Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-319) and index.
Contents:
Arts of the third dimension -- Portable objects and art historical horizons -- Miniature, model, microcosm -- The art of allusion -- The intellect of the hand -- "Making is thinking" -- Architecture, art of process -- Thinking and making in tenth-century Iraq -- The eighth epistle -- The material imagination -- Makers, movements and mutable materials -- The craftsman in society -- Building ornament -- Taking the shapes of images -- Trails of ornament -- Building ornament -- Arcades and cordons sanitaires -- The inlaid surface -- Jaziran synthesis -- Occupied objects -- Lessons from a storeroom -- Seeing-with and the art of the object -- Occupied objects -- Inkwells, architecture, and conditioned vision -- The scribe in the inkwell -- Object as theatre -- Likeness and allusion -- Material metaphors -- The languages of objects -- The poet's craft -- Metal, stone, and smoke -- Mobile monuments -- Radiant monuments -- Metaphor and modality -- The poetics of ornament -- From Nile to Kilga -- The city reinscribed -- Mediterranean miniatures -- Ornament as ekphrasis -- Memory and imagination -- Conclusion : objects in an expanded field.
Summary:
Through close studies of ceramics, metalwares and other plastic arts from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, most strikingly, architecture.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.