Arts of the Book: Illustrated Texts, Miniatures
Illuminated Album Page With Sura Al-Fatiha
Safavid, 16th century CE
Materials and technique
Opaque watercolour, gold and ink on paper
37.9 x 27 cm
The Surat al-Fatiha is the opening chapter of the Qur’an. Often composed as a double-page frontispiece with lavish use of gold and lapis lazuli, the Surat al-Fatiha was among the most elaborately decorated pages in a Qur’an manuscript and provided a showcase for the calligrapher and illuminator to demonstrate their talents. These precious pages were often preserved apart or even created separately from the Qur’an manuscript and pasted onto album pages, as may be the case here. This page is written in nasta'liq script, the favoured script of Persian calligraphers in the sixteenth century for writing poetry and prose, but an uncommon choice for copying Arabic verses from the Qur’an. This page was copied by Ishaq al-Shahabi directly from an example by Mir 'Ali, according to the text in the lower corners. Ishaq (or Mahmud) al-Shahabi was a star pupil of the celebrated master calligrapher Mir 'Ali. To copy a master’s hand so directly was a great achievement and one which frustrates study of well-known calligraphers (Soucek in Thompson and Canby, 2003, p. 50).
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