Manuscript illumination (tadhhib)

Illumination is the art of decorating title pages, headings, verse divisions, colophons, dedications, borders and book covers; Norah Titley traces its origin to the simple decoration of vowel marks and of the circles separating verses in Qur'ans written by Arab calligraphers in the seventh and eighth centuries. ¹ By the fourteenth century ornate palmettes and sunbursts decorated the borders of Qur'ans, and the arabesque had become inseparable from Islamic decoration. ¹

Titley derives the arabesque from the ornamentation of square Kufic script, when calligraphers added tendrils and scrolls to the tops of vertical letters; it is a design of leaves, and later flowers, always attached by their stalks to a tendril. ¹ Artists of Iran, Turkey, India and Kashmir added their own characteristics to this originally Arab art, using it in religious and secular manuscripts alike. ¹

Titley notes that the academies of Shiraz under Iskandar Sultan and of Herat under Baysunghur, Shahrukh and Sultan Husayn produced the finest fifteenth-century illumination, Shiraz favouring deep maroon and Herat black. ² Herat headings used lapis lazuli grounds; artists fleeing from Herat to Tabriz brought flowers into the arabesque; and Tabriz work passed to India under Humayun and to Istanbul after 1514. ³ Illumination was not confined to text pages but entered paintings themselves, on architecture, tents, saddlecloths and carpets. ^{4 2}