Review: Arts: 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 Ell
The Guardian – United Kingdom; Jul 15, 2006
JASON ELLIOT
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 Is lamic
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).
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
