Anthony Welch

Shah ʹAbbas & the Arts of Isfahan

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Stuart Cary Welch

Kimbell Art Museum

Asia Society

The collection of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan contains some of the world's finest examples of painting and calligraphy and is perhaps the most important private Muslim collection of Islamic art. This volume, richly illustrated with 24 color plates and 101 black-and-white photographs, provides a brief history of the collection and offers a generous selection of paintings, manuscripts, calligraphies, bindings, and drawings that spans the geographic range of Islamic art from North Africa to India. Detailed discussions of each illustration introduce readers to the major patrons and artists in the development of the arts of the precious book. Anthony Welch and Stuart Cary Welch have selected the most magnificent pages from the prince's collection for this volume. Included are portraits of the great Mughal rulers of India, paintings from the pages of a sixteenth-century Shahnamah (Book of Kings) of Iran, and stunning examples of calligraphy. Among the Muslim manuscripts represented are Qur̕ans from North Africa, Ottoman Turkey, Iran, and India; historical works such as the Ottoman illustrated manuscript of the Tuhfet ul-Leta̕if; philosophical treatises such as the Ethics of Nasir al-Din Tusi of India; and literary works such as the late-sixteenth-century Anvar-i Suhayli, commissioned and probably illustrated by the leading Safavid Iranian painter Sadiqi Bek. -- Inside jacket flap.

The Collection of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan

Arts of the Islamic Book

This book offers a close survey of the changing audiences, modes of reading, and cultural expectations that shaped epic writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Anthony Welch, the theory and practice of epic poetry in this period—including little-known attempts by many epic poets to have their work orally recited or set to music—must be understood in the context of Renaissance musical humanism. Welch’s approach leads to a fresh perspective on a literary culture that stood on the brink of a new relationship with antiquity and on the history of music in the early modern era.

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

This indispensable guide provides a unique insight into the academic profession at a time of major change. It is organized both thematically and geographically with attention given to regions rarely covered, such as China and Latin America. For the first time, here is a book that critically assesses the condition of the professoriate at a time of momentous change when the profession is fracturing along fault lines.

Anthony Welch

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