The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

56, ‘The Event’. The main panels are surrounded on three sides by a
broad border of gold open-work arabesque terminating with finials
made up of alternating lotus flowers and buds. These light, elegant
pages faultlessly demonstrate a harmonic resolution of opposites
made up of open, closed, angular, cursive, static and dynamic patterns,
picked out in blue and gold, ‘the colours of the heavenly vault
and its luminaries’. 31
During the fourteenth century many illuminated Mamluk
manuscripts displayed stellar patterns with Chinese lotus flowers
and peonies. One such example is the double-page frontispiece in
a Qur’an written and illuminated for Arghun Shah al-Ashrafi
(1368–88) in the National Library, Cairo. At the centre of each page
is a small radiating sixteen-sided star which bursts into flower and
extends into a larger sixteen-sided figure enclosing floral motifs.
The central square panel is framed with a band of alternating lotus
flowers and peonies and these motifs are repeated and elaborated
in the outer frame, border and margin palmette. The text in the
upper and lower panels is taken from sura 26, ‘The Poets’, and is
written in ornamental Eastern Kufic. Kufic has a hieratic status in
Mamluk manuscripts, and was invariably used in headings in the
upper and lower panels, where its passive monumental aspect acts
as a perfect foil to the cursive scripts used in the centre panels.
Among the most beautiful manuscripts of this period are
those commissioned by Sultan Sha’ban. Two works commissioned
for his mother’s madrasa and his own khanqah near the Citadel,
in the National Library, Cairo, display remarkable illuminated
frontispieces. Both manuscripts reveal how profundity can be
expressed in purely ornamental language, and they convincingly
challenge modernist Western attitudes that dismiss ornamentation
as superfluous and decorative. These manuscripts resonate with a
beauty and majesty that cannot be explained by formal analysis
alone. There is a heraldic magnificence in the gilding and colour,
and the designs are perfect in their resolution, but there is another,
deeper dimension which is implicit in their creation. It is manifest
in the faultless technique, care, patience and breathtaking
complexity of the task in hand. The visual texture, consisting of
almost imperceptible surface irregularities and slightly embossed
layers of gold leaf, constantly reminds us that these works are the
product of the human hand and therefore are not perfect. They are
essentially a labour of love, an act of dedication and religious
devotion, and ‘a soul-nourishing accomplishment’. Modern
computers can replicate the complexity of such patterns in an
above: Detail of a panel featuring Chinese lotuses and
peonies: fourteenth-century illuminated frontispiece.
The Decorative Arts of the Ayyubids and Mamluks 185