective, I hope not only to contribute to the important line of argument Joshua O’Driscoll develops in his iconic article, but also to explore the meaning of Latin as an iconological statement and hence to contribute with new methodological developments in the field of art history.
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► Identification of precious colourants in VI century manuscripts. ► Manuscripts analysed are among the oldest ever studied. ► Non-invasive analysis allowed to obtain information ...useful to art historians and conservators.
Two Byzantine VI century manuscripts known as Vienna Dioskurides and Vienna Genesis, held in the Austrian National Library at Vienna, were analysed with in situ non-invasive techniques. Raman spectroscopy, UV–Vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry with optic fibres and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry were used to characterise the palette of these early Middle Ages manuscripts. The analytical study was performed to have a better knowledge on the colourants used by ancient miniature painters, a subject known more on the basis of traditional sources (i.e. medieval treatises) than of analytical evidences. Indeed these illuminated manuscripts are, to the authors’ knowledge, among the oldest ever being analysed, so that the colourants found in them can be considered among the oldest evidences of their use. The main feature of Vienna Dioskurides and Vienna Genesis palettes is their richness, exemplified by the simultaneous presence of gold and ultramarine blue; in Vienna Dioskurides cinnabar is also present. Information regarding ultramarine blue is surprising, being the analytical evidence of the use of this precious pigment at least three centuries before its use in Western manuscripts, a feature justified by the fact that the Byzantine Empire was the dominant culture in early Middle Ages in the Mediterranean World. Other colourants include azurite and indigo, red lead, orpiment, red and yellow ochres, while a mixture of blue and yellow colourants, known as vergaut, was used to render green hues. Organic colourants were also used, such as madder and Tyrian purple, the latter employed to dye the parchment of Vienna Genesis.
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