Oleg Grabar

How ornamentation enables a direct and immediate encounter between viewers and art objects Based on universal motifs, ornamentation occurs in many artistic traditions, though it reaches its most expressive, tangible, and unique form in the art of the Islamic world. The Mediation of Ornament shares a veteran art historian's love for the sheer sensuality of Islamic ornamentation, but also uses this art to show how ornament serves as a consistent intermediary...

Jerusalem is the final volume in a set of four selections of studies on Islamic art by Oleg Grabar. Between them they bring together more than eighty articles, studies and essays, work spanning half a century by a master of the field. Each volume takes a particular section of the topic, the three others being entitled: Early Islamic Art 650-1100, Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800, and Islamic Art and Beyond. Reflecting the many incidents of a long...

The Dome of the Rock was built in 692 C.E. under the patronage of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. It enshrines the Sacred Rock, literally the irregular highest tip of Mount Moriah, one of the several ridges around which the city of Jerusalem began to develop as early as five thousand years ago. The structure commemorates the Prophet Muhammad's (ca. 570-632) celebrated Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and his Ascension through the...

"This book presents and explains one of the most extraordinary spaces on earth, the large man-made area which occupies the southeastern corner of the walled Old City of Jerusalem and which takes up almost one-sixth of its surface." "This book is an unprecedented endeavor. For the first time an Israeli, a Palestinian, and a Dominican institute of higher learning, all located in Jerusalem, have decided to jointly sponsor a volume dealing with Jerusalem's...