The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field.
This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur
Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span
The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions
The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question
The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)
About the Author
Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. He publishes on late antiquity, Islamic architectural history and historiography, transcultural dimensions of Islamic art, image theory, museology, and Orientalism. His books include The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000), and Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter, (2009), awarded the 2011 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.
Gülru Necipoğlu is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. She publishes on architecture and architectural practice, aesthetics of ornament and figural representation, cross-cultural exchanges, and Islamic art historiography. Her books include Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapi Palace (1991); The Topkapi Scroll, Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (1995) which won the Albert Hourani and Spiro Kostoff awards; and The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (2005), winner of the Fuat Köprülü award and the Albert Hourani honorable mention award. She edits the journal Muqarnas and its Supplements.
