Museum Picks: Istanbul Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum

Turkish and Islamic Works Museum is the first Turkish museum covering the Turkish and Islamic art works wholly. The establishment works that have been started at the end of 19th century have been completed in 1913 and the museum has been opened for visit in the soup kitchen building located in Süleymaniye Mosque complex, which is one of the most important works of Mimar Sinan, with the name of “Evkaf – ı İslamiyet Müzesi” (Islamic Foundations Museum). After the announcement of the republic, it has taken the name “Turkish and Islamic Works Museum”.

Museum Picks: Museum of Classical Divan Literature – Galata Mevlevi Lodge

T he Galata Mevlevi Lodge (mevlevihane) or as it is also known the Kulekapı Mevlevi Lodge which is now serving as a museum, is one of the institutions which reflect the culture of the era in the best possible way. The Mevlevi Lodges which for centuries combined scholarship with music, had a great influence on the Turkish culture. A great number of those people who came together in a Mevlevi Lodge environment were educated in various areas of fine arts and their names were remembered for a long time as far as science and scholarship was concerned. The Mevlevi Lodge which is located at the top of the steep street going down to Yüksekkaldırım is the oldest Mevlevi Lodge of İstanbul. It was built in 1491, on the hunting grounds of İskender Pasha who was a governor – general during the times of Sultan Bayezid. Its first master was Mehmet Mehmed Sema-i Çelebi. The building was struck by fire during the reign of Sultan Mustafa III. (1766) but was replaced by the existing Mevlevi Lodge by the same Sultan. In later years, the building underwent repairs during the reigns of Sultans Selim III, Mahmud II and Abdüllmecid. The institution which carried out its activities until 1925 was once more restored between the years 1967 – 1972. The Mevlevi Lodge which was built as a complex contained rooms and spaces for pray chanting, dervish cells, the quarters of the master (şeyh), special prayer (namaz) area for the Sultan, the section for the female members, library, fountain for the public, clock room, kitchen, mausoleums and an enclosed graveyard.

Semahane
(Ritual Prayer Hall)
On the enterence door of this wood structured section there is the restoration statement of Sultan Abdülmecid dated 1853. The building has an octagonal plan and a good sample of the baroque style of the 18^th century. In this section Turkish musical instruments and works related to the Mevlevi culture are exhibited. In the upper section which is divided with wooden grills, the poems (divan) of the Classical Ottoman poets and manuscripts belonging to Şeyh Galib, İsmail Ankaravi, Esrar and Fasih Dedes and the poetess Leyla Hanım who were trained and educated at the Mevlevi Lodge are kept in chronological order. The quarters of the master (şeyh) and the special praying area for the Sultan are upstairs.

Dervish Cells
It is constructed with stone and consists of rooms in a row.

Mausoleums

Şeyh Galib Mausoleum; It was built by Halet Said Efendi at the beginning of the 19^th century. It has a square plan. Mehmed Ruhi, Hüseyin, İsa Selim, Şarih-, İsmail Ankaravi who first annotated the Mesnevi and Şeyh Galib Efendi are buried here.

Halet Said Efendi Mausoleum; It was built at the same time as the other mausoleum. Has a square plan. Inside, Şeyh Kudretullah, Ataullah Efendi, Halet Said Efendi and Emine Esma Hanım who is the wife of Ubeydullah Efendi are burried.

Fountain and the Clock Room
They are located to the right of the entrance. The masonary structure was built in early 19^th century.

Library
It was built by Halet Said Efendi. It is on the top floor of the special prayer place and contains 3455 volumes.

Treasury (Graveyard)

Those who functioned as masters (şeyh) at the Mevlevi Lodge, their spouses, the “kudum” and “ney” playing musicians and poets who had “divans” (volume of collected poems) are burried here. The graves of Humbaracı Ahmed Pasha, İbrahim Müteeferrika who set up the first printing press in Turkey, the composer Vardakosta Seyyid Ahmet Ağa, Nayi Osman Dede, and the family members of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha are also here. The tomb stones are significant for their inscriptions and decorations.

Address: Galipdede Caddesi, No:15, Tünel
Operating days and hours: Closed Mondays / 09.30-17.00

Copyright Notice: Rebuplic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism

Museum Picks: National Gallery of Art

T he National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and works on paper from the Middle Ages to the present. Records on all of the more than 110,000 objects and images of more than 6,000 objects in the collection are available online.

Copyright ©2006 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Museum Picks: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art houses one of the most significant collections of Islamic art in the world. These widely diverse arts, from an area extending from southern Spain to Central Asia , trace the distinctive visual imagination of Islamic artists over a period of fourteen hundred years. The collection is comprised of over 1,700 works, of which some 150 examples are on view; these include glazed ceramics, inlaid metalwork, enameled glass, carved wood and stone, and manuscript illustration, illumination, and calligraphy. Particular strengths of the collection are glazed pottery and tiles from Iran and Turkey ; glass, especially from the late seventh to the mid-thirteenth century; and Persian and Turkish arts of the book.

The museum began to concentrate seriously on Islamic art in 1973, with the acquisition of the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, the generous gift of Joan Palevsky. Although the Heeramaneck collection forms the nucleus of the Islamic holdings, the focus and scope of the collection have developed considerably since 1973. Two important additions, both gifts, occurred in the 1980s. In 1985 the noted collector Edwin Binney, 3rd, bequeathed more than one hundred works, in particular, examples of the arts of the book and ceramics of the Ottoman period. Approximately fifty glass objects, primarily of the early Islamic period, from Hans and Varya Cohn’s splendid collection were given to the museum in 1988. The collection has been augmented further over the past two decades through gift and purchase, most notably the acquisition in 2002 of the Madina Collection of Islamic Art, made possible in large part by a generous gift from long-time LACMA benefactor and Trustee Camilla Chandler Frost. Its addition has created a new international focus on Los Angeles and on LACMA.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All rights reserved

Museum Picks: The Detroit Institute of Arts

The Islamic collection was expanded in the 1920s under the leadership of the first curator of Near Eastern art. The arts of Islam are exhibited adjacent to the galleries of Asian Art on the first floor and includes the book arts, calligraphy and miniature painting, and objects of glass, ivory, lacquer, wood, and stone, with strong collections of metalwork, ceramics, and textiles. Representing the works of an extraordinarily wide range of cultures and civilizations from antiquity to the present, the Middle Eastern, Islamic and Asian Art Collection includes pieces from a broad geographical arc including the Middle East and Asia.The collection was established in 1890 with Detroit pharmaceutical manufacturer Frederick K. Stearns’ gift to the museum of thousands of pieces from the Middle East and Asia. The collections of Ancient and Islamic Art and that of Asian Art developed separately over the years, with several key acquisitions like the nearly 4,000 year old statue of Gudea of Lagash from Mesopotamia/Babylon (present-day Iraq) and the monumental Head of Buddha from Korea. In 2003, the collections were merged into the Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Asian Art Collection.As part of its activities the department has also presented major exhibitions of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Classical, and Islamic art and curators have participated in excavations in Iraq and Egypt. more

© 2005 The Detroit Institute of Arts. All rights reserved

Museum Picks:The Metropolitan Museum’s Collection of Islamic Art

The Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Islamic art, which ranges in date from the seventh to the nineteenth century, reflects the great diversity and range of Islamic culture and offers perhaps the most comprehensive permanent installation of Islamic art on view anywhere. Nearly 12,000 objects created in the cultural tradition of the world’s youngest monotheistic religion (Islam, founded in A.D. 622, means “submission to God”) have been assembled at the Metropolitan from as far westward as Spain and Morocco and as far eastward as Central Asia and India. While many of these objects were originally intended for decoration of a mosque or for use during worship, domestic and luxury objects in the collection reveal the mutual influence of artistic practice in the sacred and secular realms. In particular, the traditions of calligraphy, vegetal ornament (the arabesque), and geometric patterning are strongly expressed in most pieces on view.more

Copyright by MET

Exhibitions: Sackler Museum – The Tablet and the Pen: Drawings from the Islamic World

  

The Tablet and the Pen: Drawings from the Islamic World uses 28 examples from Turkey, Iran and India to explore the development of drawing as an independent artistic medium; as part of the process of design for paintings, textiles and metalwork; and as a catalyst for artistic experimentation. It emphasizes aspects of technique and illuminates the historical circumstances that affected the development of the medium and the increased demand for single-sheet drawings in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, through July 23.

Art Editorials:The Arts of the Mongols

The Arts of the Mongols

“A monstrous and inhuman race of men,” Mathew Paris called the Mongols in the 12th century. They “feed on raw flesh, and even on human beings,” he wrote in his history, Chronica Majora.” They are incomparable archers,…impious and inexorable men.”

Written by Shelia S. Blair

The Mongols themselves traded on this reputation to intimidate their enemies. “Our horses are swift,…our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as the mountains…. We are not moved by tears nor touched by lamentations,” they warned the Mamluk sultan Qutuz. And in fact, the reputation was largely deserved. Genghis Khan was as brutal as he was brilliant, uniting disparate Turko-Mongolian tribes to form the most extensive land empire known to history, stretching from the Yellow Sea to the Caucasus Mountains. In February 1258, his grandson Hülegü sacked and burned Baghdad in one of the bloodiest conquests of the age, whose aftershocks shook the entire Islamic world.

Yet these efficient and ruthless conquerors also created, in the empire they won, what historians today call the pax mongolica, a century of peace and order so complete that it was said that a young woman could walk across Asia carrying a golden tray on her head without concern for her safety. During this period, approximately 1250 to 1350, unfettered trade linked the Mediterranean and China. This was the age of Ibn Battuta, William of Rubruck and Marco Polo, the most famous globetrotters of the Middle Ages.

Es-Seyyid Abdullah Efendi d. 1731

Abdullah of Yedikule was the favourite pupil of the celebrated calligrapher Hafiz Osman Efendi, and we know from the register of calligraphers that he received his icazet in 1102 H. He achieved great beauty and perfection in his use of Thuluth and Naskhi and was awarded both praise and protection by Sultan Ahmed Ill. He produced twenty-four Qur’ans as well as a number of Enams, Evrads, Kit’as, Murak’kas and Hilye-i Serifs. He had a large number of pupils. Most of his works are preserved in the Nuruosmaniye Library. Abdullah Effendi was greatly loved and admired by his teacher. He used the name Seyyid to indicate that he was descended from the family of the Prophet. He bid farewell to this transitory world in 1144 H.

Art & Leisure: Calligraphy – A Noble Art

Calligraphy is more than handwriting. It is a "spiritual technique" that beaches out with grace and elegance to engage the eve, mind and soul…

Written by Kamel Al-Baba

In a broad sense, calligraphy is merely handwriting, a means of recording and transmitting information, sometimes clearly, sometimes not, but in most instances hastily and with little regard for its appearance. In the Arab world calligraphy is something more. It is an art—indeed the chief form of visual art—with a history, a gallery of great masters and hallowed traditions. It is an art of grace and elegance which inspires wonderment for its appearance alone.

What distinguishes calligraphy from ordinary handwriting is, quite simply, beauty. Handwriting may express ideas, even great ideas, but to the Arab it must express, too, the richer dimension of aesthetics. Calligraphy to the Arab is, as the Alexandrian philosopher Euclid expressed it, "a spiritual technique," flowing quite naturally from the influence of Islam.

For thirteen centuries the dominant influence in the Arab world has been the Islamic religion. Its sacred book, the Holy Koran, as the word of God revealed to Muhammad in the Arabic tongue, has inspired generations of calligraphars who have sought to reproduce its words with a perfection of style worthy of its contents. Islam has exerted also a more subtle, a more indirect influence on the development of calligraphy: by discouraging the graphic representation of human beings and animals it channeled the creative energies of Muslim artists toward other decorative arts, especially calligraphy. Because the Koran itself has always been the most widely owned and widely read book in the Muslim world, the incentive to produce beautiful transcripts of the work has been powerful and constant. And because the final product was portable and relatively durable, the art acquired status among a people with nomadic origins.