Review and Analysis of Coomaraswamy's Artistic View about the Book of al-Jazari

Khorasanizadeh, Mohammad

doi:10.52547/jic.6.1.29

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Volume 6, Issue 1 (Semi-Annual 2022) JIC 2022, 6(1): 29-40 | Back to browse issues page

‎ 10.52547/jic.6.1.29

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Khorasanizadeh M. (2022). Review and Analysis of Coomaraswamy's Artistic View about the Book of al-Jazari. JIC. 6(1), 29-40. doi:10.52547/jic.6.1.29
URL: http://jih-tabriziau.ir/article-1-169-en.html

Review and Analysis of Coomaraswamy's Artistic View about the Book of al-Jazari

Mohammad Khorasanizadeh ^*

Faculty of Arts, Shahed University, Tehran , HonareNab@gmail.com

Abstract: (5630 Views)

The book “Fi Ma'arifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiya” by al-Jazari, an engineer and artist of the sixth century AH of Islamic Civilization, in which fifty automated devices are described in a similar way to the product design process, with illustrations. The importance of this book becomes clear when we know that today dozens of its manuscripts are kept in museums around the world. This multiple copying of a book in different periods and geographies shows its many uses in different ages. In recent centuries and after the transfer of books and cultural heritage of Islamic civilization to the West, many scientific researches have been conducted around this book, the absolute majority of these researches have been conducted by researchers in the fields of mechanical engineering, physics and robotics, and therefore its artistic aspects have been almost ignored. has been While al-Jazari's book can inspire many artistic researches in various fields of art such as product design, music, painting and calligraphy. One of the few artistic researches about this book is " The treatise of al-Jazari on automata ", written in 1924 by Coomaraswamy. This booklet, which has not yet been translated into Persian, has been analyzed in the present study. This study both through its research approach and its author's position, has a great value in the history of art. The method of this research is descriptive – analytic and Historical, during which the text of the Coomaraswamy was translated into Persian and was analyzed and reviewed along with some other library data. The main question in this research is that What features of al-Jazari’s book are emphasizes by Coomaraswamy, as art researcher? Therefore, the purpose of this study is to find the features of the book of al-Jazari from the view of Coomaraswamy. These artistic features were extracted from the text of the booklet in 7 cases; Diagnosing the painting of the door of Amida palace, negating the possibility of painting the face of a specific sultan, introducing al-Jazari as an artist, the characteristics of the illustrations of a manuscript, not changing the names of kings in the illustrations of later versions, Arabic and Greek markings, and examining 8 paintings. It can be said that Coomaraswamy has tried to answer some of the ambiguities and errors by limited informations in the time of text compilation using visual arguments, and the artistic features and especially the features that can be applied to the history of this work of art and science, Provides information such as writing, slave names, markings, specialty stylistics, and so on, but most of the points that Coomaraswamy puts forward is based on the history of art rather than on aesthetics and stylistics, and in fact this booklet may be the first art historical document about al-Jazari’s book. One of the most important achievements of this text is the one in which Coomaraswamy reads al-Jazari in the first place as an artist and eventually second to a thinker, and this inference from a historian of art can be very important.

Keywords: al-Jazari, Ilm al-Hiyal, sina'at al-hiyal, Coomaraswamy, Painting, Art History.

Full-Text [PDF 1994 kb] (2450 Downloads)

Type of Study: Original Research | Subject: 2
Received: 2022/03/28 | Accepted: 2022/10/17 | Published: 2022/11/23

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