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Because of the lack of systematically treated material from the period preceding the fifteenth century, the publication of an exhaustive study on the historical and artistic development of Persian bookbinding is almost impossible at the present time. It is not the writer's purpose to present here a historical or stylistic study of the subject, but rather to add to already published material additional specimens of artistic value, which may extend the hitherto scanty knowledge concerning the art of Persian bookbinding of the century in question. This book appears as a contribution from the University of Michigan Research Seminary in Islamic Art, which owes its existence to the interest of Dr. Alexander G. Ruthven, President of the University, and Professor John G. Winter, Director of the Division of Fine Arts.

Nine essays first presented at the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s seventh biennial symposium, entitled “Regime Change.”

The essays collected in this volume highlight some of the regimes of thought and changing trends that structure the field of Islamic art history. The authors present new research exploring the intentions of patrons, the agency of craftsmen, and their responses to previous artistic production, thereby allowing artifacts and monuments to be set within their historical, social, and artistic contexts.

In their contributions, Annabel Teh Gallop, Dmitry Bondarev, and Umberto Bongianino discuss significant changes to Qur’an production due to dynastic and political regime changes in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, as well as in Borno and Morocco in Africa. Corinne Mühlemann looks at changes in the role and status of designers and weavers making silk in Khurasan in the post-Mongol period. Lisa Golombek, Michael Chagnon, and Farshid Emami explore Safavid art and architecture, focusing on the material and sensorial qualities of a group of tiled arch panels tiles with narrative scenes, a delicately painted vase, and the clocks of the main square of seventeenth-century Isfahan. Regime change also comes about through technological shifts, and Ulrich Marzolph and Yasemin Gencer ask how the rise of photography and new printing techniques shaped the production, exchange, and transmission of images in Iran and Turkey.
 

In the past decades, scholarship on Islamic art has challenged the parameters of the discipline, but in the process, the Italian context has often been overlooked. Gathering the voices of prominent international specialists, the book fills an important gap by presenting new research on topics ranging from the medieval to modern periods. Contributors investigate how Islamic artifacts were collected, categorized, and studied; examine Orientalism(s) in Italy and beyond; reconstruct the genealogies of scholars who helped found and develop the academic discipline and museum practices; and offer new scholarship on ceramics, textiles, metalwork, rock crystals, numismatics, and archaeology. The volume reveals the interchange between romantic reveries and more “scientific” Islamic art studies. Following the model of counter-Orientalism proposed by Karla Mallette, it raises questions of identity, otherness, and self-representation within a cultural and geographical context where the Islamic “component” was—and is—perceived either as exotic or integral to Italian identity. 

With over 100 illustrations, Stories and Histories of Islamic Art in Italy explores how amateurs, artists, and intellectuals perceived of, depicted, and wrote about the Islamic world, offering new ways to examine Italy’s Islamic past.