Gülru Necipoğlu

"In this work, Gulru Necipoglu convinces us that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process of negotiation between the architect and his patrons, rather than from the restless, unrestrained formal experimentation previously attributed to him. The author is the first to use a broad range of published and unpublished primary sources specifically in order to illuminate the cultural setting in which Sinan's monuments were produced and 'received'. She describes how Sinan created a layered system of mosque types, reflecting social status and territorial rank, shaped by ideas of identity, memory and decorum. Seen from this perspective, Sinan's monuments, with their highly standardized forms, used in ingeniously varied combinations, acquire dimensions of meaning that have not been recognized hitherto." "Illustrated with hundreds of specially commissioned photographs and architectural drawings, The Age of Sinan is unlikely ever to be superseded."--BOOK JACKET.

Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire

The Age of Sinan

15. ve 16. Yüzyılda Topkapı Sarayı Mimarî, Tören ve İktidar

Karen Leal

The articles in Muqarnas 27 address topics such as spolia in medieval Islamic architecture, Islamic coinage in the seventh century, the architecture of the Alhambra from an environmental perspective, and Ottoman–Mamluk gift exchange in the fifteenth century. The volume also features a new section, entitled “Notes and Sources”, with pieces highlighting primary sources such as Akbar’s Kathāsaritsāgara. Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World is sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Muqarnas, Volume 27

An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World

Muqarnas

Robert B. Mason, 'New Looks at Old Pots: Results of Recent Multidisciplinary Studies of Glazed Ceramics from the Islamic World.' Edward J. Keall, 'Forerunners of Umayyad Art: Sculptural Stone from the Hadramawt.' Avinoam Shalem, 'From Royal Caskets to Relic Containers: Two Ivory Caskets from Burgos and Madrid.' Ethel Sara Wolper, 'The Politics of Patronage: Political Change and the Construction of Dervish Lodges in Sivas.' Robert Ousterhout, 'Ethnic Identity and Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman Architecture.' Günkut Akin, 'The Müezzin Mahfili and Pool of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne.' Derin Terzioğlu, 'The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation.' Serpil Bağci, 'A New Theme of the Shirazi Frontispiece Miniatures: The Divān of Solomon.' David J. Roxburgh, 'Heinrich Friedrich von Diez and His Eponymous Albums: Mss. Diez A. Fols. 70-74.' Lisa Golombek, 'The Gardens of Timur: New Perspectives.' I.I. Notkin, 'Decoding Sixteenth-Century Muqarnas Drawings.'

An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture

Maria J. Metzler

Muqarnas 36 features a stunning variety of Islamic art genres, ranging from monumental architecture, manuscripts, textiles, and tiles, to inscriptions, material objects, and forgery. It sweeps across India, Iran, and Turkey, and concludes in Britain, with the discovery of an Ashmolean Museum objet d'art that is not exactly what it is advertised to be. The volume begins with an overview by Finbarr Barry Flood of the architecture, calligraphy, epigraphy, painting, and portable arts of pre-Mughal Islamicate South Asia. Pre-Mughal court culture has always played second fiddle to the overwhelming hegemony and brilliance of the Mughal dynasty but in its regional heterogeneity it is more than worthy of study. This is followed by two essays examining manuscript illumination: Cailah Jackson, 2017 winner of the Margaret B. Sevčenko Prize in Islamic Art and Culture, discusses two manuscripts illuminated by Mukhlis ibn ʿAbdallah al-Hindi in thirteenth-century Konya; and Denise-Marie Teece treats the early sixteenth-century Safīna manuscript (Biblioteca Reale Ms. Or. 101), its illuminator Ruzbehan al-Modhahheb, and its unique six-page preface. A Byzantine stole with embroidered Arabic inscriptions in the collection of Vatopediou Monastery on Mount Athos is the subject of the fourth essay by Nikolaos Vryzidis. The volume's seven essays conclude with three investigations into Ottoman art history: the blue-and-white tiles of the Baba Naqqaş style of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as prominently displayed in the Muradiye Mosque in Edirne (Patricia Blessing), the architectural book Risāle-i Miʿmāriyye of the seventeenth-century Caʿfer Efendi and in particular his notes on surveying and the architect's cubit (Gül Kale), and the evolution of the late sixteenth-century Ottoman custom of requiring the sultan to be victorious over the non-Muslim enemy and to only use spoils from the holy war in the construction of a sultanic mosque (Samet Budak). The Notes and Sources section continues with Bill Hickman's analysis of the tantalizing calligraphed tiles of the now destroyed mosque built for the Sufi shaykh and poet Eşrefoğlu Rumi (d. 1469?), and two communications about artifacts on British soil: a wooden box, believed to have contained the heart of Abbot Roger de Norton (d. 1291), with an Arabic inscription that is now deciphered by Barry Knight, 147 years after its discovery; and a gorgeous Persian luster bowl in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, which when subjected to UV examination, revealed that it was a product of extensive repair, or "restoration," over the centuries. A systematic examination of the bowl and its remarkable history by Francesca Leoni and her colleagues uncovers a level of fakery of antiques that, it is suggested, might be prevalent in museum ceramic collections.

Muqarnas 36

Sibel Bozdoğan

Julia Bailey

Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.In Muqarnas articles are being published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.

Architectural Heritage of the "Lands of Rum"

History and Ideology

Mimar Koca Sinan (c. 1489-1588), the 'Great Architect Sinan', was appointedchief royal architect to the Ottoman court by Sultan Suleyman I in 1539.During his fifty-year career he designed and constructed hundreds of buildings and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects, particularlyrenowned for his influence on the cityscape of Istanbul. In this innovative, major study, Gülru Necipog ̄lu argues that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process of negotiation between the architect and his patrons, rather than from restless, unrestrained formal experimentation as has been previously described.

Gülru Necipoglu

Necipoglu demonstrates the palace's role as a vast stage for the enactment of a ceremonial that emphasized the sultan's absolute power and his aloofness from the outside world. In the absence of the monumentality, axiality, and rational geometric planning principles now usually associated with imperial architecture, the author's deciphering of the palace's iconography is all the more revealing.

The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power

Doris Behrens-Abouseif

Anna Contadinia

Essays in Honor of J.M. Rogers

Alina Payne

From Global to Local

Histories of Ornament

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture

The Topkapi Scroll

A major assessment of the works of celebrated Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan (1489-1588). Presents a cultural and social history of Ottoman architecture in the early modern eastern Mediterranean world.

Gülru Necipoğlu

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