Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to use the right words for techniques, materials and tools when you make and present art works, and to understand techniques artists use to get particular effects. The museum offers the vocabulary of three Islamic crafts: illuminating a book, writing with a reed pen, and cutting glazed tile. Your own tools and techniques, and the effects you test, are for your class. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- C1.2 use appropriate vocabulary to describe techniques, materials, and tools when creating and presenting visual art works […]
- C2.1 demonstrate an understanding of a variety of techniques that artists use to achieve specific effects […]
2 Before you start
A thought to carry into the lesson.
3 The lesson
Which word names the part, the tool or the material?
Make a three-column list from the records: parts, tools, materials. Decide where each word belongs, and mark the words you did not know.
What does the technique do to the surface?
Choose one step from a record. Describe what the surface looks like before and after it, and name a technique you use that makes a similar change.
Go deeper
Zellij is the ceramic mosaic used to pave and wainscot floors and walls in Morocco 2. The record gives Rexford Newcomb quoting Jean Gallotti on the lanes of Fez: a house going up is betrayed by a gravel of chips of coloured glazed terracotta, the debris of zellij, and the courtyard rings with the steel hammers of the tile-setters trimming their pieces 2. The border inscriptions are made from whole glazed tiles, usually black. The inscription is laid out and the surface round the letters is cut through the glaze to the terracotta with chisels or sharp hammers, leaving black letters on a terracotta ground 3 4.
How do we know?
The record's picture of the tilework comes from Rexford Newcomb, who quotes Jean Gallotti on the lanes of Fez 2. For the history Newcomb notes that Leo Africanus, writing early in the sixteenth century, mentions a brilliant ceramic industry in the century before 2. He adds that Alfred Bel cites the author of the Rawd al-Qirtas, about 1325, on the fourteenth-century care for building with enamelled tiles, marble and carving 3. So the history reaches the record through writers that Newcomb cites.
Think about it
Newcomb divides Moroccan decorative tilework into ceramic mosaic and painted tiles 3 4. By Gallotti's account, painted tiles never had in Morocco the success they had elsewhere, and mosaic remained in favour 4 5. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: what does a maker gain by choosing cut mosaic over painted tile?
Into the museum
- Zellij: the types of Moroccan tilework, the inscriptions cut through the glaze, and the history at Fez.
- Manuscript illumination: the parts of a book that illuminators decorated, and the colours of the Shiraz and Herat schools.
- Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the soot ink and the dot by which letters are measured.
Try this
Read Manuscript illumination, Calligrapher and Zellij. Build a glossary of ten words from them, each with a one-line meaning in your own words.
4 Carry it further
Where this lesson leads in the museum.
5 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Manuscript illumination (tadhhib) have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Illumination: the parts of a page and its colours. Illumination is the art of decorating title pages, headings, verse divisions, colophons, dedications, borders and book covers. Norah Titley notes that the academies of Shiraz favoured deep maroon and those of Herat black, and that Herat headings used lapis lazuli grounds. Which of these words for parts of a page, and which colours, would you add to your own list of vocabulary?
In your own words: what does Calligrapher (khattat) have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
The calligrapher's pen, dot and gold. The hand is written with a reed pen and black soot ink. Letters are measured in units of a dot, the diamond or square shape the pen makes when its full width touches the paper, and lines are set with a ruler called the mistar. Gold is applied as gold ink, or as gold leaf fixed with an adhesive made from seed oil and then burnished with a stone. Which of these words would you use for your own tools?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: The Arts
- 2. Rexford Newcomb, The Decorative Tiles of North Africa (New York, 1929), p.21
- 3. Rexford Newcomb, The Decorative Tiles of North Africa (New York, 1929), p.22
- 4. Rexford Newcomb, The Decorative Tiles of North Africa (New York, 1929), p.23
- 5. Rexford Newcomb, The Decorative Tiles of North Africa (New York, 1929), p.24