Glass From Islamic Lands: The al-Sabah Collection

The wonder and vitality of Islamic glass are revealed in this extraordinary publication, the first major study in over seventy years. Glass objects rarely bear inscriptions that provide vital information, and throughout history they were shipped long distances, often to be discarded or melted and re-formed. In a triumph of patient scholarship, Stefano Carboni draws on a huge range of sources in many languages and from many disciplines in order to overcome these research difficulties. The book is based on the remarkable al-Sabah Collection and includes detailed descriptions of hundreds of objects, accompanied by 250 specially taken color photographs and forty commissioned line drawings. It begins with the legacy of Roman and Sasanian traditions in the early years of Islam and extends well over a thousand years to the last phase of glass production in Mughal India and Safavid and Qajar Iran in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The discussion covers a haunting mixture of glass specific to a particular time and place, such as the enameled and gilded glass of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egypt and Syria with its spectacular decoration technique unsurpassed to the present day; and categories of glass common to both the early and medieval periods in many locations, either undecorated or with applied, molded, and impressed decoration. 250 color and 40 b/w illustrations.