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This beautiful book allows the reader to appreciate the complexities and subtleties of Ottoman art and architecture as a whole, while simultaneously learning more about the history of one of the world's most magnificent cities - Istanbul. Bridging the gap between the specialist scholar and the educated general reader, the history of the city is discussed, from the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 up to the beginning of the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire was finally d...

Though immediately recognizable in public discourse as a modern state in a political "hot zone," Armenia has a material history and visual culture that reaches back to the Paleolithic era. This book presents a timely and much-needed survey of the arts of Armenia from antiquity to the early eighteenth century C.E. Divided chronologically, it brings into discussion a wide range of media, including architecture, stone sculpture, works in metal, wood, and cloth, manuscript illumination, and ceramic...

Imran Qureshi (born 1972) is one of the most visible and popular representatives of Pakistan's contemporary art scene. Schooled in the demanding and precise techniques of miniature painting, he employs symbolism and ornamentation from the Mogul tradition that blossomed in the north of the Indian subcontinent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his own idiosyncratic way, Qureshi combines these traditional motifs and techniques with conceptualism and abstract painting, and keen obse...

Islamic artists channelled their energies not into easel painting and large-scale sculpture, but rather into what Western scholars, obeying a very different hierarchy of art forms, rather disparagingly term the decorative arts or even the minor arts. In point of fact, some of the greatest masterpieces of Islamic art are in the media of ceramics, metalwork, textiles, ivory and glass. Often the images they bear express a complex set of meanings, for Islam inherited much material from the iconograp...

The British Museum has one of the finest collections of Assyrian artifacts in the world, centered around the famous carved stone reliefs from the palaces of the Assyrian kings at Nimrud and Nineveh. Dating from the ninth to the seventh centuries B.C., these remarkable sculptures show the kings' exploits in battle and in hunting, and ceremonies at the Assyrian court. This catalogue describes their excavation in the mid-nineteenth century and the excitement aroused in Western Europe by the discove...

Medieval metalwork is one of the artistic highlights of the Iranian world, as well as of the Departement des Arts de l'Islam at the Louvre in Paris, which holds more than one hundred and fifty objects from this period. A new approach to the study of a historic collection, Precious Material: The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World is a comprehensive overview of the production of metalin medieval Iran. Although this is one of the most important collections in the world, the objects, some w...

This handsome portfolio contains ten fine art prints of David Roberts’ superb lithographs of nineteenth-century Luxor, selected from Egypt: Yesterday and Today (AUC Press, 1996).Between 1842 and 1849, on the basis of sketches made on the spot and aided by his excellent memory, Roberts produced the drawings that Louis Haghe turned into prints published by Graham Moon. These lithographs appeared in the original hand-painted deluxe edition. Suitable for framing, they reproduce details of the monume...

In 1556 Prince Sultan Ibrahim Mirza commissioned a copy of the great Persian literary classic, the Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones) of Abdul-Rahman Jami. For the next nine years, five court calligraphers worked on the transcription of the poetic text, and then another group of gifted artists illuminated and illustrated it. This magnificent volume, now housed in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, and known as the Freer Jami, is renowned as one of the most sumptuous works of the Safavid period and a...

Order and Disorder looks at the cross-cultural context and collaborative nature of Aligheiero Boetti's iconic artworks. The original, often large-scale works in his series Mappe (Maps), Tutto (Everything), and "squared word" were created in needle and thread by women in Afghanistan and in Pakistani refugee camps following the Soviet invasion in 1979, under the direction of Boetti (1940-1994).Photographs of the artworks and of Afghan women embroidering them are accompanied by examples of embroide...