Sewn Together with Peace of Mind

Islamic Album Pages from Harvard's Collections

The special exhibition Sewn Together with Peace of Mind: Islamic Album Pages from Harvard's Collections, which opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum on March 29, 1997, will be on display through June 8, 1997. Featuring paintings, drawings and calligraphy from Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India and Safavid Persia (Iran), this exhibition presents a wide variety of Islamic art as it relates to the practice of album compilation from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The exhibition is organized by Barry D. Wood, 1995-1996 Andrew W. Mellon intern in the Department of Islamic and Later Indian Art. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The works exhibited here range from paintings of aristocratic youths and equestrian scenes to panels of calligraphy mounted in exquisite marbled borders. A highlight of the exhibition is a page almost certainly from the famed "St. Petersburg Muraqqa", compiled in the early eighteenth century. On one side is a mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth-century Mughal painting of a prince visiting an ascetic. On the reverse of the page is an early seventeenth-century set of three samples of calligraphy of Imad al-Hasani (1551-1616), one of the greatest practitioners of the nasta'liq. Other important works featured in the exhibition are Persian "single-page" paintings, including two by the master of that genre, Aqa Riza (c. 1565-1635). Young Man in a Blue Cloak is representative of Riza's early focus on elegant young nobles, while Nashmi the Archer shows the markedly different artistic vision of Riza adopted in later years.

Albums like those displayed in this exhibition have been an important aspect of Islamic art for centuries. The original Arabic term is muraqqa, from the root meaning to patch. An album consisted of a number of sheets of paper or cardboard onto which were pasted examples of calligraphy, drawing or painting, often accompanied by border decoration. These pages were bound together into a kind of hand-held art gallery. The earliest extant Islamic albums, created in fifteenth-century Persia, seem to have been constructed fairly haphazardly, but soon the albums developed into carefully organized visual ensembles of great beauty.

By the sixteenth century, the album was firmly established as an artistic genre in the three major Islamic Polities of early modern times: the so-called "gunpowder empires" of Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Safavid Persia. Each of these Empires developed its own distinctive style of album. The Ottomans specialized in albums of the finest calligraphy, while the Mughals cultivated extremely lavish and ornate albums of painting and calligraphy, and a market for single-page paintings to be mounted by the purchaser flourished under the Safavids. Sewn Together with Peace of Mind displays a representative sample of this widespread and fascinating art form.

Some of the most interesting and puzzling Islamic album pages are those that pair paintings or drawings with text fragments. More often than not the connection between the words and the images is not readily apparent. "It is precisely this aspect of the mystery that makes album pages doubly enjoyable: they represent a challenge to the mind as well as a delight to the eye," writes the show's organizer in the accompanying gallery guide. For example, on a page entitled Two Cavaliers, the text is formed by cutting and pasting sections of the poet Sa'di's great work, Gulistan (rose Garden). Once brought together, the text comments on the human condition in a time of drought. However, the image on the same page, of a vigorous battle between two horsemen seems unrelated. The exhibition invites visitors to consider that their own sense of relevance may differ from the creators of these album pages, and to venture their own interpretations of the connection between the paintings and their appended texts.

The title of this exhibition is taken from a Persian poem which exemplifies the esteem in which albums were held, a panegyric to an album written by the seventeenth-century poet Abu-Talib Kalim. Kalim, court poet to the emperor Shahjahan of Mughal India (r.1628-1658), writes, in a pun, on the Persian word meaning "collectedness," that the album's binding was "sewn together with peace of mind."