Materials, techniques and conventions

This lesson asks you to explain the terminology of techniques, materials and tools and use it correctly, and to extend your understanding of the techniques and conventions artists use. The museum offers only a few examples of architecture and ornament from the Islamic world; your class adds the rest. ¹

Pull the names of materials out of a description, then the names of what was done to them. Which names do you know from your own course, and which need research?

Look at how the form relates to the surface that carries it. Does it grow out of the surface, or work with it? What name does a scholar give that?

In Masalik al-absar, Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari describes al-Aqsa and the Rock "as its building stood in the year 743", drawing on a short book by Taj al-Din Ahmad ibn Amin al-Mulk that set down the measurements in cubits. ^{2 3} In it the octagonal building around the Rock rises eighteen cubits above the paved court. Each side of the octagon is twenty-nine and two-thirds cubits, faced for seven cubits with veined white marble and for seven more up to the waterspouts with gilded mosaic. The drum of the dome has sixteen gilded glass windows screened by grilles outside. ³ The leaves of the doors are plated with carved yellow brass. ⁴

Who made the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock? The Encyclopaedia of Islam says its plan and composition belong to a high Byzantine tradition and calls it almost certain that the builders and planners were Christians from Syria or Palestine. It says scholars debate whether the mosaicists were Syrian or Byzantine, while the style comes mostly from Late Antique and early Byzantine art with some Iranian elements. ⁵ For the mosaics of the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, Nadine Schibille notes that tenth-century Arab sources say the tesserae and workmen came from the Byzantine empire. ⁶

What stands today is not a plain witness to what al-Umari measured. The Encyclopaedia says most of the exterior decoration has gone, that the Ottomans covered the outer walls with Turkish ceramics in the tenth/sixteenth century, and that between 1956 and 1964 a Restoration Committee restored the monument, guided by the aim of returning every part to its earliest documented shape. ⁵ The editor of al-Umari's book says he went to Palestine to compare its figures with the building. ⁷ The museum's record on gold-leaf tesserae reports Schibille's analysis of gold leaf from Damascus and Khirbat al-Minya and holds no analysis of tesserae from the Dome itself. ⁸

Give your reason and answer the strongest objection to it: which source would you trust most for how the walls of the Dome were faced in the Mamluk period, al-Umari's description of the building as it stood in 743, or what stands there today after the Ottoman ceramics and the restoration of 1956 to 1964?

• The Dome of the Rock: its decoration and inscription, its changes and repairs.
• Gold-leaf glass tesserae: the analysis of the gold at Damascus and Khirbat al-Minya.
• Masalik al-absar: al-Umari's book, which passes on the measurements of the Rock and the mosque.
• Arabesque: plant ornament, with a comparison to the folded leaves of the Dome's mosaics.

Read the record on the arabesque. Choose a surface around you and sketch a pattern that respects it as Yeomans describes, then name the material, the technique and the convention in two lines.