NEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 10TH CENTURY

This finely illuminated folio would have marked the opening or closing of a section from the Qur’an. The use of simple forms such as lines, circles and rectangles combined into complicated geometric designs is brought here to a high level of mastery. An impressively illuminated Qur’an endowed to the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem (now in the Islamic Museum at the Haram al-Sharif) is decorated with a frontispiece entirely formed with interlocking lines. Whilst only four colours are used (yellow, green, red and black), the four intertwined lines formed a rich and fascinating design not dissimilar to the present work. The Qur’an is dated to the 9th century and probably pre-dates our folio (Khader Salameh, The Qur’an Manuscripts in the Al-Haram al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Jerusalem, Reading, 2001, cat.5, p.48). Most Qur’ans of the Abbasid period appear to have been conceived with such frontispieces and a number of related pieces from the Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul are published in 1400. Yilinda Kur'an-i Kerim, exhibition catalogue, Istanbul, 2010, kat.7, 10, 14 and 30. They are from Qur’ans in horizontal ‘Italian’ format and make an extensive use of gold and sepia (or red) to outline the gold forms.

The sura heading of sura XV on a folio from the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris issues a large palmette in the margin which closely related to our palmette. Each is strictly symmetrical, uses a combination of filled-in and reserved areas, with the gold applied with tight red or black strokes. It is likely that our frontispiece decorated such a Qur’an (Ms.Or. arabe 350a; Arabesques et jardins de paradis, Paris, 1989, cat.219, p.289).

These decorative devices survive through to the 11th century and even later, and are very much used on manuscripts copied in the ‘New Style’ or ‘Eastern Kufic’ style; see for instance a Qur’an section in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection or a Qur’an (François Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, Oxford, 1992, cat.78, pp.142-143).