ISLAMIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE

1. ISLAMIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE INTRODUCTION Islamic Art and Architecture, the art and architecture of those areas of the Middle East, North Africa, northern India, and Spain that fell under the domination of Islam at various times from the 7th century ad.

2. Islamic architecture in India dates from the 13th century to the present. Brought to India by the first Muslim conquerors, Islamic architecture soon lost its original purity and borrowed such elements from Indian architecture as courtyards surrounded by colonnades, balconies supported by brackets, and above all, decoration. Islam, on the other hand, introduced to India

3. Historical sequence The development of Islamic art from the 7th to the 18th centuries may be divided into three periods. The formative period coincided roughly with the Umayyad caliphate (661-750), under whose rule Islamic territory was extended from Damascus, in Syria, to Spain. The middle period spans the time of the Abbasid caliphs (750-1258),who ruled Islam from Baghdad, in Iraq, until the time of the Mongol conquest

4. Domes Domes, a great feature of all Islamic architecture, developed both from Sassanian and Early Christian architectural traditions. The earliest surviving mosque is the building known as Dome of the Rock (late 7th century) at Jerusalem, one of the greatest religious structures in the world; it marks the spot where, according to tradition, Muhammad ascended to

5. Minarets During the lifetime of the Prophet, the call to prayer at Medina was made from a rooftop by a muezzin, analogous to the Jewish practice of blowing the shofar (ram's horn) or the early Christian use of a wooden clapper to summon worshippers. It seems likely that the Syrian tradition of marking the corners of a building by four short towers was the origin of minarets

6. Decorative art The idea behind the condemnation of making images of prophets and saints, and of adoring these images and tombs, was that such practices materialized worship, which belongs to God alone. Likewise, the creation of representational images by artists was condemned because only God is able to give life to creation. These prohibitions were always observed in religious contexts—in mosques, on mosque carpets, in the decoration of the Koran and Koran boxes

7. Pottery One of the finest aspects of the Islamic artistic tradition is found in pottery, on which was lavished a degree of innovation and creativity comparable to that reserved for fine art in other cultures. Pottery was apparently collected by the prosperous middle class much as the Dutch middle class avidly collected portraits and genre paintings in the 17th century. .

8. Glass Muslim artists also worked in glass, first with techniques used in Byzantium and Sassanian Iran, and then in new ways. Fatimid—cut glass, lustre-painted glass, and stamp-decorated glass—is of an exceptionally high quality. In this period a small number of exquisitely carved rock-crystal vessels, comparable in quality to the cut glass, were also made

9. Wood carving and Ivory carving Besides its use as architectural decoration for mosques, ornamental woodwork was also used in a secular context. Exceptional examples, of which openwork figural panels with courtly scenes survive, decorated Fatimid palaces. Some of this work echoes the style of the Coptic (Christian Egyptian) artistic tradition. Screens and furniture were also decoratively carved.

10. Painting Like other Islamic art forms, painting served definite purposes. The Western concept of art for art's sake, central to the tradition of easel painting, did not exist, and Islamic art was the art of book illustration. The earliest Islamic paintings to survive in any number are miniatures illustrating manuscripts of Greek scientific texts translated into Arabic the fables of Bidpai and the Maqamat of al-Hariri the narrative of a traveller's adventures.

11. Stylistically, all these paintings were derived from the 13th-century Baghdad school of manuscript illustration. The scientific illustrations are line drawings based on Classical models, and the colourful secular paintings have a charming naivety, with only two or three monumental figures represented and landscape shown as decorative elements.