The study of Islamic calligraphy is “almost inexhaustible,” begins German-born Harvard professor Annemarie Schimmel’s Calligraphy and Islamic Culture, “given the various types of Arabic script and the extension of Islamic culture” throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. The first calligraphic script, called Ḥijāzī, allegedly originated in the Hijaz region, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Another version called Kūfī, “one of the earliest extant Islamic scripts,” developed and flourished in the “Abbasid Baghdad,” Anchi Hoh writes for the Library of Congress, “a major center of culture and learning during the classical Islamic age.”

Despite the long and venerable history of calligraphy around the Islamic world, there is good reason for the saying that the Qur’an was “revealed in Mecca, recited in Egypt, and written in Istanbul.” The Ottomans refined Arabic calligraphy to its highest degree, bringing the art into a “golden age… unknown since the Abbasid era,” Hoh writes.

“Ottoman calligraphers adopted [master Abbasid calligrapher] Ibn Muqlah’s six styles and elevated them to new peaks of beauty and elegance.” One of the peaks of this refinement can be seen here in these delicately preserved dead leaves covered with golden Arabic script.

This particular application of the art is, needless to say, “difficult and delicate work,” say the notes on one such leaf in Singapore’s Asian Civilisation Museum:

The leaf has to be dried, and the tissue has to be removed slowly so as to leave the skeletal membrane. The stencil of the composition is placed behind the leaf and the gold ink with gum Arabic is applied over it. This art of producing calligraphy of a dried leaf, is one that was practised most widely in Ottoman Turkey during the 19th century. During this period, Ottoman calligraphers were interested in producing compositions which took the shape of fruits, animals and even inanimate objects like ships and houses.

The examples here come from a Twitter thread by Bayt Al Fann, an artist collective “exploring art & culture inspired by Islamic tradition.” There you can find many more elaborate examples and translations and descriptions of the calligraphic script — generally verses from the Qur’an, Hadith prayers, and poetry. Learn much more about Islamic calligraphy in Schimmel’s book; in her Metropolitan Museum of Art bulletin “Islamic Calligraphy” with Barbara Rivolta (free here); and in Hoh’s three-part Library of Congress series here. And find out how Turkish calligraphers like Nick Merdenyan and Saliha Aktaş have reinvented the art in the 21st century….

via MetaFilter

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

In the National Gallery there hangs a portrait of an unknown woman, painted by an unknown artist around 1470 somewhere in southwestern Germany. This may sound like an artwork of little note, but it does boast one highly conspicuous mark of distinction: a housefly. It’s not that the portraitist was in such thrall to realism that he included an insect that happened to drop into the sitting; at first glance, the fly looks as if it belongs to our reality, and has alighted on the canvas itself.  Why would a painter, presumably commissioned at the considerable expense of the sitter’s family, include such a seemingly bizarre detail? National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlum-Cooper offers answers in the video below.

“It’s a joke,” says Whitlum-Cooper. “And it’s a joke that works on different levels, because on the one hand, the fly has been tricked into thinking this is a real headdress,” fooled by the painter’s mastery of that most difficult color for light and shadow, white.

“But obviously there’s a double joke, because we, looking at it, think, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a fly on that painting!'” It is our very instinct to shoo the bug away that tells us “we’ve been duped, because actually, everything here is two-dimensional. This is just paint. And the skill of the artist is that they’ve been able to take that paint, and brush, and a bit of wood, and conjure it into something that feels so lifelike, we do believe — even just for a second — that’s a fly sitting on that picture.”

Five centuries later the joke still works, though it could well be more than a joke. One theory put forth here and there in the comments holds that the fly functions as a reminder of impermanence, of decay, of mortality. If so, it suggests that the subject of this portrait may already have been dead by the time of its painting, a notion supported by the symbolic weight of the forget-me-nots in her hand. (One commenter even argues that the artist is none other than the famed Albrecht Dürer, and that the woman depicted is his late mother.) Though it may not rank among the great works of art, this mysterious image nevertheless shares with them the quality of multivalence. The fly could be a gag, and it could be a memento mori — but why not both?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.