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The experience of colour in Islamic visual culture has historically been overlooked. In this new approach, Idries Trevathan examines the language of colour in Islamic art and architecture in dialogue with its aesthetic contexts, offering insights into the pre-modern Muslim experience of interpreting colour.
The seventeenth-century Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, represents one of the finest examples of colour-use on a grand scale. Here, Trevathan examines the philosophical and mystical traditions that formed the mosque’s backdrop. He shows how careful combinations of colour and design proportions in Islamic patterns express knowledge beyond that experienced in the corporeal world, offering another language with which to know and experience God. Colour thus becomes a spiritual language, calling for a re-consideration of how we read Islamic aesthetics.
‘An important contribution to the study of Islamic art. Idries Trevathan brings out with admirable clarity the metaphysical and cosmological meanings of colour and light beyond their decorative function.’
SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR, George Washington University
‘Every student of Islamic art should read this book. It brilliantly brings together pre-modern Islamic theories on colour with contemporary theories and scholarship. Much more than mere art history, this tour de force breaks the artificial boundaries between disciplines. Rather, it compares the theoretical literature on colour with the process of creating colour and the application of colour in art. Highly recommended.’
SAMIR MAHMOUD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture & Interior Design, Lebanese American University
Idries Trevathan is a curator and
conservator with close to twenty years’ experience working with Islamic art
collections in the Muslim world and beyond. Trevathan works regularly on
conservation projects and has conducted technical and aesthetic colour studies
on a range of Islamic art, including the nineteenth-century Malay Qur’an
manuscripts, eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Damascene reception rooms and sixteenth-century
Ottoman porticoes in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Trevathan trained as an art
conservator at the City & Guilds of London Art School and earned a PhD in
colour in Islamic art from the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts,
London.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. The Intellectual Context
2. The Work of Art: Masjid-i Shah
3. Colour Systems
4. The Aesthetics of Colour
5. Light, Lustre and Luminosity
6. Colour and the Journey of the Mystic
7. Colour and Spirituality in the Time of the Safavids
8. Meaning within Masjid-i Shah
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Index