ARTH 212 - Islamic Art and Architecture: The First 400 Years

FDR: HA Fine Arts Distribution
Credits: 3

The 7th Century CE/1st Century AH was a time of great political, cultural, and religious change in Eurasia. Amid a power vacuum created by conflict between warring Byzantium and Sasanian Iran, a polity emerged, drawing authority from a new faith, Islam. For the subsequent 400 years following the initial Islamic conquest, a series of Caliphates sponsored the construction of vast urban spaces, monuments, mosques, palaces, and other structures, some of which have remained in continuous use since. Alongside this, patronage of the visual arts more broadly including manuscripts, ivories, metalwork, and other media also thrived. The course will consider how this artistic and architectural output came to define Islamic Art as a visual tradition and as an academic discipline. It will do so by tracing artistic developments across the early Islamic world, ranging from the Iberian Peninsula in the West to North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.