I learned from a glossary at the back of this book that the term muqarnas refers to “honeycomb or stalactite vaulting made up of individual cells or small arches”. A chapter on “The Muslim West” features a colour photograph of the vault of the Dome of the Two Sisters (c. 1380) in the Alhambra, which is made up of “over five thousand cells”. The effect of light on the surface produces a “multitude of reflections”. A local poet called Ibn Zamrak wrote, with perhaps forgivable hyperbole, that the vault “surpasses the stars in the heavens”.
While many of the volumes in the World of Art series are devoted to a single artist, this one covers “a thousand years of history” (from the death of Muhammad to the height of the Ottoman empire) and “an area stretching from the Atlantic to India and the borders of China”. Among the forms discussed are architecture, calligraphy, book illumination, painting, ceramics, glassware, textiles and metalwork. A select bibliography runs to around 100 items. There are 270 illustrations, many of which I found astounding. A carpet depicted on page 247 is “a woven Paradise”. A silk prayer cloth on page 279 is a “portable mosque”.
Robert Hillenbrand is the author of over a hundred publications. In an introduction he writes that this book is “more a study of the peaks rather than the valleys”, and admits to neglecting the art of whole dynasties; but I imagine that most readers will be deeply impressed by the range of historical information and detailed comment he has packed into 280 pages. The Dome of the Rock (completed 691) took “the prime plot of real estate in all Jerusalem”, formerly occupied by Solomon’s temple and associated with Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac and even “the Creation itself”. The Islamic Sir Christopher Wren is Sinan (c. 1491‐1588); his mosques are “great grey mountains of masonry, but as complex and coordinated as a fugue”. The index includes an entry on “light symbolism”; the Alhambra:
studiously manipulates contrasts of light and dark, with bent entrances, shafts of sunlight angled into shadowy interiors, dim passageways suddenly opening into a courtyard open to the blazing sun, and light reflected from placid ponds or walls clad in glistening tiles.
