Islamic Art and Paintings

Islamic art is the art of the lands ruled by Muslims, made for Muslim patrons or by Muslim artists, from the 7th century on. The Met stresses that the term covers not only art made for the faith, such as a mosque and its furnishings, but the art and architecture of those lands as a whole; the Getty's art vocabulary lists "Muslim" as another name for the style. The V&A's collection runs from the 7th to the early 20th century, chiefly from Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and North Africa.

Sources: The Met: The Nature of Islamic Art · Getty AAT: Islamic (culture or style) · Victoria and Albert Museum: Islamic Middle East collection

The most salient characteristic of Islamic art, the Met says, is decoration that covers the whole surface, built from four elements: calligraphy, plant (vegetal) patterns, geometric patterns and figures. The four are often combined on one page, tile or carpet. In painting, the pages of Persian books add bright color and gold, and the scenes are set into the written text as parts of the book.

Sources: The Met: The Nature of Islamic Art · The Met: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp · The Met: Figural Representation in Islamic Art

Yes, outside religious art. The Met explains that the often-cited Islamic opposition to images of people and animals holds for religious art and architecture, while figures flourished in secular art in nearly all Islamic cultures; in illustrated books, paintings were visual aids to the text and no restrictions were imposed. In Islamic religious art made for mosques, the V&A notes, artists usually leave out people and animals and turn to color, pattern, geometry and plants. Some Persian and Ottoman manuscripts also illustrate the life of the Prophet Muhammad, such as his Ascent to heaven in Shah Tahmasp's Khamsa.

Sources: The Met: Figural Representation in Islamic Art · Victoria and Albert Museum: Design and make your own Islamic tile (family activity) · British Library: Or 2265, Shah Tahmasp's Khamsah of Nizami

Islamic miniatures are paintings made for books, and later also as single pages; Persian miniatures were painted for books of Persian poetry and history. The Met traces their rise to the late 1200s, when the Mongol rulers of Iran gave new impetus to illustrated books and their painters absorbed influences from Chinese scrolls. Herat under the Timurids in the 1400s is often regarded as the high point of Persian painting, and under Shah 'Abbas (ruled 1587–1629) single-page paintings became more popular than manuscript illustration.

Sources: The Met: The Art of the Book in the Ilkhanid Period · The Met: The Art of the Timurid Period (ca. 1370–1507) · The Met: The Art of the Safavids before 1600

The Met calls calligraphy the most highly regarded and most fundamental element of Islamic art, because the Qur'an, the book of God's revelations to the Prophet Muhammad, was transmitted in Arabic, and the Arabic script lends itself to many ornamental forms. Leaves of the Blue Qur'an, written in gold on blue-dyed parchment in the 9th or 10th century, are among the Met's examples. Not all calligraphy is religious, the V&A adds: inscriptions also carry poems, praise for rulers and aphorisms.

Sources: The Met: Calligraphy in Islamic Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art: Folio from the Blue Qur'an · Victoria and Albert Museum: Calligraphy in Islamic art

Islamic geometric patterns are designs built from simple shapes, the circle and the square, which are repeated, interlaced and combined into stars and polygons. The Met names four basic repeat units, circles, squares, the star pattern and multi-sided polygons, and notes that such patterns can in principle grow without end. Islamic artists took the shapes from late antique Greek, Roman and Sasanian art and elaborated them, helped by the work of Islamic mathematicians, astronomers and scientists; because they show no living beings, they are popularly linked with Islamic art.

Sources: The Met: Geometric Patterns in Islamic Art · Victoria and Albert Museum: Design and make your own Islamic tile (family activity)

Arabesque is the European name for the scrolling plant patterns of Islamic art. The Met explains that a highly abstract, fully developed version of this style emerged in the 10th to 12th centuries, and that the word, French for "in the Arab fashion", was coined in the early 19th century after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt; few scholars of Islamic art use it today. Apart from the garden, with its reference to paradise, these plant motifs are largely without symbolic meaning.

Sources: The Met: Vegetal Patterns in Islamic Art

The Shahnama is the great Persian epic: about 50,000 rhyming couplets completed by the poet Firdausi around 1010, telling the history of Iran's kings from mythical times to the Arab conquest of 651, the Met explains. Rulers of Iran kept commissioning illustrated copies, among them the Great Mongol Shahnama of the 1330s, the Baysonghor Shahnama of 1430 and the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, begun in the early 1520s, whose 759 folios hold 258 paintings. Pages from all three are in our collection.

Sources: The Met: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp · The Met: The Art of the Book in the Ilkhanid Period · UNESCO Memory of the World: Bayasanghori Shâhnâmeh (Prince Bayasanghor's Book of the Kings)

The great painters of Islamic art include al-Wasiti, Behzad, Sultan Muhammad, Aqa Mirak, Riza-yi 'Abbasi and Nakkaş Osman. Al-Wasiti painted a Maqamat of al-Hariri dated 1237. In Herat, Behzad painted for the Timurid sultan Husayn Bayqara, as in a Bustan of Sa'di of 1488. The Met names Sultan Muhammad, Mir Musavvir and Aqa Mirak among the most renowned artists of Shah Tahmasp's workshop in Tabriz. In Isfahan, Riza-yi 'Abbasi painted single pages such as The Lovers (1630), and at the Ottoman court Nakkaş Osman illustrated the Hünername.

Sources: The Met: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp · Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Lovers · British Library: Or 6810, Khamsah of Nizami (Herat, 1494–95) · Wikimedia Commons: Yusuf fleeing the advances of Zulaikha, by Bihzad (file record) · Wikimedia Commons: Maqamat of al-Hariri, painting by al-Wasiti (file record) · Wikimedia Commons: Hünername II, folio 103b (file record)

Persian miniatures were painted for courts in Iran and Central Asia; Mughal miniatures for the Mughal emperors in India from the later 1500s. The Met explains that Akbar (ruled 1556–1605) gathered Persians, Indian Muslims and Hindus in his workshop, and that their collaboration created a specifically Mughal style with Persian, Indian and even European elements, refined under Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Mughal painting has its own page: Mughal painting.

Sources: The Met: The Art of the Mughals before 1600

Islamic religious art is the art made for the faith: copies of the Qur'an, and mosques with their furnishings. Because the Qur'an was transmitted in Arabic, the Met calls calligraphy the most highly regarded element of Islamic art, and it notes that the objection to images of people and animals holds for religious art and architecture. Qur'ans and mosques are therefore decorated with script, geometric patterns and plant scrolls rather than figures. Leaves of the Blue Qur'an and the Nurse's Qur'an in our collection are examples.

Sources: The Met: The Nature of Islamic Art · The Met: Calligraphy in Islamic Art · The Met: Figural Representation in Islamic Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art: Folio from the Blue Qur'an

Islamic art began in the 7th century, as Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula. At first, the Met explains, artists who had worked for Byzantine or Sasanian patrons kept their own styles while working for Muslim patrons, and the Umayyad caliphate (661–750) is often considered the formative period; even the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem mixes Greco-Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian elements. The Met orders Islamic art by ruling dynasty, from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Safavids, Ottomans and Mughals.

Sources: The Met: The Nature of Islamic Art · The Met: Figural Representation in Islamic Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns 78 painted pages from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp and leaves of the Blue Qur'an and the Nurse's Qur'an. The V&A in London holds over 19,000 items from the Middle East and North Africa, among them the Ardabil Carpet of 1539–40, the world's oldest dated carpet. The British Library keeps Shah Tahmasp's copy of Nizami's Khamsa, and the Golestan Palace in Tehran the Baysonghor Shahnama of 1430.

Sources: The Met: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp · Metropolitan Museum of Art: Folio from the Blue Qur'an · Metropolitan Museum of Art: Bifolium from the Nurse's Qur'an · Victoria and Albert Museum: Islamic Middle East collection · Victoria and Albert Museum: The Ardabil Carpet · British Library: Or 2265, Shah Tahmasp's Khamsah of Nizami · UNESCO Memory of the World: Bayasanghori Shâhnâmeh (Prince Bayasanghor's Book of the Kings)

Yes, for historical works. The famous paintings and Qur'an pages in our collection were made between the 9th and the 18th century, and their makers died centuries ago, so they are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects; a few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain