A pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. These archives document Viollet’s excavations at Samarra and his surveys of Islamic monuments, particularly in Iraq and Iran. In 2021-2022 a scientific project funded by the GIS CollEx-Persée and co-partnered with BULAC and CeRMI has been set up to study part of the iconographic materials stored in these archives (EpiPOM project). In the frame of this project, an international conference was organized in Paris on 23 June 2022 to bring together a network of researchers in the arts of Islam into a collaborative study of this partly undisclosed archival material.
This essay is a critical survey of relevant Song dynasty sources that are essential to an understanding of the term Dashi 大食. Scholars in the nineteenth century identified Dashi in Tang dynasty writings as a designation for Arab Muslims. This definition consequently has been and is being applied to all occurrences of Dashi in Song dynasty texts. However, Dashi in the Song no longer described Arab Muslims, but, as a multivalent term, referred to a variety of peoples and places in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Contrary to commonly held view, Dashi falls short of providing evidence for an Arab controlled maritime trade from South Asia to China that contemporary scholars suggest. The paper, therefore, calls for a re-evaluation of the alleged Arab influence in Asian maritime trade networks during the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and a closer reading of the Chinese source material.
Ernst Cohn-Wiener was an unusual wide oriented art historian, whose interests spanned from European and Jewish art, to East Asian and Islamic art and architecture, the latter one is in the focus of this paper. Despite his many contributions in the area of art history he did not get the place he deserved. In the 1920s his interest turned to Islamic Art History and he decided to explore Islamic architecture in Central Asia, a widely unknown field. Two expeditions carried out by him and his wife in 1924 and 1925, resulted in his well-illustrated overview on the Medieval Islamic architecture of Turkestan, published as Turan – Islamische Baukunst in Mittelasien (1930). When he lost his position as a lecturer in 1933 due to the ‘Rassegesetze’ imposed by the ruling Nazis, he emigrated together with his wife via England to India, working for the Maharaja of Baroda until 1939. Their last move was to New York, where Cohn-Wiener died two years later in 1941.
Kurt Erdmann was a German art historian of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with European architecture and paintings he developed a special interest for ancient Persian art as well as medieval and early modern Middle Eastern art. He became one of the leading art historians on Oriental carpets and published numerous major studies which were widely read. As a curator of the Islamic Department of the State Museums in Berlin and as a university teacher he became an influential scholar for generations of students in Germany and in Turkey.
This introductory essay overviews the state of scholarship and controversies in the field of Islamic art, in tandem with the gradual reappraisal of Persian art, from around 2000 to the present. By surveying twenty-year debates concerning the academic and display genre called ‘Islamic art’, as well as the reformulating process of the art historical concept ‘Persian art’, this essay seeks an alternative pathway to put several contentious debates concerning art history in general and Persian art in particular into fruitful discussion.
This essay offers the first survey of architectural history after the Muslim conquests in the Indian Subcontinent in Urdu, the major Muslim literary language of colonial India. Contributing to the history of art history in non-European contexts, the essay traces the emergence of a deliberately ‘Islamic’ art history as the outcome of intellectual exchanges between Indian, European, and Middle Eastern authors. Reflecting this mixed provenance, the popular and scholarly texts examined here are termed ‘architectural rekhta’ by using the old name for Urdu (Rekhta: ‘mixed’). In apt architectural metonymy, ‘Rekhta’ was renamed ‘Urdu’ in homage to the Urdu-e Mu‘ala (or Red Fort of Delhi), revealing a conceptual link between the palace of the last Mughal emperors and Urdu as its language based on the centrality of buildings to Indo-Muslim cultural memory. Consequently, when colonial Muslim authors combined elements of European practice with their own concerns to produce their ‘mixed’ mode of art historical writing, architecture became their primary focus. In line with the themes of this special issue of the JAH, this approach examines the ‘post-Persianate’ cultural memory of Indian art of the Islamic period.
This article presents a brief history of the Museum of Oriental Art in Rome. Its main focus is its collection of Persian Art: not only because of the objects it contains, but also because of the further activity it has encouraged in the form of exhibitions in Italy and abroad and collaboration with institutions in Iran itself and elsewhere in Italy. This co-operation also includes excavation and research in Iran for example in Isfahan’s Friday mosque and Arg-e Bam and participation in exhibitions in other locations in Italy and abroad.
The early history of the study of Parthian art may be profitably divided into three overlapping phases. The first phase, ‘Ordering’, begins with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s dismissive assessment of Parthian art, at this point known mainly from coins, as derivative and barbaric. The second phase, ‘Exploration’, begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia and the documentation of rock reliefs and architectural remains in Persia by travellers such as Flandin and Coste. The third phase, ‘Grand Narratives’, occurs primarily in the 1930s, when the first major efforts to synthesize Parthian art were undertaken by Arthur Upham Pope, Ernst Herzfeld, Neilson Debevoise and Michael Rostovtzeff. While Pope and Herzfeld treated Parthian art as a nadir between the Achaemenid and Sasanian Empires, a view adopted in many subsequent studies, Debevoise and Rostovtzeff considered it to be a vibrant and original phenomenon.
Recent research has sought to deconstruct the narrative of the carpets of South, Central and West Asia created by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European and North American scholars. This article builds on the methodology of that recent historiographical work, but looks at a later historical moment, the 1970s. Then, as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formation of ideas of Iran and Islam through the agency of carpet studies was clearly visible. It explores this process through two exhibitions held in 1976 under the umbrella of the UK-wide World of Islam Festival, Arts of Islam at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Carpets of Central Persia at the Mappin Gallery, Sheffield and the Birmingham City Art Gallery. The article argues that whilst the visibility of carpets in the Festival reinvigorated carpet studies in the short term, its exhibitions failed to offer a sustainable forward path for the discipline. Rather they reinforced already anachronistic ideas about Iran’s role in the material culture of the region and continued to focus carpet scholarship the narrow question of provenience, the place and date of making.
The paper discusses the ‘discovery’ of Mughal painting at Vienna and the pioneering research dedicated to it from the 1920s onwards by Josef Strzygowski and his circle. The focus is on the so-called Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn Palace which was decorated in the 1760s under Maria Theresa with collages made of cut-up paintings of the Mughal empire. The dialectics of this unique decoration scheme are unravelled which emerges as a destructive and at the same time emphatic appropriation of the ‘other’. An additional interest is provided by the connection to Rembrandt and Schellinks who copied Mughal miniatures for which the prototypes appear in the Millionenzimmer. The conclusion draws a parallel to Mughal artistic appropriations.
Although the translations of important scholarship on art history across the different European languages are increasingly common, the same cannot be said about the invaluable articles and books published in non-European languages. In the case of Persian art, the results of research conducted by scholars writing in Persian, Arabic or Turkish, are often inaccessible for many Western scholars. Accordingly, the aim of the translation of Aʽẓam Naẓarkarde’s work, ‘Painter and artist of the Âstân-e Qods during the Afsharid period’ is twofold. Firstly, the paper highlights the potentials of a heavily underused source for art history by introducing several official documents. Secondly, the reader gains precious insight into the art historical writing and thought within Iran. The translation may shed light on the applied theoretical framework and methodology currently observed by Iranian scholars, as well as on their approach to the study of art history.
The so-called Polish carpets were once believed to be woven on Polish looms, even though—as we now understand—they were (most likely) manufactured in the Persian cities of Kashan and Isfahan. Yet, the misattribution of these objects’ origins is still evident in the phrase by which they are referred to in most English-language art-historical accounts, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’. This essay explores the history of conceptualising these carpets’ artistic geography, from art historians’ belief in their fictional Polish provenience, to their appreciation as some of the most valuable Safavid-era Persian carpets, to recent attempts to move away from defining these objects’ geographic roots in definite terms. With conflicting theories about their artistic geographies vying for attention, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’ are serving here as a springboard for rethinking the spatial dimension of the practice of naming in Art History, particularly the paradox inherent in the idea of artistic origins.
In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500—1599)—challenge this classification. Scholarship has witnessed intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars from each other. These are not pedantic trivialities, but deliberate intrusions of national and political agendas into art historical analyses. The geographic split partitioning Iran from Central Asia has its origins in the historical battles waged between the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids across the sixteenth century, while the linguistic and ideological rift separating English- and Russian-language academics stems from political divisions from the time of British and Romanov imperial ambitions during the late nineteenth century, through Cold-War tensions spanning the twentieth.
After the recent publication of two previously unknown “Sasanian” silver plates depicting the renowned scene of the chariot of the Lunar God Mah, added to the other five known examples, this article reconsiders one specimen of this series of objects – here addressed as the “Rashy plate” –, the authenticity of which appears questionable. Three parameters are considered for discussing this plate: iconography, manufacturing technique and provenance, and all of them are contextualised in the period of the great exhibitions of Persian Art (between the 1930s and the 1960s). The outcome of these exhibitions, besides stimulating scholarly research on previously understudied artistic productions, was the consequent rising interest by museums and private collectors in art objects from the ancient Iranian world. The introduction of possible forgeries, such as the Rashy plate, coherently fits into this increasing demand of the art market.
The purpose of this essay is threefold. Firstly, it attempts to introduce the diplomatic and collecting careers of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Baron Albert Eperjesy (1848–1916), who was the highest representative of his country in numerous European capitals and –between 1895 and 1901– Tehran. Secondly, an attempt will be made to contextualise his collecting habits by drawing attention to the peculiarities of Austro-Hungarian collector diplomats. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Persian element of this collection will be discussed within the previously outlined framework, namely, what artworks it did include, how and where he obtained them, and what would be their subsequent fate.
This study examines Baluch carpets’ musealisation and the prejudiced view that carpets woven by Persians are superior to the carpets of tribal groups– a view expressed in 1876 by Robert Murdoch Smith in the exhibition catalogue of the Persian collection he had purchased for the South Kensington Museum. To do so, travel memoirs, museum registers and exhibition catalogues in European and US museums ca. 1870s-19030s are revisited. The scope is to refine Baluch weavings as museum objects and delineate how tribal carpets were integrated in museums within ethno-cultural stereotypes in Persian art and the re-discussion between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts.
The article surveys the life and output of Eric Schroeder (1904-71), who served from 1938 as (mainly honorary) Keeper of Persian Art at the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, mounting choice exhibitions and greatly expanding the collection of paintings. After assessing his two major books – Persian Miniatures in the Fogg Museum of Art (1942) and Muhammad’s People. An Anthology (1955) – the focus shifts to his chapters and articles on Persian architecture and book painting. His remarkable range, profound erudition, flood of original insights and peerless prose explains why his best work, as relevant today as ever, should be required reading for students of Islamic art.
This article deals with aspects of Alois Riegl’s investigation of Baroque art in light of selected passages of his still unpublished manuscripts. The analysis of this voluminous corpus, in comparison with Riegl’s posthumous publications on the “origins” of Baroque art, reveals not only a much more comprehensive study of Baroque art, but also a far more complex idea of “Baroque”. The purpose of the article is to advance knowledge about Riegl’s actual contribution to Baroque studies. Particular attention will be paid to both core concepts of Riegl’s analysis of Baroque art and his methodological approach, by highlighting reference models as well as divergences from contemporary research.
Wooden architecture played a crucial role in Josef Strzygowski’s theory of civilisation. He presented it as the authentic Volkskunst, expressing the inventive spirit of the North, as opposed to the Machtkunst radiating from Rome and Constantinople. Strzygowski, who granted an equal place to Germanic and Slavic peoples in this ‘wooden Atlantis’, was a tactical ally for art historians in Central and Eastern Europe, who used timber architecture to construct an autonomous development of national art. At the opposite pole were scholars under the intellectual influence of ‘phantom Rome’ – the Riegl’s and Dvořák’s Vienna. They denied the original character of wooden buildings – perceived as a reflection of monumental architecture – and saw their opponents, whatever the source of their views, as adherents of the pro-Eastern-oriented part of the Viennese school. Today’s history of art history also seems to underestimate the external – mainly Russian – influence on Strzygowski’s concepts.
This article outlines an approach to a manuscript by the art historian Otto Pächt, which engages with the theories of the physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick. The focus is primarily on Pächt’s exploration of the question, ‘What means Knowing?’. It is argued that Pächt drew significant implications for his art-historical work from Schlick’s ideas. Schlick’s lectures not only encouraged Pächt to consolidate art history as an exactly distinct discipline within the concept of ‘Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung’, but he also influenced his understanding of determining artistic ‘quality’ in a historical context, his scientific approach to artworks, and his notion of modern ‘representation theory’ in the scope of the image theory. Moreover, Otto Pächt’s fundamental conflict with none other than Ernst Gombrich is not least due to his commitment to Moritz Schlick. In times when the possibility of perceiving reality has become increasingly dubious and ‘storytelling’ has become a buzzword in this sense, Pächt’s manuscript is, on the contrary, a resource of thought-provoking impulses. Following him requires limiting art history as an explanatory discipline or renouncing the claim to create ‘reality’.
