![]() ![]() Roughly a generation and a half later, scholars like A. Spain, Egypt, or Iran to seek alternate solutions to formal problems and to develop more or less coherent theories of ornament in architecture. In reacting against the dogmatism of a classicizing tradition, architects like Pascal Coste, Bourgouin, Prisse d’Avesnes, Owen Jones, and a few others were inspired by their travels to. Specialists may have rejoiced at this turn of events, but, as is often the case with academic humanists faced with a large public, they were hardly prepared to answer the legitimate questions of visitors to the galleries: what does one see in objects of so many techniques? What do 9th-century ceramics and 16th-century miniatures or rugs have in common? Is this an art which stylized the forms of Late Antiquity because it made certain conscious choices within an existing language, or did it create an entirely new visual idiom? In either case, does it express new meanings or retell the same stories with a new alphabet? What internal historical, ideological, or regional motors led to changes in the development and use of its forms? Are the generally accepted categories of analysis and explanation for Western art appropriate, when no formal hierarchy of forms and functions is immediately visible, or at best an unusual hierarchy of repetitive designs over unique motifs, of writing over personages, and of objects of daily use over large panels or sculptures? What are the esthetic ambitions of Islamic art? Are they culturally restricted or trans-cultural?Ĭuriously enough, partial answers to some of these questions were more readily available seventy or a hundred years ago than they are now. ONE OF THE RESULTS OF the Metropolitan Museum’s brilliant installation of its Islamic collections has been that art historians, critics, journalists, and the general public have, willingly or not, been confronted with the need-or, at the very least, the opportunity-to understand the creativity of a culture previously relegated to a few pages in general manuals of art history, if not omitted altogether, as a distant relative of the grand tradition without sufficiently redeeming exotic qualities. ![]()
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