Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800

Book excerpt: Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800 is the second in a set of four selections of studies by Oleg Grabar. Its focus is on the key centuries - the eleventh through fourteenth - during which the main directions of traditional Islamic art were created and developed and for which classical approaches of the History of Art were adopted. Manuscript illustrations and the arts of objects dominate the selection of articles, but there are also forays into later times like Mughal India and into definitions of area and period styles, as with the Mamluks in Egypt and the Ottomans, or into parallels between Islamic and Christian medieval arts.