Casting Light on the Surface, Scientific Exactitude Meets Poetic Inspiration: A Close Look at Six Objects from the Islamic Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

摘要

The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the most important collections worldwide related to illuminated and illustrated manuscript production in the Islamic world. The collection safeguards approximately 72 fully bound manuscripts, complete with their entire textblocks, as well as several thousand detached, singular folios representing a diversity of cultural traditions and a broad span of time, from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, and place of origin from as far westward as Spain and Morocco and eastward into Central Asia and India. Comprising both sacred and secular objects, the collection reveals the interdependency of scholarly and artistic proficiencies found within the Islamic world.