Introduction

The art of the Umayyads (661–750) has long been a magnet for scholarly attention, especially from around 1900 onwards, and with a particular focus on architecture and its decoration, since that accounts for most of what survives. Some of the greatest scholars of Islamic art, such as Creswell, Herzfeld, Sauvaget, Ettinghausen and Grabar, have sought to chronicle that material and to unravel its complexities. In particular, Creswell's magisterial survey of that subject, first published in 1932 and then re-issued in expanded form in two gargantuan volumes in 1969, has provided a solid foundation for all subsequent research, though of course not the last word. And Grabar devoted perhaps his finest work to a comprehensive assessment of early Islamic art in its full historical, social, economic, religious and cultural context, and the Umayyad period was central to his argument. More recently, the Umayyad contribution to textiles, manuscript production9 and metalwork has attracted greater interest and has made a more nuanced appreciation of Umayyad art possible.

Nevertheless, the great bulk of the published work on Umayyad art has taken the form of close-focus studies of individual monuments and their decoration, to the detriment of sustained attempts to identify the immanent characteristics of Umayyad art as a whole. The relatively few ventures in this latter direction have either been too brief, as in some of the handbooks of Islamic art, or have been too focused on a single building to permit extended reflections of more general import. That latter approach has indeed consistently yielded significant results, but it is nevertheless too easy to lose sight of their wider application. So, there is still ample room for an assessment of Umayyad art as a whole, concentrating on the wood rather than the trees, let alone the twigs. The evidence cited in the present chapter is for the most part familiar enough. But it is used here in an attempt to define an Umayyad aesthetic by probing the rationale that governed what was borrowed from earlier Mediterranean traditions.

The Historical Context

It is worth recalling very briefly the political backcloth to this artistic process, familiar as it is. The whirlwind Arab conquests in the exact century following the death of the Prophet Muḥammad in 632 saw Muslim territory expand continuously, until it stretched from central France to the borders of China, the greatest empire the world had yet seen.