The Experience of Islamic Art on the Margins of Islam

Abstract

This volume is the fifteenth publication in the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference Papers series, each of which contains the lecture presented by the recipient of the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award for excellence in Islamic studies along with contributions by other scholars dedicated to a special topic. For the first time ever, in 1996 the award was presented to an art historian, Oleg Grabar, who chose “The Experience of Islamic Art on the Margins of Islam” as the theme of the fifteenth conference. The crossing of boundaries by artifacts, decorative elements, or figural subjects from one cultural hemisphere into another, as well as the perception of the “inherited” monuments of other cultures, is a broad and still largely unexplored field. While studies following the wandering of motifs are quite numerous, the reasons for their selection and tacit integration into new contexts, along with their reshaping and revaluation, are not dealt with very often. Each of the five articles directs our attention to a particular border area of Islamic culture during a particular period, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. Each contribution also approaches the question of how (regardless of the way) acquired Islamic objects and monuments were dealt with from a specific angle. The result is a small and very diverse collection of experiences that surely does not offer an overview of all responses to Islamic art. However, it convincingly demonstrates how revealing research on the cultural margins can be ...