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This comprehensive survey is published more than half a century after the last – and first – monograph about the subject, The Kūfic Inscription in Verses in the Court of the Royal Palace of Masʻūd III at Ghazni (Rome, 1966), written by Alessio Bombaci. When Bombaci found out that most of the epigraphy from the palace were to be read in Persian, the discovery was justly hailed as a major scientific breakthrough, given that earlier attempts at deciphery (including Bombaci’s own initial efforts)...

Comprising four essays, the catalogue accompanied an exhibition of 23 Indian-inspired drawings attributable to the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) and their possible Mughal prototypes. While the link between the two groups of artwork has been discussed in specialist literature for more than a century (and it was recognised by experts even before), this exhibition, held at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, between 13 March and 24 June 2018, brought them together for the fi...

This lavish volume may be the first monograph to have been dedicated to Qajar drawings and sketches. Therefore, while the book apparently revolves around a single album (Harvard Art Museums / Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Alpheus Hyatt Purchasing Fund, 1960.161), readers will soon recognise its more general underlying objective throughout the chapters, i.e., the place of drawing in the repertoire of Qajar art. The impressive size of the book ensures that the reproduction of each folio appears at ...

This monograph about architectural decoration in 15th-century Iran (and beyond) is the first of its kind not only because of its subject matter but also with respect to its emphasis on the Turkmen dynasties. Until the recent increase of studies on Turkmen cultural patronage, the Āq Quyūnlū and Qarā Quyūnlū seemed to be perpetually overshadowed by their Timurid rivals in scholarly literature. Sandra Aube’s monograph, along with those by Simon Rettig and Chad Lingwood, seeks to counter this imb...

Sensory, notional, and emotional properties of silks and other fabrics are discussed in this essay which draws on historiography, poetry, as well as visual representation of textiles in paintings and figurative/textual supplements to fabrics, in order to highlight the ever-present, yet involuntarily perceived and therefore rarely noticed, synesthetic experiences caused by textiles. Although its primary purpose is to argue for the presence of a heightened sensory awareness of textiles in the M...

In parallel with historiography in general, architectural history has been primarily concerned with the heritage of elites, forgoing other social groups: this book, thus, aims to rectify this deficiency by highlighting the continuity of earthen architecture in many regions of the world and do away with the still-prevalent fallacy according to which mud-brick “preceded” red brick and both were eventually superseded by stone. Pre-modern societies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, primar...

This small volume contains the published version of the author’s lecture in the New Research in Art History series of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, which was delivered under the title Looking East, Looking West: Mughal Painting Between Persia and Europe, on 19 November, 2015. According to Singh, hybridity in Mughal painting should not be dismissed as eclecticism or strangeness, for it is a consciously employed device. For instance, when one half of a late-Mughal painting, Lovers...

Inquiring into early-modern Muslim viewers’ habits, impressions, impulses, and reactions in confrontation with book paintings, this essay challenges established academic paradigms which generalise the Islamic world and over-emphasise hostile Muslim attitudes towards images. Through a thoughtful selection of written sources and visual testimonies, Christiane Gruber opens up a much wider range of emotions which often included affirmative, protective, and iconophile sensibilities with respect to...

The volume accompanied an exhibition which was held at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, between 26 August 2017 until 7 January 2018. As a catalogue, it records 77 items exhibited (pp. 131-157), while it also contains a collection of essays recreating the concept of the exhibition. The exhibition, in turn, was brought about by the joint display of Qajar artworks from the businessman-politician Kazem Kooros’s (1906-2010) collection, by courtesy of his heirs, the donation of Ez...

This general survey of Qur’ans is based on material from one collection, the Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī Institute of Oriental Studies, Tashkent, as the latter is housing the most comprehensive ensemble of Central Asian manuscripts. In geographic terms, the range of volumes under discussion covers an area from Ḫīva to Marv, while the chronology stretches between the beginning of the 17th century and the October revolution. Thus, Efthymiou’s work warrants the attention of both those with an interest in ...

What warrants mention of this publication in spite of its popular tone is, firstly, the exceptional archaeological assemblage which it makes accessible and, secondly, its documentary value as a new addition to the still scantly published material about the so-called Belitung shipwreck, an outstanding find recovered (in 1998) by a highly controversial project of recent maritime archaeology. The Belitung ship is the first and only salvaged boat surviving from the ‘Abbasid Caliphate. Built at on...

The volume consists of seven individual studies which are bound together by their strong reliance on The Houghton Shahnameh (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) by Martin Bernard Dickson and Stuart Cary Welch and the deference of the author to this two-volume work. While the author engages multiple problems in the respective chapters, his overarching concern is for “Dickson & Welch 1981”: a seminal volume which Soudavar believes to have been unjustly marginalised, ignored, and/or criticised by subsequent...

Following a major study by Christine Nolle-Karimi (2014) which posited that historical Khorasan was where Herat was perceived as an imaginary centre, this newest volume about the same region assumes a decentralised approach to the Iranian East. It shows Khorasan to be a multipartite entity made of irrigated arable lands and oases under the dominance of four cities, Nīsāpūr, Marv, Herat, and Balkh, and bordered by the Dast-e Kavīr and Qara Qūm deserts, the Āmū Daryā, and the Hindu Kush range. ...

Written with a wide intellectual scope and without fear of confrontation, this book addresses what its artist-scholar author considers to be fundamental flaws in the theoretical underpinning and methodology of Islamic art scholarship. Arguably, these have been responsible for hindering the ability of this branch of art studies to comprehensively interpret its subject since its introduction into Western academia at the past turn of the century. Thus, the book seeks to construe these deficienci...

This volume was published in conjunction with the reinstallation of the permanent exhibition of West Asian carpets at the Museum of Angewandte Kunst (MUK) in Vienna in April 2014, after a long pause. It recounts how the previous display was dismantled in part because declining public interest in antiquities prompted the MAK’s shift from historic exhibitions towards contemporary design. Such developments led to a growing tension between the extensive holdings of carpets and the perceived sense...

Iran is not the primary interest of this book, yet nearly each of its eleven essays bear some degree of significance for Iranian studies, thus each will be briefly mentioned. As set out by the editor in the introduction, the volume focuses on the often-overlooked non-textual matters conveyed by epigraphy, which range from the multilingualism of inscriptions and their audiences, to the legibility, accessibility, materiality, and performativity of monumental texts. The only article dealing wit...

The volume opens with a biographic sketch and summary of activities of Renata Holod—minus a list of publications. It then brings together eleven contributions by her former doctoral students, encompassing a very wide geographic, temporal, and conceptual horizon of Islamic art. As the essays directly concerned with Iranian studies (L. K. Michelsen and J. Olafsdotter: “Telling Tales: Investigating a Minaʼi Bowl”; D. J. Roxburgh: “ ‘Many a Wish Has Turned Dust’. Pir Budaq and the Formation of Tu...

Encompassing the results of over fifty years of archaeological and architectural fieldwork, this volume, dedicated to the author’s lifelong companion and erudite reader Lisselotte Soltani, offers a consummate presentation of key findings during a rich scholarly career. It endeavours to trace the formation of building techniques, types, and functions over the course of three millennia, mostly within the modern boundaries of Iran. The aim and ambition of this monumental work conjure up the trad...

The essay is an attempt to throw light on Turkmen manuscript patronage, long considered to have been eclipsed by Timurid bibliophilism, which it emulated, and Safavid book production, which it preceded. Pīr Būdāq (d. 1466) has been selected as a case study for examining the realities for princely book production during the unstable period of late Qaraqūyunlū rule when Pīr Būdāq was appointed by his father, Jahānsāh (r. 1438-1467), as governor of Shiraz (1456-1460) and Baghdad (1460-1466) befo...

The article analyses a series of photographs depicting Mīrzā Reẓā Kermānī, the assassin of Nāser al-Dīn shah, first imprisoned, then executed (on 11 August 1896). These photographs were taken by a number of official photographers from different angles and distances, and widely disseminated in various forms in order to use the imagery as a deterrent by imprinting the face of the regicide and his punishment on collective consciousness. This may have been among the first instances when photograp...