Precious Materials
The Art of Metalwork in the Medieval Iranian World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:GINGKO
Published:21st Dec '23
£70.00
Available for immediate dispatch.
Medieval metalwork is one of the artistic highlights of the Iranian world, as well as of the Departement des Arts de l'Islam at the Louvre in Paris, which holds more than one hundred and fifty objects from this period. A new approach to the study of a historic collection, Precious Material: The Arts of Metal in the Medieval Iranian World is a comprehensive overview of the production of metalin medieval Iran. Although this is one of the most important collections in the world, the objects, some well-known but many more unpublished, have never been studied or published as an ensemble. This volume includes a presentation of the collection through the lens of its centers of manufacture, a full technical analysis, as well as the functions and contexts in which the pieces were used. Each object is fully described and illustrated in color with close-up or X-ray images, and many inscriptions have been translated and are included in the catalog entries
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
ISBN: 9781914983122
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
316 pages