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Precious Materials

£70.00

The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World

edited by Annabelle Collinet

foreword by Yannick Lintz

with contribution by David Bourgarit

translated by Annabelle Collinet and Melanie Gibson

Format: Hardback, 240x296mm (portrait)
Published: 21 December 2023
Pages: 336, 206 colour plates, 27 halftones, 2 maps, 20 tables, 7 charts
ISBN: 978-1-914983-12-2
Series: Art Series

Co-published with Louvre Museum

Description

Medieval metalwork dating from the tenth to thirteenth centuries is one of the artistic highlights of the Iranian world, as well as of the Musée du Louvre in Paris which holds more than 80 objects from this period. This is one of the most important collections in the world but until now the objects, some well-known and others quite unknown, have never been studied or published as a single group.

ISLAMETAL, the ambitious project that carried out the archaeometallurgical research on these objects, was established to provide vital new information on the processes, places, and craftsmen linked to their production. This far-reaching investigation, which included material analyses as well as close examinations of each object, is at the core of this volume and allowed the author Annabelle Collinet, with her collaborator David Bourgarit, to propose new categories for many of the objects. This book, a translation of the French original published in 2021, offers a fresh look at these objects, providing a comprehensive overview of medieval production, a full technical analysis and a presentation of the collection through the lens of its centres of manufacture, as well as the functions and contexts in which the pieces were used. Each object is fully described and illustrated in colour with many close up or X-ray images. All the inscriptions were read and are published here in the original Arabic accompanied by their translations.

 

Annabelle Collinet is in charge of the Medieval Iranian Collection at the Département des Arts de l’Islam at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Melanie Gibson is Editor of the Gingko Art Series. She lectures widely and her publications focus on the ceramics, glass and sculpture produced in the Islamic world.

David Bourgarit is an archaeometallurgist, research scientist at Centre de Recherche et de et de Restauration des Musées de France.

Yannick Lintz is the former director of the Département des Arts de l’Islam at the Louvre Museum in Paris and the current director of the Musée Guimet in Paris.

Additional information

Weight 3 kg
Theme

Art

Contents

9 Preface by Yannick Lintz

10 Map of the Iranian World

13 Foreword

 

17 INTRODUCTION

17 The Collection

20 From Gaston Migeon to ISLAMETAL:

Studies of the Collection

 

CHAPTER 1

28 THE ART OF METAL IN THE IRANIAN WORLD C. 900–1220

32 The Historical Background

33 The Material and Artistic Culture of Khurasan

40 Archaeological Data and Dating

43 The Context of Production

 

CHAPTER 2

50 MATERIALS, ALLOYS AND TECHNIQUES

David Bourgarit, Annabelle Collinet

53 Materials and Alloys in the Textual Sources

58 Alloys and Impurities

65 Metal Inlays

68 Shaping Techniques

77 The Surface

92 The Organisation of Production

 

CHAPTER 3

106 THE ART OF INLAID METAL IN HERAT

111 Masterpieces of Herat

126 Objects Attributable to Herat

 

CHAPTER 4

148 PRODUCTION IN GHAZNA AND KHURASAN

151 Production in Ghazna

178 Objects from Khurasan and their Regional Diffusion

 

CHAPTER 5

208 THE CONTEXT OF THE OBJECTS

213 Furnishings and their Uses

255 Serving Ware and Reception Practices

269 Care of the Body

277 Utensils from Shops

 

296 CONCLUSION

 

298 APPENDICES

David Bourgarit, Annabelle Collinet

 

300 Bibliography

312 Index

316 Archaeometallurgy

Excerpt

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Reviews

Precious Materials is a dazzling and erudite work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Drawing together careful historical research, provenance sleuthing, and comprehensive archaeometallurgical analysis of materials and techniques, the text sets a new bar for the study of metalworking in the medieval Islamic world. The authors present a sequence of clear interpretive frames that build upon each other, culminating in a catalogue where each virtuosic object is explored in unprecedented detail. Working in concert with this is a wealth of carefully deployed technical imagery, suffusing the whole book with the uncanny beauty of the X-radiograph and the microphotographic detail. We are shown things no human eye has ever seen before. The metalworkers of pre-Mongol Iran and Afghanistan have long been recognized as supreme masters of their craft, but never before has it been possible to see and to know the true extent of their skills in such forensic detail.

Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Brown University