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Blurring of Cultures at Louvre's Islamic Art Wing
Hundreds of works of art from infinitely diverse cultures lumped together under the banner of Islam went on view Wednesday in the newly opened Islamic art wing at the Musée du Louvre.
In row upon row of glass cases mainly arranged on two enormous levels, bronze vessels, ceramics, glass, the occasional bit of ivory and more, succeed each other, often juxtaposing the art of very different lands.
In the early periods, the art of the Arab Near East, mainly of Iraq, Syria and Egypt, is thrown together with that of the Iranian world (the present states of Iran and Afghanistan, including the cities of Bokhara and Samarkand, historically at the heart of early Persian culture in Islamic times). The logical solution, a display reflecting the main cultural areas with a chronological progression within each one, was rejected. The result is often a visual blur and intellectual confusion. Sheer masterpieces, like the casket inlaid with silver and gold from 14th-century Iran, perhaps the finest in the world, do not sufficiently stand out.
On the plus side, scores of works of art out of sight for decades are now visible. This includes early ceramics excavated long ago in Iran, at Shush, known as Susa to the Romans.
Some of the most important Arab bronze vessels in the world, inlaid with silver and copper in the early decades of the 13th century, or silver and gold in the hundred years or so that followed, can be seen once again.
A famous basin commissioned for the Ayyubid Sultan al-’Adil Abu Bakr (1238-40), which was designed by Ahmad ibn ’Umar “known as al-Dhaki,” as the signature stipulates, should not be missed. His name followed on another object by the qualifier al-Mawsili is a reminder that Mawsil — Mosul in modern usage — is the stopping place where artists fleeing the Mongol invasion of Iran in 1219-21 introduced the aesthetics and technique of their homeland.
The equally famous basin signed by Da’ud ibn Salâma al-Mawsili in the year 650 of the Muslim calendar (1252-53), transferred from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is also there. The mastery of the figural patterns reveals designers trained in pictorial ateliers although, sadly, not a single Arab manuscript of the same high order survives.
The hugely important jar with scrolling motifs commissioned for Sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf (1237-60) is closely related to a basin signed by Ahmad ibn ’Umar. Here too, the source is to be sought in the illumination practiced by pictorial ateliers.
Other Arab bronzes with inscriptions in Arabic and Latin conjure memories of places where East and West met.
A ewer from Arab Spain in the shape of a peacock carries an Arabic signature identifying it as “the work of the Christian King’s slave.” Underneath, an inscription in Roman capitals proclaims “Opus Salomonis Erat” naming the artist, probably called Sulayman, the Arabic form of the biblical name.
Most intriguingly, a large basin is inscribed in Arabic and French to the name of Hugues de Lusignan, King of Cyprus (1324-59). Its style points to a Syrian master. Why a ruler from the Franco-Armenian dynasty of Lusignan chose an Arab artist is a mystery. “Uk min Lazinian,” as the Arabic inscription calls Hugues, aggressively claims — in Arabic only — to stand “at the vanguard of the troops of the Kings of the Franks (the West Europeans).” Two escutcheons were engraved with the arms of Jerusalem after the basin was completed, pointing to hopes of conquest — by then Jerusalem had long been wrested from the European crusaders by Salah ad-Din, who entered the city in 1187.
Other shattering conflicts are echoed in the Iranian collections, the richest in the Louvre display.
A glazed ceramic tile once formed part of a frieze that ran in the throne room of a palace at Takht-e Soleyman. Two fragments dug up by German archaeologists, who did not mention what remained of the inscription, allowed me to show in 1984 that the tile bought by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1899, like many other intact tiles scattered across the world, came from the palace. All carry Persian verses from the Shah-Nameh, the Book of Kings, written in the 10th century. The choice of the verses revealed a daring act of cultural resistance by an occupied nation.
The Iranian literati running the administrative apparatus of their ancient land devastated by the Mongol invasion persuaded the ruler Abaqa Khan (1266-81) to have his summer palace erected at Takht-e Soleyman. Against architectural logic, it partly followed the ground plan of the ruins of what had been the most important palatial and religious complex of pre-Islamic Iran. Building on or along shattered foundations is tricky, but this symbolized the revival of Ancient Iran. The initiative was taken by Abaqa’s state secretary, Atâ Malek Joveyni, driven by an acute sense of history — he later wrote a major history of Iran — and inspired by Nasir ad-Dîn Tusî, a Sufi with Ismaili leanings.
Abaqa’s successor, Teküder, was converted to Islam by Sufi masters, took the name Ahmad, and mounted the throne in 1281. Atâ Malek commissioned the frieze of revetment tiles in which some Shah-Nameh verses adapted by him to the second-person singular boldly seem to address the resident. Enraged, the Mongol establishment slayed Sultan Ahmad.
Elsewhere, entire panel revetments from Ottoman Turkey speak of other upheavals. The 16th-century glazed tiles were ripped off in the late 19th century from mosques and palatial structures erected in Istanbul, a city that had been the capital of Byzantine Greece until the Turks conquered it in 1453. Unfortunately, some imposing panels are slapped in a row on the same partition as in some unfinished construction site.
The same principle inspired the display of magnificent 14th-century doors removed from Cairo mosques.
Scores of other beautiful works of art are likewise lined up by category, some illustrating themes. Headings like “Figuration and Narrative in the Eastern Lands of Islam” or “Writing in the Mamluk and Mongol Domains” are too broad to be really helpful.
Wall texts can be misleading. One reads, in the museum’s own English version, “At the first sight the works in the Department of Islamic Art tell us very little about the function or the religious or secular context of their use.”
Walking from an Iranian 13th-century ceramic revetment tile of a mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca, to 14th- and 15th-century Egyptian mosque lamps, the public may wonder whether those who wrote these lines seriously considered the objects.
A number of labels are even factually wrong. In a glass case with ewers from the Indian subcontinent, a small brass bowl labeled “Eastern Iran or India, circa A.D. 1600” is typical of Western Iran in the late 16th century.
Elsewhere, two ceramic ewers seen side by side are called “verseuses tripodes.” One, however, which is Chinese, has no legs but a circular base. The truly tripod piece, which is Iranian, is argued to “owe its profile to the Chinese model.” In fact, the flaring cylindrical body of the Iranian vessel, with a tubular spout rising at an approximately 45-degree angle, reproduces a model known from metalwork in early Islamic Iran.
An admirable page torn away from an early 15th-century manuscript from the Herat school induced the label writer to speculate about the nature of the manuscript — the complete romance of Homay and Homayun by the 14th-century poet Khaju Kermani, or an anthology? The former, almost certainly. Headings cut out from other pages are variously pasted around the painting. They refer to chapters of the romance, which the label fails to mention.
A famous bowl from northwestern Iran engraved in the 11th or 12th century with the figure of a hare raised on its legs amid scrolls is signed in Persian, using the standard Arabic loan-word ‘amal, or “opus,” ‘amal-e Bu Taleb, “the work of Bu Taleb.” The name is corrected to “[A]bu Taleb” by the label writer, presumably unaware that Bu Taleb is not incorrect Arabic but follows Persian usage at that time.
The labeling and the display alike betray insufficient familiarity with the culture and history of profoundly different civilizations. The problem is not unusual in Western institutions dealing with “Islamic art,” a 19th-century construct. If art specialists shoved together all things Buddhist from Nepal to Japan, Cambodia and Indonesia, they would be laughed out of court.
Souren Melikian
The New York Times