7.1 Materials, Processes, and Techniques in West and Central Asian Art

West and Central Asia stretches from Arabia and Anatolia (modern Turkey) through Iran to Central Asia and the Himalayas. If you remember five art forms for this unit, make them pottery and tile, metal, cloth and carpets, book painting, and calligraphy (beautiful writing).

Two big pottery breakthroughs came from this region: lusterware, which has a metallic shine fired onto the glaze, and blue designs painted in cobalt on a white ground. Tile was just as important. Persian builders wrapped whole mosque walls and domes in colored tile, as you can see at the Great Mosque of Isfahan, and Ottoman workshops at Iznik in Turkey turned out tiles and dishes that buyers far beyond Turkey wanted.

Metalworkers cast, hammered, engraved and inlaid metal into vessels, weapons, armor and statues. Weavers made silk tapestries, velvets and knotted carpets. Painters worked on walls, in books and, in the Himalayas, on thangkas: Buddhist paintings on cloth.

A common visual habit ties much of this art together: a love of flat, two-dimensional design. Surfaces are filled with geometric shapes, scrolling plants and writing. Even when people appear, they sit in shallow space, on ground that tips up toward you, against patterned backgrounds.

Basin (Baptistère de St. Louis) (Muhammad ibn al-Zain; c. 1320–1340 CE; brass inlaid with gold and silver). This large basin was made in the Mamluk sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria. The metalworker hammered the bowl from brass, engraved his designs, then hammered thin gold and silver into the cut lines and areas. Bands of figures circle the outside: Mamluk officials, hunters and servants carrying weapons and animals. Inside are more hunts and battles, and the bottom swarms with fish, eels and other water creatures that would seem to swim when the basin was filled.

Muhammad ibn al-Zain signed it six times, unusual pride for a craftsman. It has no dedication to a patron, so no one knows who first owned it. The basin later came to France, where it was used to baptize royal children, including Louis XIII. Its name, given in the 1700s, is misleading: Saint Louis (King Louis IX) died decades before it was made.

Bahram Gur Fights the Karg, folio from the Great Il-Khanid Shahnama (Islamic; Persian, Il'Khanid; c. 1330–1340 CE; ink and opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on paper). The Shahnama (Book of Kings) is Iran's national epic, finished by the poet Ferdowsi around 1010. The Il-Khanids were Mongol rulers of Iran. By paying for a grand illustrated copy of this Persian epic, they presented themselves as rightful heirs of the ancient Persian kings.

On this page, Bahram Gur, a famous hunter-king, kills the karg, a horned, wolf-like monster. Painters ground minerals into opaque watercolor and added gold and silver; the silver has since darkened. Blocks of text frame the scene. The twisting trees and swirling clouds show Chinese influence, which reached Iran because the Mongols ruled lands from China to Iran. In the early 1900s, a dealer named Georges Demotte took the manuscript apart and sold its pages separately, so its paintings are now scattered among many museums.

The Ardabil Carpet (Maqsud of Kashan; 1539–1540 CE; silk and wool). This is one of a matched pair of carpets made for the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din at Ardabil, in northwest Iran. Safi al-Din was the ancestor of the Safavid shahs, so the shrine was a family and dynastic monument. Shah Tahmasp's court probably sponsored the carpets.

It is a knotted-pile carpet: weavers tied short pieces of wool around a foundation of silk threads, hundreds of knots in every square inch, which let them draw fine curves. One large carpet is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the other, smaller one is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The London carpet is over 10 meters long.

A golden central medallion surrounded by pointed oval shapes sits on a deep blue field of flowers and vines. Two hanging lamps of different sizes extend from the medallion, perhaps so they look equal from one end of the carpet. Each corner holds a quarter of the medallion, as if the design continued beyond the edges. An inscription at one end quotes a poem by Hafiz about having no refuge but the beloved's threshold, then names Maqsud of Kashan and the date. Maqsud may have been the designer or the official in charge, not a single weaver; a team would have worked on the loom for years.