Old Persian Architectural Scroll Found
Concord
TIME International
June 24, 1996 Volume 147, No. 26
_________________________________________________________________
DIVINE ARCHITECTURE
REDISCOVERED DESIGNS BY A MEDIEVAL PERSIAN MASTER BUILDER OFFER NEW INSIGHTS
INTO ISLAM
EMILY MITCHELL
While Harvard professor Gulru Necipoglu was doing research in 1986 at
Istanbul's Topkapi Palace Museum Library, curator Filiz Cagman
produced a scroll she thought might be of interest to the visiting
scholar. The two women had become friends over the years, and Cagman
had read an article by Necipoglu on early Islamic architectural ground
plans. "Look," said Cagman, "I have something similar to that
material." As they unrolled the 30-m scroll and its sophisticated
geometric patterns emerged, Necipoglu remembers, "I was amazed because
I had never seen anything like it."
Nor had anyone else. The well-preserved document of heavy rag paper is
a rare artifact from centuries past. The scroll, with its 114
drawings, is a pattern book from the workshop of a master builder who
worked in Persia during the late 15th or 16th century. It is the
earliest of its kind to have been found intact. Before its discovery
in Istanbul, the earliest known Islamic architectural scrolls were
fragments from the 16th century around Bukhara, Uzbekistan. The
fascinating find is now reproduced in an elaborate modern book with a
scholarly analysis by Necipoglu: The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and
Ornament in Islamic Architecture (395 pages; $160), published by
California's Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.
The tome has won an award from the U.S. Society of Architectural
Historians and was named the best new scholarly book in the field of
architecture and urban planning by the American Association of
Publishers.
Born in Istanbul, Necipoglu, 40, has lived in the U.S. since 1975 and
studied Western art history as an undergraduate at Wesleyan
University. "Frankly, I took Islamic art for granted," she says,
"until a college adviser suggested that I look into it." In 1979 she
entered Harvard as a graduate student, and she later attended Columbia
University. Two years ago, Harvard named her to the prestigious post
of Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art. After digging through archives,
she determined that the Topkapi scroll, dating from the Timurid or
early Safavid dynasties, which ruled in what is now Iran, had probably
been put together in Tabriz, a city known for its decorative and
architectural splendor.
Such working drawings were part of a widespread tradition in medieval
Islam, but since they were usually not secured in archives, most have
been damaged or lost over the centuries. Still, Necipoglu believes
that some may yet exist in the hands of traditional practicing masons
who guard them jealously and pass them on as a family secret. The
Topkapi scroll ended up in Istanbul almost by accident. At the Ottoman
court, the elaborately patterned tile and glazed-brick of the Timurid
style was briefly the vogue, and Persian tilemakers were imported to
carry out those designs. The scroll, which is a kind of how-to manual
for the decoration of flat panels and elaborately ornamented vaults,
must have been left behind and deposited in the imperial treasury
after the patterns were no longer fashionable.
The text accompanying the scroll's two- and three-dimensional ink
drawings deepens the significance of abstract design in the medieval
Islamic world. Well into the 20th century, the West viewed much of
Islam's abstract art as merely decorative. The 19th century French
writer Jules Bourgoin, for example, after studying the great buildings
of Moorish Spain and North Africa, decreed that the importance given
to surface decoration was a sign of inferiority. But as Necipoglu
demonstrates, the abstract designs, generally referred to as
"arabesques," have not always been central to Islamic art, which is
richly diverse.
Artists were elevated to a privileged status in Islam, Necipoglu says,
because "artisanry was not only thought to be the work of the hands
but was deeply connected to the creative powers of the mind and
therefore was highly valued." God was often compared to an architect,
and builders, through their creations, were considered to be imitating
the cosmos. The dome of one splendid 17th century mosque was likened
to heaven, and its splendid arched galleries to mountains.
Geometry, it was believed, was a gateway to spiritual wisdom--a
concept, Necipoglu writes, that helped provide a backdrop for the
burgeoning taste for geometric abstraction during the late 10th and
11th centuries. Geometric ornament, she says, "functioned as a
multilayered sign system that could be adapted to a wide variety of
meanings and context." Repeated patterns--interlocking stars and
many-angled geometric shapes--could sometimes act as a metaphor for
divine unity. The complexities of color and line dazzled viewers, but
beholders were also lifted to another, more profound sphere and
awakened to the existence of a harmonious, geometrically arranged
universe. A 16th century Ottoman sultan was transfixed by the sight of
a lectern covered with multi-angled designs that continually seemed to
shift before his eyes as he looked first in one direction and then
another. He exclaimed in delight, "God! God! What are these beautiful
forms? Like wine, they instantly caused me to lose my head." Made by
artists whose names have long disappeared from history, the drawings
of the Topkapi scroll retain that same power to intoxicate.
_________________________________________________________________