Art of Islam. Gaston Migeon

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      The art of the early caliphs, whose splendour has been revealed only by historians, and which spread to the south and the west, was equally crucial to the development of Persian art, given that Persia had initially been a province of the vast empire of the caliphs. In spite of its continual originality, demonstrated initially through Shiism and its ingenious and abundant but varied works of art, Persia had no political independence as a state for close to nine hundred years. A province under the caliphate, Persia was in effect ruled by caliphs through local dynasties including the Tahirids, the Saffarids, the Samanids, the Deilemits, the Ghaznavids, the Buyids, the Seljuqs led by Togrul Beg, and later the Kharismians. However, it was finally subjugated by the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Although the il-Khanids or the dynasty of Hulagu’s descendants for some time built a peculiar kingdom comprising Persia and part of Anatolia, this kingdom was razed following an invasion by Tamerlane. In the 15th century, the Turcoman Qara Quyunlu (Black Sheep) dynasty was created by Kara Yusuf. In 1468, however, the Aq Quyunlu (White Sheep) dynasty replaced it and put the Turcomans back on the Persian throne. It was only in 1502 that Shah-Ismaïl, of the Safavid dynasty, gave Persia its independence and a prosperity which reached its height under the reign of Shah Abbas. This dynasty disappeared in 1722 and was replaced by an Afghan family which, notwithstanding the remarkable rulers it produced, was replaced by Nadir Shah. After the relatively short reigns of Adil Shah and Shah Rukh, Kerim Khan, from the tribe of the Zends, gave power to his family, leaving Shah Ismaïl of the Safavid dynasty to rule only in principle. After three short successive reigns, this small dynasty was defeated by Agha Mohammad Khan of the Qajar tribe.

      This short historical review of Persia is crucial to demonstrating that despite the diverse origins of its Muslim rulers, Persian art witnessed a constant evolution, not only in Persia per se, but also in Turkestan, which depended on Persia’s architectural influence. In effect, it was impossible to find architects from Turkestan’s nomadic tribes. It is a known fact that when Tamerlane wanted to adorn Samarkand, he had to resort to Persia’s finest architects and the monuments that they erected there, for the great conqueror and his successors are by all standards a reflection of Persia’s architectural glory.

      Ancient and pre-Islamic Persian architecture is well-known today thanks to a good number of extant, impressive monuments. Nevertheless, Persian Muslims were able to decorate their buildings, even public buildings, in such a way as to give them a character entirely distinct from the one that can be seen on Achaemenid or Sassanian monuments, and the variety of construction programmes with which they had to comply left us with an even greater number of different types of buildings that we cannot find in Egypt, Syria or the Maghreb.

      Buildings in Persia, Mesopotamia and Turkistan were influenced by two building systems, both of which stem from earlier traditions. The platband with its columns and ceilings includes the roof framing and timber construction, the walls of which can either be made of baked or unbaked bricks, rough stones, or half-timberings covered with earth and bricks. This system of construction comes from Assyrian and Median art. Vaulted buildings, with arcades and without monolithic columns, from Chaldean and Persian traditions as well as Sassanian art, have only brick pillars as isolated support points, built on either a circular, octagonal, or square plan flanked by four attached columns. The Persians preferred the vault system because structural timber was absolutely lacking in a greater part of the country. Therefore, they quickly became very skilled at such construction. As a logical outcome of the construction system used, Persian architects concluded that the rib, which crimps the beam fillings and forms a resistant self-supporting network, is the most important component of the vault. Owing to this subdivision of the total surface area of the vault, construction work was made easier than that of huge barrel or groined vaults, good examples of which are found in extant ancient hot baths. They had at their disposal two types of artificial materials: baked and unbaked bricks.

      Bricks

      Unbaked brick constructions are essentially very fragile. From early times, humans initially saw the need to preserve their facings by covering them with baked bricks. A short while later, enamelled bricks were used, and it may just have been by chance, a result of accidental extreme baking, that ancient Chaldean architects discovered the possibility of glazing the external surface of bricks and took advantage of this feature to improve on solidity and beautify the decoration of their buildings.

      Since bricks do not easily lend themselves to projections, various skills are therefore required to create a play of shadows and lighting effects, either by using bricks laid out like the teeth of a saw or corbels. Corbels, however, cannot produce solid projections without a special arrangement that enables the creation of successive supports, whose bond stems from the type of materials used. Such is the case with the ajouré lattices of the minaret of the Great Mosque in Mosul, for example, which were intended to make the walls sufficiently solid without rendering them any lighter, or the creation of stalactites – a peculiar element in Islamic architecture, produced by a series of different squinches stacked up like corbels.

      The Registan, 17th century.

      Samarkand.

      The Sher-Dor Madrasa, 1619–1636.

      Samarkand.

      The Gur-e Amir Mausoleum, 1403–1405.

      Samarkand.

      Stalactites

      While stalactites are often nothing but relatively complex brick squinches, they can be remarkably developed. The use of stalactites in construction was not restricted to corbels, arches and cornices. They were also used to make entire vaults. Upon becoming a common motif in decoration, stalactites were used indiscriminately; they decorated interior arches, formed cornices, capitals, and even the crowns of minarets, and when this vault component was used in structural timber works, it lost its characteristic successive squinches and resembled juxtaposed prisms with flat surfaces. They were painted and gilded, regardless of whether they were made of wood or plaster. Finally, when a creative artist thought of decorating them with small pieces of glass, tinned in a way as to form some sort of glowing crystallisations which reflected light from every angle and appeared invisible, they invented one of the most elegant and original components of Persian architecture.

      Roofs

      Roofs of structural timber buildings are often terraces lined with terra-cotta tiles. For vaulted buildings, the roofing was most often formed by the extrados of the vault itself. For colossal domes or tombs, the need to have a pleasant outline inevitably required the use of either a higher dome supported by a drum (as in Isfahan, Shiraz and Samarkand), or a conical or polygonal roof circumscribing and sheltering the interior dome.

      Ornamentation

      Faience was the most luxurious component of architectural decoration in Persian buildings. Initially reduced to the size of enamelled bricks, contrasting with the pink background of baked bricks or the white tone of stuccos (Momine Khatun Mausoleum in Nakhchivan), enamelled decoration soon became very common in brick masonry. Then, in an attempt to create something different using drawings with rectilinear components, which is possible only with bricks, small enamelled fractions were cut and juxtaposed to create beautiful decorations of a faience marquetry, a kind of opus sectile that can be used alone or alongside baked bricks. The use of different types of enamelled terra-cotta tiles, whose juxtaposition allows for drawings or accurately glazed components in turquoise blue with reliefs, alternating with lustrous elements on a creamy white background, СКАЧАТЬ