.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Other folios from the same Qur'an sold at Christie's King street, 7 October 2008, lot 2.
The overall impression given by these folios is of a perfect mastery of the balance between elongations, crescent-shaped curves and upstrokes. They seem to follow strict geometrical formulae that determine proportions of each leaf. François Déroche notes that 'the number of lines of the page and the height of the script is strictly controlled' (F. Déroche, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, The Abbasid Tradition, London, 1992, p. 21). Ours has a text area of 9 in. wide (23 cm), exactly as a very similar six-line Qur'an in the Khalili Collection attributed to the 9th century (no. KFQ67, F. Déroche, op.cit., p. 68, fig. 20). The present folio and the Qur'an in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection belong to what Déroche terms the D group which is the most varied of the early Abbasid scripts (Déroche, op.cit., p.36).
The overall impression given by these folios is of a perfect mastery of the balance between elongations, crescent-shaped curves and upstrokes. They seem to follow strict geometrical formulae that determine proportions of each leaf. François Déroche notes that 'the number of lines of the page and the height of the script is strictly controlled' (F. Déroche, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, The Abbasid Tradition, London, 1992, p. 21). Ours has a text area of 9 in. wide (23 cm), exactly as a very similar six-line Qur'an in the Khalili Collection attributed to the 9th century (no. KFQ67, F. Déroche, op.cit., p. 68, fig. 20). The present folio and the Qur'an in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection belong to what Déroche terms the D group which is the most varied of the early Abbasid scripts (Déroche, op.cit., p.36).