Islamic Art.
Hello classmates,
First of all I am going to define art. According to www.dictionary.com, art is defined as “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” Nowadays, its very hard for anyone to imagine his or her life without art. Well in the Islamic Era, art flourished and was treated as any other field. It embraced art forms such as architecture, decoration, ceramic art, faience mosaics, lustre-ware, relief sculpture, wood and ivory carving, friezes, drawing, painting, calligraphy, book-gilding, manuscript illumination, lacquer-painted bookbinding, textile design, metalworking, and gemstone carving. Islamic art was influenced by Arabic, Turkish, Persian and other non-Islamic cultures.
As the other fields, Islamic artists were influenced by their religion. Because they wanted to come closer to God and God’s knowledge, writing the Quran’s script and decorating mosques were essentials to this matter.
In the renaissance, roman and Greek artists succeeded in using art, in particular drawing, painting, and sculpture, to depict stories of the bible. Some of the paintings were extremely significant to religion. Art became a field in which nobles, and effluents proved this social status through patronage of religious paintings. However, art in Islam has its limitation. Visual depictions are prohibited in Islam. Although the Quran does not explicitly forbid images of figures, some hadith prohibited Muslims form creating visual depictions of figures. The reason for that is any sort of visual depiction encourages idolatry; where the images or sculptures would be more important than what they represent.
Rima