What Islamic artists made art with

This lesson asks you to explore and experiment with materials, tools and techniques and to use them to make art works. The museum shows what Islamic artists used: mineral pigments and gold, the calligrapher's pen and ink, and inlaid metal. Your own experiments, and any newer technologies, come from your class. ¹

For each record, list the materials and tools it names and what they were used for. Then say what you would test first if you had the same materials in your own studio.

The records describe traditional ways of working. Compare one of them with a tool or material you use today, and say what changed and what stayed the same.

The calligrapher's tools are few. The record says the hand is written with a reed pen and black soot ink ². UNESCO lists the traditional tools as a pen of reed or bamboo, ink of honey, soot and saffron, and handmade paper treated with starch, egg white and alum ³. In the seventh century AH Yaqut al-Musta'simi (d. 698 AH) fixed the six principal hands ². The entry says his great change was to cut the reed pen at a slant where it had been cut straight, which gave the hand a new lightness ².

Two sources give the tools here. One is an encyclopaedia entry in Turkish, which names a reed pen and black soot ink ². The other is UNESCO, which placed Arabic calligraphy on its Representative List in 2021 on the nomination of sixteen States Parties ³. UNESCO adds honey and saffron to the ink and names the treatment of the paper ³. The record reports both descriptions side by side and does not choose between them.

UNESCO names writing with markers and paint, and spray-paint lettering on walls, among the contemporary forms of the practice ³. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: do a marker and a can of spray paint belong to the same art as a reed pen and soot ink?

• Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the ink, the paper and the measure of the dot.
• Pigments and gold in Persian painting: the mineral colours, their binders and the making of gold leaf.
• Inlaid metalwork: the metals of the vessels and the centres where the technique spread.

Read the records on pigments and gold in Persian painting and inlaid metalwork. Choose one material or tool and write three sentences on how it was prepared or used, then mark the sentence that comes from the record.