Art and the society that made it

This lesson asks you to explain, from research, how knowing the cultural and historical context of an art work has clarified its meaning, and how works respond to and reflect the society that made them. The museum offers three cases: glass, painting and tile. The research and the comparison with other works come from your class. ¹

List the materials, techniques and patrons each record names. Say which of them you think explains the work best, and what else you would need to find out to be sure.

Choose one feature of a work and show what it tells you about the people who made or ordered it. Mark what the record says and what you are inferring.

Follow the glassworkers. Nadine Schibille ties the changes in the glass industry to new capitals. Umayyad Damascus imported large consignments of mosaic tesserae for the Great Umayyad Mosque and its palaces ². At al-Raqqa, after it became the caliphal residence in 796, two plant-ash glass groups were produced side by side, probably by glassworkers brought from Mesopotamia ^{2 3}. Al-Ya'qubi relates that al-Mu'tasim gathered craftsmen, glassworkers among them, from Basra and sent them to Samarra ⁴, where glass was used for prestigious decoration such as mosaics and glass inlays ⁵.

Two kinds of evidence meet here. The first is a written report: al-Ya'qubi's account of what al-Mu'tasim did ⁴. The second is Schibille's account of the glass groups made at al-Raqqa, where she says the workers were probably brought from Mesopotamia ³. Glass weights are among the most precisely dated witnesses to Egyptian glassmaking ⁶. The record does not say what the workers were paid or who ordered each building.

The records say rulers brought glassworkers to new capitals. Give a reason, and answer the best argument against you: was it the ruler's order or the workers' skill that made a capital's glass?

• Glassmaking in the early Islamic world: the capitals, the workers and the scale of production.
• Gold-leaf glass tesserae: the mosaic cubes of the Great Umayyad Mosque and what a scholar found in their gold.
• Mughal painting: the painting studios, one of the other two cases of this lesson.

Read the records on glassmaking in the early Islamic world and Mughal painting. Write a paragraph that explains one work by its patron or its materials, and underline the sentence that comes from the record.