One of the world's most important private collections of Islamic art is currently on display at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, writes David Tresilian This autumn's major exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris consists of some 470 pieces from the collection of Nasser D. Khalili, an Iranian-born collector who has one of the world's largest private collections of Islamic art. Already seen in Australia and the UAE, the exhibition brings together masterpieces from a total collection of around 20,000 objects. Arranged in three sections, it aims to suggest ideas about the nature and identity of Islamic art. Entering the exhibition, housed in the Institut's main exhibition spaces, visitors are introduced to the first of these sections, which illustrates the relationship between Islamic art and religion. Islamic art is by no means necessarily religious, if by that is meant art that is designed exclusively for religious purposes or to illustrate religious themes. However, from an early date it played an important role in religious buildings and devotion, notably through the decoration of mosques, mausoleums and madrasas and the tradition of calligraphy developed for copies of the Quran. The Khalili collection contains some fine examples of this form of Islamic art, though in this section of the exhibition, as in later, there are few architectural elements on display. Gestures are made in an architectural direction, with tiles, carved friezes, and other decorative items finding their way into the displays, but overall there is little account of the characteristic forms of Islamic architecture. The focus is on portable items, and pieces in the first section of the exhibition illustrate ways in which artists and craftsmen produced transportable objects used for religious purposes, including the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. Until early in the last century, tradition dictated that the decorative textiles, or kiswa, used to clothe the Kaaba in Mecca and the tomb of the Prophet Mohamed in Medina were made in Cairo and carried to the two cities each year under the protection of the Ottoman sultan. The present exhibition contains panels from such textiles dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries, each elaborately worked with Qur'anic inscriptions in gold. There is also a sitara, the curtain used to veil the entrance to the Kaaba, which, like the kiswa, was replaced each year by a new piece made in Cairo. The example included in the exhibition, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Majid in 1855-56 and sent by the Egyptian viceroy Mohamed Said Pasha, was apparently preserved from the usual fate of such materials, which was to be cut up into pieces and distributed as mementos. Yet, it is in the second section that the exhibition really comes into its own. This focuses on the relationship between the usually anonymous craftsman who produced the objects on display and the patrons who commissioned them. The latter were often rulers or members of the ruling caste, but they also included members of the urban merchant classes. These seem to have developed a taste for surrounding themselves with decorated household and other items, such as metalware, glassware and ceramics, often worked in expensive or difficult to manage materials. In addition to this type of material, there are many copies of the Quran on display, for which different styles of calligraphy were developed along with extensive decoration. The earliest example dates from the 8th century and is a fragment of Sura X1 written in Hijaz-style calligraphy on parchment. It can be compared to another piece, a fragment from Sura X written in a contrasting Abbasid style and dating from the same time. One piece particularly marked out for notice is a copy of part of Sura II written in gold on a purple ground and dating from the 10th century. According to the sumptuously produced exhibition catalogue, it is possible that this style of presentation, otherwise unknown, was based on that used for imperial Byzantine codices. Like the togas of Roman emperors, these were coloured purple using dye made from the shells of a marine snail, the murex, living off the coast of Tyre. Later copies of the Quran can be more precisely dated and are either complete or far more substantial than these early fragments. They can be given a specific provenance, since sometimes they are dedicated to the patron who commissioned them. This inserts them into the system of commissions that also resulted in many of the most important examples of Islamic architecture. Aristocratic and other patrons would commission copies of the Quran for religious foundations, as was the case for the series of decorated Qurans commissioned by the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Shaaban for his foundations, one of which is included in the exhibition. There are also examples of secular books in the exhibition, finely copied and often illustrated. While it is the fate of all generalisations to risk qualification, it nevertheless seems true that the main form of painting seen in Islamic art consists of book illustration, along with the images that appear on ceramics and other items. The tradition of large-scale naturalistic painting on mythological, historical and other themes that developed in Europe from the Renaissance onwards is unknown in Islamic art, as is the focus this form of art places on individual artists. Aside from calligraphers, who are sometimes mentioned by name, illustrators are among the few makers of Islamic art to have been individually recognised as professional artists. They left a great number of illustrated books and manuscripts to posterity, often on non-religious subjects. Among such books included here are works on horsemanship, medicine, geography, Islamic law and mathematics. Probably the most spectacular examples of illustrated books presented here come from Iran, with the exhibition including pages from the large-format Jami' al-tawarikh (Collection of Histories) made by Rashid al-Din Fazi-Allah in 1314-15 and from the so-called "Houghton" Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings, made in the 1520s. There is also an opulent copy of the poetry of the Arab poet al-Mutanabbi made in Iran in 1313-1314 dedicated by the copyist Ibn al-Savaji. The Jami' al-tawarikh, written in Persian with illustrations that owe something to Byzantine or even Chinese painting, was a royal commission presenting the history of the Mongols from Genghis Khan, the history of the world from the biblical patriarchs and the ancient kings of Persia to the time of the Prophet Mohamed and the Muslim caliphs, and the history of the "five dynasties" of the Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Francs and Chinese. While artists and patrons can sometimes be traced for the books on display, this is less easily done for the craft items, including metalwork, weaponry, ceramics, jewelry, glass and other pieces, which make up further items of Islamic art. These the exhibition groups together in a third section, "a universe of forms and colours," which is designed to highlight motifs that cross boundaries between one class of items and another. These include the emphasis in Islamic art on writing and calligraphy, the use of geometrical decoration and floral or vegetable forms in arabesque-type patterns, and the kind of overall decorative impulse that seems to have wanted to leave no surface undecorated. Of these features, it is perhaps the emphasis on decorative geometrical patterns that has come to be most associated with Islamic art. The notes to the present exhibition suggest that tendencies towards geometrical decoration, sometimes suggesting meditations away from originally natural forms, can be seen as anchored in a sort of Platonic conception of beauty, in which natural beauty shadows the perfection of the divine. In this conception, the use of geometrical ornament is a way of leading the mind away from earthly distractions, going hand-in-hand with the distrust of image-making in Islamic art. However, the exhibition also draws attention to another explanation, which is the link between geometrical decoration and the mathematics needed to construct the volumes of Islamic architecture. The argument here, expressed in commentary on the helpful English-French audio-guide, is that the same habit of mind that, for example, designed the geometrical patterns for the frontispiece of a late 14th-century Quran, also expressed itself in a fascination with mathematics, seen in scientific instruments such as astrolabes, the geometric grids underlying the plans of Islamic buildings, and the development of ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy. Visitors cannot fail to learn much about what unites Islamic art from this exhibition. This was an art which, from a religious underpinning, was produced within an economy of often anonymous producers for ruling or urban merchant patrons and expressed particular habits of mind in characteristics forms and designs, whether these were religious and philosophical or more mundane and practical. Yet, visitors may also be struck by what disunites it. The exhibition brings together objects created over a period of more than one thousand years in centres from Spain to Central Asia. As a result, Islamic art can appear to be a kind of catch- all category, a way of presenting what in reality are quite miscellaneous items. These are seen together as expressions of a single civilisation, objects from Mamluk Egypt placed next to those from Mogul India, Ottoman Turkey and Safavid and pre-Safavid Iran. Anyone buying the exhibition catalogue will notice that this adopts a different style of presentation, one which places more weight on chronology and on different areas of origin. Perhaps the exhibition was presented differently in earlier incarnations in Australia and the UAE, accounting for the fact that the catalogue does not correspond to the lay-out of the present exhibition. This is a source of minor irritation, as it is not possible to find objects in the catalogue simply by remembering their places in the display. However, it also indicates that there are different ways of presenting Islamic art. Arts de l'Islam, chefs-d'oeuvre de la collection Khalili, Institute du monde arabe, Paris, until 14 March 2010.
