Arts of allusion: object, ornament, and architecture in medieval Islam

Abstract

Through close studies of ceramics, metalwares and other plastic arts from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, most strikingly, architecture.

Contents

Arts of the third dimension -- Portable objects and art historical horizons -- Miniature, model, microcosm -- The art of allusion -- The intellect of the hand -- "Making is thinking" -- Architecture, art of process -- Thinking and making in tenth-century Iraq -- The eighth epistle -- The material imagination -- Makers, movements and mutable materials -- The craftsman in society -- Building ornament -- Taking the shapes of images -- Trails of ornament -- Building ornament -- Arcades and cordons sanitaires -- The inlaid surface -- Jaziran synthesis -- Occupied objects -- Lessons from a storeroom -- Seeing-with and the art of the object -- Occupied objects -- Inkwells, architecture, and conditioned vision -- The scribe in the inkwell -- Object as theatre -- Likeness and allusion -- Material metaphors -- The languages of objects -- The poet's craft -- Metal, stone, and smoke -- Mobile monuments -- Radiant monuments -- Metaphor and modality -- The poetics of ornament -- From Nile to Kilga -- The city reinscribed -- Mediterranean miniatures -- Ornament as ekphrasis -- Memory and imagination -- Conclusion : objects in an expanded field.