Search results for ""Author Robert Hillenbrand""

Professor Hillenbrand has written extensively over the last twenty-five years on Islamic architecture from Spain to India and from the seventh to the twentieth century. He has paid consistent attention to the architecture of Iran, focusing particularly on the Saljuq period (11th-12th centuries), but has also worked on Umayyad monuments in the Levant between 660 and 750 A.D., a period when Islamic architecture came of age. Apart from recording unfamiliar buildings, he has increasingly concerned himself with the iconographic significance of Muslim buildings The papers in these two volumes closely reflect these interests. Some present primary material, others attempt to explore the achievements of a specific period or dynasty while yet others analyse the religious, royal, or political context of an important monument or school of architecture. The opportunity has been taken to add illustrations to articles, and to provide additional notes and a comprehensive index.

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A detailed study of the Great Mongol Shahnama, considered to be the greatest of all Persian illustrated manuscripts​The Great Mongol Shahnama is widely considered to be the definitive version of Firdausi’s epic poem, and the greatest of all Persian illustrated manuscripts. The paintings from this manuscript are held in private collections and institutions around the world, and have only been seen together in a single volume once since they were originally dispersed. This monograph reunites the paintings and reproduces them as 67 full-page, high quality color plates, alongside an analysis by leading scholar of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand. With newly commissioned photographs and insights into technical aspects of the paintings, The Great Mongol Shahnama is a comprehensive resource for those interested in Persian art and manuscripts. Distributed for Hali Publications Ltd. and the Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian. Co-published by Hali Publications Ltd. and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and supported by Qatar Museums. Exhibition Schedule:Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (December 2020–June 2021)

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Professor Hillenbrand has written extensively over the last twenty-five years on Islamic architecture from Spain to India and from the seventh to the twentieth century. He has paid consistent attention to the architecture of Iran, focusing particularly on the Saljuq period (11th-12th centuries), but has also worked on Umayyad monuments in the Levant between 660 and 750 A.D., a period when Islamic architecture came of age. Apart from recording unfamiliar buildings, he has increasingly concerned himself with the iconographic significance of Muslim buildings The papers in these two volumes closely reflect these interests. Some present primary material, others attempt to explore the achievements of a specific period or dynasty while yet others analyse the religious, royal, or political context of an important monument or school of architecture. The opportunity has been taken to add illustrations to articles, and to provide additional notes and a comprehensive index.

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Professor Hillenbrand has written extensively over the last twenty-five years on Islamic architecture from Spain to India and from the seventh to the twentieth century. He has paid consistent attention to the architecture of Iran, focusing particularly on the Saljuq period (11th-12th centuries), but has also worked on Umayyad monuments in the Levant between 660 and 750 A.D., a period when Islamic architecture came of age. Apart from recording unfamiliar buildings, he has increasingly concerned himself with the iconographic significance of Muslim buildings The papers in these two volumes closely reflect these interests. Some present primary material, others attempt to explore the achievements of a specific period or dynasty while yet others analyse the religious, royal, or political context of an important monument or school of architecture. The opportunity has been taken to add illustrations to articles, and to provide additional notes and a comprehensive index.

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Explores how Islamic art and architecture were made: their materials and their social, political, economic and religious context

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The studies collected in this volume, some of them rather difficult to access, date mostly from the last fifteen years and focus primarily on Persian book painting of the 14th to the early 16th centuries. In this period, Iran dominated the art of book painting in the Islamic world. The articles reprinted here examine various aspects of this, the golden age of Persian painting. They range from the period of Mongol rule, when the impact of Far Eastern themes and modes radically transformed the heritage bequeathed to Iran by Arab painting - a textbook case of the clash of civilisations - to the dawn of the modern era and the swansong of the classical style of Persian painting under the early Safavids. Yet other articles focus on the roots of book painting in the themes and styles developed in painted ceramics, on medieval Qur'anic calligraphy, on bookbinding and on the remarkably original variations played on the hitherto hackneyed theme of the figural frontispiece by Arab painters. Two major leitmotifs are explored in this selection of essays. One is provided by the constantly varying interpretations of the Shahnama ( The Book of Kings ), the Persian national epic, and especially the tendency of painters to interpret this familiar text in terms of contemporary politics. The other is the interplay of text and image, which highlights the tendency of painters to strike out on their own and to leave the literal text progressively further behind while they develop plots and sub-plots of their own. These enquiries are set within the context of a concerted effort to explore in detail how Persian painters achieved their most spectacular visual effects. In its combination of general surveys and closely focused analyses of individual manuscripts, this collection of articles will be of interest to specialists in book painting and in Islamic art as a whole

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Professor Hillenbrand has written extensively over the last twenty-five years on Islamic architecture from Spain to India and from the seventh to the twentieth century. He has paid consistent attention to the architecture of Iran, focusing particularly on the Saljuq period (11th-12th centuries), but has also worked on Umayyad monuments in the Levant between 660 and 750 A.D., a period when Islamic architecture came of age. Apart from recording unfamiliar buildings, he has increasingly concerned himself with the iconographic significance of Muslim buildings The papers in these two volumes closely reflect these interests. Some present primary material, others attempt to explore the achievements of a specific period or dynasty while yet others analyse the religious, royal, or political context of an important monument or school of architecture. The opportunity has been taken to add illustrations to articles, and to provide additional notes and a comprehensive index.

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Winner of the American Publishers Association's Award for an outstanding Professional and Scholarly title and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 1996 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. In a dazzling display of erudition, Robert Hillenbrand surveys the major building-types of the Islamic World: religious architecture (the mosque, the minaret, the madrasa), the mausoleum 'between Heaven and Earth', and the caravansarai and the palace representing the secular side. All the building-types are discussed in art-historical terms, with the interplay of form and function taken as the underlying theme of the analysis. All are comprehensively illustrated with a full range of colour and black-and-white photographs, analytical drawings, thumbnail comparative assemblies and ground plans. This major reference work, covering from Spain to Afghanistan and c. 700 to c. 1700, is a source of fascination for all seeking to appreciate the rich heritage of the Islamic World. Recurrent themes and patterns take on a wider significance - a persistent reminder that the Islamic faith and the particular type of society which it engendered makes light of vast gulfs of time and space. Features: *24 colour plates *300 black-and-white photographs *1246 line drawings *Section of composite drawings and ground plans Available in Hardback (originally published in 1994) and a revised paperback edition published in 2000. This new paperback edition includes a previously unpublished index, designed to make the book more user-friendly.

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Islamic artists channeled 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 termed 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 iconographic systems of earlier civilizations, notably those of the ancient Near East and of the classical world. Islam also developed its own distinctive vocabulary of signs and symbols. Accordingly, questions of iconography and meaning bulk large among the studies gathered together in the present volume. These studies, written over a period of almost thirty years, and taken from a wide variety of published sources, deal with aspects of the decorative arts from Spain to India and from the 7th to the 17th century. They focus in turn upon ceramics and metalwork; on coins, carpets and calligraphy; and on carving in wood and ivory. They are arranged under three headings. The first comprises general surveys of the field covering the content of these arts and confronting the challenges they present, such as the Islamic approach to three-dimensional sculpture. The second deals with questions of iconography and meaning, while the third comprises a series of studies devoted to specific media such as ivory, woodwork and numismatics. This volume therefore offers not only a general introduction to some of the problems posed by Islamic art, but also readings of key objects in an attempt to explore their meaning; and finally, an in-depth focus on individual objects representing specific genres and media.

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Embracing over a thousand years of history and an area stretching from the Atlantic to the borders of India and China, this is an unrivalled synthesis of the arts of Islamic civilization. From the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present day, Robert Hillenbrand traces the evolution of an extraordinary range of art forms, including architecture, calligraphy, book illumination, painting, ceramics, glassware, textiles and metalwork. New to this edition is a chapter ranging from c. 1700 to c. 1900, a period very often neglected in books on this subject. Hillenbrand explores how recent centuries, far from being a dark age, have seen incredible artistic ferment and creativity across the Islamic world. Full-colour illustrations of masterpieces of Islamic art and architecture – from Moorish Spain to contemporary Iran – show the far-reaching stylistic developments as well as the recurrent preoccupations that have shaped the arts of Islam since the seventh century.With 227 illustrations in colour

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I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation Iran's rich cultural heritage has been shaped over many centuries by its rich and eventful history. This impressive book, which assembles contributions by some of the world's most eminent historians, art historians and other scholars of the Iranian world, explores the history of the country through the prism of Persian literature, art and culture. The result is a seminal work which illuminates important, yet largely neglected, aspects of Medieval and Early Modern Iran and the Middle East. Its scope, from the era of Ferdowsi, Iran's national epic poet and the author of the Shahnameh to the period of the Mongols, Timurids, Safavids, Zands and Qajars, examines the interaction between mythology, history, historiography, poetry, painting and craftwork in the long narrative of the Persianate experience. As such, Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran is essential reading and a reference point for students and scholars of Iranian history, Persian literature and the arts of the Islamic World.

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