Arab Painting (Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch Der Orientalistik)

285 Pages·2010·21.72 MB·English

by  Contadini, A.

Arab Painting: Text and Image in
Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts
Handbook of Oriental Studies
Section 1, The Near and Middle East
Editor-in-Chief
W.H. van Soldt (Leiden)
Editors
G. Beckman (Ann Arbor)
C. Leitz (Tübingen)
B.A. Levine (New York)
P. Michalowski (Ann Arbor)
P. Miglus (Heidelberg)
VOLUME 90
Arab Painting: Text and Image in
Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts
Edited by
Anna Contadini
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
On the cover: Ibn Bakhtīshū(cid:123) and a Pupil. Ibn Bakhtīshū(cid:123), Kitāb na(cid:123)t al-(cid:152)ayawan, North Jazīra? ca. 1220–25. London Brit-
ish Library, Or. 2784, fol. 101v (117 × 130 mm) (Copyright of the British Library)
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 0169-9423
ISBN 978 90 04 15722 4
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints
Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS
Foreword .............................................................................................................................................. vii
Craig Clunas
Introduction (and Acknowledgements) ................................................................................................ ix
Anna Contadini
Section 1
Theoretical Issues
The Manuscript as a Whole ............................................................................................................... 3
Anna Contadini
What does ‘Arab Painting’ Mean? ...................................................................................................... 17
Oleg Grabar
Section 2
Scientific Manuscripts
Art in the Name of Science: The Kitāb al-Diryāq in Text and Image ............................................... 25
Jaclynne J. Kerner
Text and Illustrations. Dioscorides and the Illustrated Herbal in the Arab Tradition ..................... 41
Michael J. Rogers
Elusive Giraffes: Ibn Abi l-(cid:198)awāfi r’s Badā(cid:120)i(cid:123) al-Akwān and Other Animal Books .............................. 49
Remke Kruk
Mapping the Mnemonic: A Late Thirteenth-Century Copy of al-(cid:194)ūfī’s Book of the Constellations .... 65
Moya Carey
vi contents
From Iraq to Fars: Tracking Cultural Transformations in the 1322 Qazwīnī (cid:123)Ajā(cid:120)ib Manuscript .... 73
Persis Berlekamp
Section 3
Literary Manuscripts
The Earliest Islamic Illustrated Manuscript, the Maqāmāt and a Graveyard at
Su(cid:152)ār, Oman ................................................................................................................................... 95
Geoffrey R. D. King
Love Localized and Science from Afar: ‘Arab Painting’, Iberian Courtly Culture,
and the (cid:198)adīth Bayā(cid:211) wa Riyā(cid:211) (Vat. Ar. Ris. 368) .......................................................................... 103
Cynthia Robinson
The Schefer (cid:198)arīrī: A Study in Islamic Frontispiece Design ............................................................ 117
Robert Hillenbrand
The Uses of Captions in Medieval Literary Arabic Manuscripts ..................................................... 135
Bernard O’Kane
Section 4
The European Connection
Anatomical Illustration in Arabic Manuscripts .................................................................................. 147
Emilie Savage-Smith
The ‘Translation’ of Diagrams and Illustrations from Arabic into Latin ......................................... 161
Charles Burnett
Introductory Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 177
Plates .................................................................................................................................................... 179
Index .................................................................................................................................................... 265
FOREWORD
The idea of ‘national schools’ in art is one of the founding presumptions of the discipline of art history
in the nineteenth century, but it also has deep roots in a geographically and chronologically wide range of
practices around the collecting and categorising of images. Whether it is the notion of distinctive regional
manners (Huating versus Suzhou) in late Ming China, or Vasari’s classic opposition of Florence to Venice, or
the comparisons made in Safavid Iran between the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Frankish’ works collected in the Bahram
Mirza album of 1544–5, a wide range of writers have chosen to cluster work under ethnic or linguistic or
political labels. They have done so often in conditions of implicit or explicit comparison, which have cre-
ated some enduring canons and hierarchies of value and subordination. This innovative collection of essays
addresses one of the categories, ‘Arab painting’, which perhaps has too often historically been judged to be
one of the losers in this art historical practice of ranking. The loss of large quantities of the material, and
European ideological presumptions which until recently have constructed ‘Persian’ as the privileged category
of aesthetic analysis, have made it harder to maintain focus on the cultural production of the Arab world
in the realm of images, texts, and the fruitful range of relationship between them. Perhaps only a multi-
authored and cross-disciplinary study, such as the one presented here, can do justice to the complexity and
richness of the surviving material, which despite losses is still suffi cient to show that the tradition of Arabic
manuscripts is a signifi cant part of the story of word and image relationships in the mediaeval period. It
is a tradition clearly worthy of the sustained attention it is given here by a range of international scholars,
both in its own right, and in terms of the ways in which it broadens and deepens our understanding of the
manners whereby pictures and words can operate holistically in a range of cultural and historical contexts.
This collection challenges both existing presumptions about the very category ‘Arab painting’, and raises
issues around the cultures of text, image and book which will be of ongoing interest to many in a range
of disciplines.
Craig Clunas
SOAS, University of London
December 2006

INTRODUCTION
Anna Contadini
This book represents the fi ndings of scholars working from different perspectives on a wide range of Ara-
bic illustrated manuscripts. Their individual scholarly concerns range over the history and transmission of
ideas, medieval science, comparative literature and art history, while the manuscripts studied are not only
correspondingly varied in subject matter but are also spread both chronologically, from the 10th to the 16th
centuries, and geographically, from Western Iran to Spain. But there is nothing random about the result-
ing collection of papers, for the individual contributions are bound together into a coherent whole by the
thematic emphasis suggested by the title. Their concern, accordingly, is neither exclusively with the nature
and affi liations of the text in question nor just with the questions of provenance, iconography and stylistic
ana lysis raised by the images that illustrate them. It is, rather, the dynamics of the relationship between the
two that is brought centre stage, attention being focused on how they interact and complement each other;
and the emphasis on an integrated approach implies, further, that questions of reception as well as of the
locus of production need to be addressed.
The book stems, in fact, from an international conference held at the School of Oriental and African
Studies on 17–18 September 2004, which I had long dreamt of organizing with the aim of exploring alterna-
tives to the traditionally dominant approaches to illustrated manuscripts in Islamic art history, concentrating
especially on the function of image in relation to text. The enthusiastic response to the call for conference
papers on this theme clearly showed that it touched a chord, and the quality of the resulting contributions
made it immediately clear that there was a need for publishing an edited volume.1
The resulting book is organized in four sections representing thematic areas that, although in some respects
distinct, nevertheless cumulatively contribute to a more rounded understanding of Arabic manuscripts and
their illustrations.
The fi rst section is devoted to theoretical issues. It begins with a survey and critique of existing scholar-
ship in which I attempt to trace the ideological background to the emergence of the hitherto dominant
approaches to the image in illustrated manuscripts, and to argue that the resulting imbalance has led to
1 The conference was made possible by a generous award from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB),
supplemented by funding from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of my own institution, SOAS, the British Academy,
the British Research Centre in the Levant and the Khalili Collections. My work as convenor and organizer was greatly
helped by the SOAS Conference Centre and by Moya Carey, who was my AHRB research assistant at the time. The
conference included other important papers that could not unfortunately be included in the publication, those of Dimi-
tri Gutas, Jeremy Johns, Oya Pançaroǧlu and Nikolaj Serikoff. Other scholars and friends who were unable to deliver
a paper greatly supported the initiative. The Chairs, Sheila Canby, Bernard O’Kane, John Lowden and Stefan Sperl,
deserve the thanks of all who attended the conference, not only for keeping us all to time, but also for participating in
discussions with helpful comments and interesting suggestions.