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Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Finbarr Barry Flood
Finbarr Barry Flood*
Affiliation:
Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot, the prohibition of images often assumed to characterize Islamic and Jewish cultures, on the modern reception of Islamic art.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 566 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Hamburger, Jeffrey F., “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Problems, Positions, Possibilities,” in The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Hamburger and Bouché, Anne-Marie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 12–14Google Scholar, 17, 21.

2 Paret, Rudi, Schriften zum Islam. Volksroman - Frauenfrage - Bilderverbot, ed. van Ess, Josef (Stuttgart, Germany: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1981), 213–72Google Scholar; van Reenen, Daan, “The Bilderverbot, a New Survey,” Der Islam 67 (1990): 27–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ahmad ʿAli Wasil, Muhammad ibn, Ahkam al-Taswir fi al-Fiqh al-Islami (Riyadh: Dar Taybah li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʿ, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 Minorsky, V., The Chester Beatty Library: A Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts and Miniatures, no. 444 (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1958), 80–82Google Scholar.

4 Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Bağdat Köşkü 373. For the iconographic relationships between the two manuscripts see Bahattin Yaman, “Osmanlı Resim Sanatında Kiyamet Alametleri: Tercüme-i Cifruʾl-Câmi ve Tasvirli Nüshaları” (PhD diss., Hacettepe University, Ankara, 2002). My thanks to Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Pınar Gökpınar for assistance with this dissertation.

5 For the 16th-century model see Necipoğlu, Gülru, “The Serial Portraits of Ottoman Sultans in Comparative Perspective,” in The Sultan's Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed. Orbay, Ayşe (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000), 36–37Google Scholar, fig. 9.

6 Cited in Kurz, Otto, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East (London: Warburg Institute, 1975), 46Google Scholar.

7 Van Reenen, “Bilderverbot,” 46–47, 54.

8 Flood, Finbarr B., Islam and Image: Polemics, Theology and Modernity (London: Reaktion Books, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

9 Muhammad Amin ibn ʿUmar ibn al-ʿAbidin, Hashiyat Radd al-Muhtar ʿala al-Durr al-Mukhtar, 5 vols. (Bulaq, 1272/1855), 1:435–38. See also Rudi Paret, “Textbelege zum islamischen Bilderverbot,” in Schriften zum Islam, 224–25.

10 See suggestions that 2,500 Dutch blue and white tiles on the walls of a sabīl-kuttāb built in Cairo in 1758–60 at the behest of Mustafa III were originally intended for Topkapı Palace, or an imperial mosque in Istanbul, but that their populated landscape scenes offended the sensibilities of the sultan or his famously austere predecessor, and so they were shipped off to the provinces. Theunissen, Hans, “Dutch Tiles in 18th-Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: The Sabil-Kuttab of Sultan Mustafa III in Cairo,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 9 (2006): 27–28Google Scholar, 34–35.