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 show that you understand the elements and principles of design and can name them correctly, and to understand techniques artists use for specific effects. The museum offers three examples of pattern and surface from Islamic art; your own terms for design and your own work come from your class. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- C1.1 demonstrate an understanding of the elements and principles of design, and use appropriate terminology related to elements and principles when creating and analysing art works […]
- C2.1 demonstrate an understanding of a wide 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 element or principle is doing the work?
Look at each pattern and name what you see with the design terms you know: line, shape, repetition, balance and others. Say which one makes the strongest effect.
How is the effect made?
Ask whether the effect comes from adding something to a surface or from taking something away. Describe the steps the record names and what each step leaves behind.
Go deeper
Yeomans dates the Aqmar Mosque to 1125 and counts its facade on al-Mu'izz street an architectural masterpiece showing Fatimid stone carving at its best. 2 The facade is divided vertically by three keel-arched niches; the central one, taller and deeper in a projecting portal, has a fluted hood whose ribs rise and radiate like a sunrise around a central medallion. 2 3 The medallion is a set of concentric rings alternating calligraphy and scrollwork: at its centre the name of Ali repeated in a drilled Kufic lattice, then a ring repeating the name of Muhammad, then a broad foliate scroll. 3
How do we know?
Yeomans says that the right-hand flank of the facade, long hidden by neighbouring buildings, has been reconstructed and its original symmetry restored. 2 Al-Maqrizi, in the museum's record, gives the mosque's site at the end of the market of the candle-makers and reports that Amir Yalbugha al-Salimi told him he had read words in the lines inscribed on the threshold of the gate. 4 5 Yeomans thinks the domes of the prayer hall come from Yalbugha al-Salimi's restoration of 1397. 3 6
Think about it
Part of the facade has been rebuilt. Can the facade still serve as evidence of what Fatimid carvers did in 1125, and what is the strongest argument against your answer?
Into the museum
- The Aqmar Mosque: the facade, the plan and the foundation inscription.
- The keel arch: the shape of the niches and arcades at al-Aqmar.
- Arabesque: plant ornament whose leaves stay joined to their stalks.
- Girih: a short record on interlacing bands that build stars and polygons.
Try this
Read the records on girih and the arabesque. Sketch one repeat of a pattern and label its lines and shapes with design terms.
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 Girih have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Stars and polygons from interlacing lines. Girih is Islamic geometric strapwork: interlacing lines that build stars and polygons. The record says the patterns were common in Safavid and Seljuk architecture and rest on girih tiles. Look at a girih design: which lines and shapes do you see, and which words from your own design vocabulary would you use to name them?
In your own words: what does Arabesque have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Leaves that lose their stems. Richard Yeomans sees the birth of the Islamic arabesque in Samarra style B, where leaves and palmettes become abstract, lose their stems and are organised into the surface geometry of polygons and polylobes. In his view the vegetal arabesque is stylised and two-dimensional, respecting the surface. Which of your design terms describes what the leaves have become?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: The Arts
- 2. Richard Yeomans, The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo (2006), p.62
- 3. Richard Yeomans, The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo (2006), p.63
- 4. Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz wa-l-i'tibar bi-dhikr al-khitat wa-l-athar (al-Khitat al-Maqriziyya), ed. Muhammad Zaynhum and Madiha al-Sharqawi (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1998), p.1063
- 5. Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawaiz wa-l-i'tibar bi-dhikr al-khitat wa-l-athar (al-Khitat al-Maqriziyya), ed. Muhammad Zaynhum and Madiha al-Sharqawi (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1998), p.1132
- 6. Richard Yeomans, The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo (2006), p.64