Beauty and harmony

In today’s climate of cultural conflict, the V&A’s spectacular new
gallery of artefacts from all across the Islamic world reveals less a
clash of civilisations than a refreshing union of east and west,
discovers Jason Elliot

Saturday July 15, 2006
The Guardian

A transformation has occurred at the V&A. This week, after three
years of renovation and redesign, the new Jameel gallery of Islamic
art will open its doors to the public with a spectacular collection
of artefacts from across the Islamic world, many of which have never
before been seen on display.

The new gallery, dedicated to the memory of its Saudi benefactor,
Abdul Latif Jameel, is both timely and long overdue. Visitors to the
V&A’s former Middle Eastern display of Islamic art may recall a
confusingly structured and poorly lit collection of disparate
artefacts, overlooked by the sombre and greenish presence of a giant
carpet. This – the famous Ardabil carpet – was said to be one of the
finest Persian carpets in the world. However, it looked more like
something dredged from a pond.

All this has changed. A spectacularly reconfigured display of over
400 objects from the museum’s 10,000-piece Islamic collections,
sensitively interpreted by senior curator Tim Stanley, now looks set
to rival comparable collections around the world. The centrepiece of
the gallery is none other than the Ardabil carpet, rescued from its
former gloom and ingeniously displayed at floor level, as was
originally intended by its 16th-century makers.

Rebuilding the entire gallery around the 50-square-metre marvel
imposed multiple challenges on designers. The greatest of these was
to allow the carpet to be viewed horizontally, but to protect it from
undue levels of light and dust. The innovative solution has been to
surround it with an enclosure of non-reflective glass (be careful –
it’s almost invisible), free of structural supports. This is made
possible by a giant protective canopy above the glass walls, fitted
with fibre-optic lighting and suspended by steel cables from the
ceiling joists overhead. At long last, the delicate colours and
intricacy of the carpet’s pattern – created from a staggering 30m
hand-tied knots – may now be appreciated at close quarters.

The Ardabil carpet is also a reminder of the days when the
appreciation of things Islamic was less eclipsed by political issues.
To William Morris, who in 1893 petitioned for its purchase from a
London dealer, the "singular perfection" of the Ardabil carpet was an
inspiration: "To us pattern-designers," he wrote, "Persia has become
a holy land." Other designers, such as Owen Jones and William De
Morgan – whose iridescent tiles imitated techniques pioneered by
Muslim artists a thousand years earlier – were at the forefront of a
European fascination with Islamic design. Their enthusiasm encouraged
the building of English country homes based on Mogul architecture,
pavilions in the oriental style, and many a Turkish smoking-room and
Moorish conservatory around the capital.

The European attraction to Islamic art did not, of course, begin in
the 19th century. Throughout the middle ages, highly prized specimens
of Islamic craftsmanship entered the treasuries of churches and
aristocratic homes, both through trade and as booty. European
monarchs were crowned in robes woven in Sicily, one of the great
creative workshops of the Muslim artist; Fatimid rock crystal ewers
from north Africa were used to display Christian relics; and Turkish
and Persian rugs were favoured as royal wedding presents.

Fine examples of all these luxury goods are to be found in the
gallery. Others, such as the lustre ceramics produced in 15th-century
Spain and Italian inlaid metalwork called Veneto-Saracenic, testify
to a fertile exchange of artistic techniques between Muslim and
Christian cultures of the Mediterranean. In the eastern Islamic
lands, too, styles and technologies from China were taken up and
developed by Iranian artisans, whose ingenuity underpinned the art of
the later Mogul and Ottoman empires.

In today’s climate of cultural divisiveness, this sense of
interconnectedness is refreshing. It suggests for Islamic art a
global significance, and tells not so much of a clash of
civilisations, but of a resounding chorus. Islamic art is, after all,
probably the world’s greatest artistic success story. Soon after the
earliest Islamic conquests of the Middle East in the late seventh
century, artists drawing on the existing traditions of the region
began to produce art and architecture with its own distinctive
personality. Easily differentiated from its Greco-Roman and
Hellenistic predecessors, it spread through the burgeoning empire
with extraordinary speed. The universal appeal and adaptability of
this new artistic mode allowed its themes and principles to be taken
up by artists from the Atlantic coast to the Gobi desert, enriching
thereby the vast and intervening blocs of culture.

The Arab, Turkish, Persian and central Asian contributions to Islamic
art are all represented in the new V&A gallery, and there are
outstanding examples from each. Visitors can admire giant Qur’an
pages commissioned for Mamluk sultans, swollen with monumental lines
of exquisite calligraphy, or marvel at Timurid-era miniature
paintings composed with microscopic precision. There is a series of
large-scale 19th-century oil paintings from Iran (unseen for
decades), and a dramatic wall-sized display of glazed tilework from
14th-century Uzbekistan. One of the tiles from a 14th-century tomb
near Bokhara, deeply incised with swirling shades of green and
turquoise, has been deliberately exposed to the visitor’s touch. The
towering minbar, or staired mosque-pulpit, dedicated to a
15th-century Egyptian sovereign, is a masterpiece of geometric design
in wood and ivory. And there is a dazzling display of vibrant
ceramics from the famous Turkish centre of Iznik, including a large
tilework chimney-piece dedicated to the myth of the Seven Sleepers.
All these treasures are reminders of the high level of patronage
afforded to the Muslim craftsman across enormous expanses of time and
territory.

Between all these stretches a broad spectrum of lesser but
fascinating treasures. These are dominated by fabrics and ceramics,
but include fine examples of astrolabes and compasses, inlaid
candlesticks, vases and ewers, ivory caskets, enamelled and gilt
mosque lamps, bookbindings, embroidered robes, stained glass, daggers
and begging bowls, as well as some rare and touching pieces such as
the silken vestment woven in Isfahan for an Armenian church, and a
child’s funerary kaftan from Turkey.

Despite the diverse styles of Islamic art, and the astonishing
variety of media in which the skill of the traditional Muslim artist
has been expressed, there are unifying factors that make it
immediately distinctive. All Islamic art aims for beauty based on
coherence and harmony. The saying of the Prophet Muhammad, "God is
beautiful and He loves beauty", orients the artist’s aesthetic ideal;
and the Qur’anic emphasis on the fundamental goodness and
significance of life informs the goal of creating works of art that
will reflect the order, goodness and purpose of creation itself.

The expression of this vision relies on a distinct and threefold
visual structure, to which a series of panels in the gallery is very
usefully dedicated. The first of these is calligraphy: for the
faithful, the graceful ciphers of the Arabic script transmit the
voice of the Divine, and are the substance of revelation made
visible. In no other art form has the written word taken on such an
exalted role; sultans and peasants alike strove to learn its many
styles, which became disciplines in themselves, and around which an
entire science of numerological symbolism evolved. The second is
geometric design, brilliantly exploited in endless variations –
intellectually enticing and puzzling at the same time. The third
panel offers examples of idealised plant shapes drawn from the
natural world: tendrils, vines, buds and flowers, all alluding to the
fecundity and abundance of nature, and symbolically linked to the
Qur’anic evocation of paradise as a luxuriant garden.

At the simplest level, these elements comprise the fundamental
repertoire of the traditional artist; at a profounder level, they
celebrate the relationship between God, man and nature. They are to
some extent mutable – geometric patterns can form letters, and
letters can be used to create pictures – and are combined in almost
infinite and sophisticated variations of immense beauty. Great art,
according to Ruskin, "is that in which the hand, the head and the
heart of man go together"; it is precisely this insight that was so
well understood by the traditional Muslim artist, whose finest works
simultaneously appeal to the devotional, intellectual and aesthetic
sensibilities of the onlooker. The most refined expressions of this
exacting discipline – whether carved on to a paper-thin dried leaf or
stretched across a monumental facade – are thus transformed from
objects of mere visual delight into powerful focuses of spiritual
contemplation.

Recent scholarship has also begun to delve into the Muslim artist’s
use of geometric principles in designs as diverse as the layout of
pages of the Qur’an to the structure of entire mosques. Behind these
lie aesthetic as well as symbolic considerations, reflecting a
reverence throughout Islamic cultures for the philosophical dimension
of mathematics, for numbers and the shapes derived from them. In this
sense, Islamic art extends a fascinating bridge between the
intellectual heritages of east and west, and throws light on the
Islamic role as a transmitter of classical learning into Europe
through the medium of Arab culture. Despite the "exotic" attraction
of many of the motifs and styles used in Islamic art, deeper study
reveals a more rational foundation, coherent and rigorously
structured.

The enormous challenge of designing a gallery in which to order
meaningfully artefacts produced over a span of 1,000 years and three
continents has been diligently met. Roughly speaking, the Jameel
gallery is divided in half between artefacts with either a secular or
a religious function. This is a problematic but necessary dichotomy,
since the whole of Islam is underpinned by a theocentric vision,
wherein the worldly and spiritual are not so forcefully divided as in
other forms of belief. But the looseness of this separation
deliberately highlights a common misconception about Islamic art as a
whole. While it is true that art destined for an overtly religious
context rarely contains images of human forms, many of the items on
display prove that Islam’s doctrinal "ban" on graven imagery –
originally a Jewish tradition, absorbed into Islam in its earliest
years – was interpreted differently at different times, rather than
explicitly laid down in the Qur’an.

Along its length the gallery traces a historical line, with the
earliest exhibits nearest the entrance. Here, Roman capitals and
Sassanian vases from the pre-Islamic period suggest how Islamic
artisans took up existing artistic prototypes and shaped them to the
evolving vision of the Muslim world.

One important characteristic of the gallery is the interpretive
support available to the visitor. There are interactive maps showing
the territorial extent of Islamic cultures; several videos expand on
themes of religious and courtly patronage; and poetry from the
Shahnameh of Ferdowsi can be heard alongside a display of inscribed
tiles. Attention is also drawn to the limitations of the term
"Islamic art" to describe the artistic output of such diverse
cultures; and the care that has gone into the displays themselves is
immediately obvious. Colour and light abound.

A critic might draw attention to the predominance of ceramics, or to
the lack of musical or scientific instruments – both pioneering
achievements of the Islamic Middle East. But the gallery does not
claim to be exhaustive, and has attempted not to acquire new
material, but to re-explore its existing holdings. It has put one of
its most generous donations to excellent use. It also demonstrates
just how far the western understanding of this complex artistic
heritage has evolved since the days of the museum’s earliest
collectors. It will be the envy of the museum’s other galleries and
of collections internationally, and, 150 years on, will amply fulfil
the V&A’s original writ to bring the splendour and richness of
Islamic art to the greater world.

· The new Jameel gallery opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum,
London SW7, on July 20. Details: 020-7942 2000. Jason Elliot’s most
recent book is Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran (Picador)

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