Art Photos mixed

It was a major boon for a collector to own a Qur’an by a celebrated calligrapher or copied at a holy site, such as the prayer room of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, or written in lampblack from the oil lamps at the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul. By acquiring, reading and reciting from Qur’ans, the blessings they carry are bestowed on to their new owners. Fortunately for today’s scholars and conservators, early custodians were keen to add to the texts’ genealogy by inscribing their names and relevant restoration treatments in the manuscript. *The movement of Qur’ans is explored in an exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, which features rare loans from Istanbul’s Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. For the US museum’s chief curator and curator of Islamic art, Massumeh Farhad, who is co-curating the show with Simon Rettig, it is thrilling to trace the manuscripts’ journeys through time and space.

From Baghdad to Istanbul

An inscription in a late 13th-century Qur’an copied by the celebrated calligrapher Yaqut al-Musta’simi states that the Qur’an had travelled from Baghdad in Iraq to Tabriz, north-west Iran, before its arrival in Istanbul, possibly as one of the spoils from Selim I’s raid of the treasury of the Safavid dynasty founder, Shah Isma’il, after the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Three centuries passed before Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808-38) transferred it from Topkapi Palace to the tomb of his father Abdülhamid—an admirer of the calligraphic arts. It entered the collection of Istanbul’s new Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in 1914, when the Ottoman government centralised the empire’s manuscript collections.These inscriptions also record previous restorations. “You see them particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries,” Rettig says. In most cases, the binding and the first and last pages are the first to be replaced. “The exhibition shows that components are not contemporary with each other. You have 13th-century texts with illuminations added in the 15th century in a binding made in the 17th century. It’s fascinating to have all these complex layers of history in one place,” he says.

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Falcon cup (around 1600) from the Gilbert collection (Photo: © Victoria & Albert Museum)

The Gilbert collection reopened in refurbished galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London on 15 November. The collection of around 1,200 decorative art objects was donated to the UK in 1996 by the late British-born, Los Angeles-based property tycoon Arthur Gilbert and his first wife Rosalinde.

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Khamsa of Nizami (around 1585–90), a Mughal manuscript in the Keir collection on long-term loan to the Dallas Museum of Art (Photo: courtesy of Resnicow and Associates)

When the Dallas Museum of Art secured the loan of one of the world’s most significant private collections of Islamic art two years ago, few predicted the resonance it would have today. As the US prepares to inaugurate a president who once proposed banning Muslims from entering the country, the museum is reaffirming its commitment to Islamic art. It is preparing a dedicated gallery on its ground floor for the Keir Collection—2,000 works assembled by the late Hungarian lawyer and collector Edmund de Unger.

“It’s putting Islamic art in a prime location—you can’t miss it,” says Sabiha Al Khemir, the museum’s senior adviser for Islamic art. The 2,200 sq. ft space, which is due to open on 16 April, will present a rotating display of more than 100 works spanning 13 centuries. The stars of the collection, including the lavishly illustrated Mughal manuscript Khamsa of Nizami (around 1585-90), will be shown alongside never-before-seen carpets, pottery and textiles.

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Joana Vasconcelos's Pop Galo (2016) (Photo: © Luís Vasconcelos; courtesy of Unidade Infinita Projectos)

A giant cock by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos will be shown in Beijing as part of the celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year on 28 January 2017 and the beginning of the year of the rooster. It will then be displayed in Shanghai.The ten-metre-high sculpture, Pop Galo, which represents the symbol of the city of Barcelos in northern Portugal, has been on display on the Lisbon waterfront since last month. It consists of 17,000 hand-made tiles and is illuminated at night by 15,000 LED lights, using almost 9km of electrical cable.

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Your essential guide to the must-see shows, biennials and museum openings around the world

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A major exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s year-long journey to the Low Countries from 1520 to 1521 is to be held in Aachen and Antwerp in 2020 and 2021. The curators of this ambitious project hope to bring together all the paintings and most of the drawings the artist created on what was an important trip, which he carefully recorded in his journal. It is unusual for institutions to reveal details of exhibitions so far in advance, but this is being done partly to help secure loans from many leading museums across Europe and North America.

The Dürer exhibition is due to open in October 2020 at the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen, which is near Germany’s border with Belgium and the Netherlands. In February 2021 it will be presented at Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts (which is closed for major renovations and due to reopen in 2019). The most important painting completed on Dürer’s trip is of St Jerome, in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.

Five preparatory drawings, four in the Albertina in Vienna and one belonging to the Berlin State Museums, are also being requested. On one of the sketches for the saint, the artist has inscribed: “The man was 93 years old and yet healthy and strong”. Another preparatory drawing is of the skull, which he had bought a few weeks earlier in Cologne for two pfennigs.

The other four paintings Dürer made on the journey are all portraits. Bernard von Reesen, a 30-year-old Danzig merchant living in Antwerp, was depicted a few months before he died from the plague (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden). The others are of uncertain or unidentified sitters. These are in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; the Louvre in Paris; Madrid’s Prado; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “All five paintings done in the Low Countries are essential for our exhibition,” says Peter van den Brink, the co-curator from Aachen.



Dürer’s Study of a Man Aged 93 (1521) (Albertina, Vienna)

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Frosted landscape by Patrice Thomas

Founded in 1217 by St Francis of Assisi, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, the Custody of the Holy Land is a branch of the Franciscan monastic order that has operated in Jerusalem continuously for more than eight centuries. Their mission has been to preserve the places in the city that are important to the Christian faith, and to protect pilgrims to those sites, which number more than 2 million a year.As emissaries of the Catholic Church in Jerusalem, the Franciscans have also guarded religious buildings and objects, becoming custodians of a collection of vestments, liturgical objects, books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, sculptures and pottery that have been rarely seen by the public. Many of the items came from royal families that the Franciscans have outlasted. Around 30 of these objects go on view this month in the exhibition Venetian Treasures in Jerusalem: Following the Lion, at the Monastery of St Saviour near the New Gate, the order’s headquarters and one of two planned sites for the new Terra Sancta Museum.



Francesco De Mura, The Coronation of the Virgin, around 1730



A reliquary of the True Cross, 1628



The order has also leant works from its collection to museums around the world. A group of 12th-century sculptural capitals of columns depicting New Testament scenes from the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, operated by the Franciscans, are part of the exhibition Jerusalem 1000-1400; Every People Under Heaven at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 8 January). A friar from St Savior who assisted in preparing the exhibition is now studying museum administration in New York.Also on loan to the Met are two 13th-century silver candlesticks from Bethlehem, with a warning inscribed in niello: “Maledictur qui me aufert de loco sce nativitatis bethleem” (Anathema to him who would take me away from the site of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem).

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Today would have been David Bowie’s 70^th birthday (it’s hard to believe that the music genius died almost a year ago, on 10 January). The Victoria & Albert Museum has organised a wealth of events on 8 January celebrating the rock god, from a choir performance of groundbreaking Bowie tracks such as Heroes, to a guitar session led by Nigel Jones which focuses on the chord structures on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The day will close with a screening of the feature film David Bowie Is Happening Now, filmed on the closing night of the exhibition David Bowie Is, which opened at the museum in 2013 (Pulp front-man Jarvis Cocker, the artist Jeremy Deller and other fans and collaborators*discuss*key objects charting*Bowie’s artistic career). Meanwhile, David Bowie Is opens in Japan today at the Terrada G1 in Tokyo (until 9 April). This stint is the ninth international tour venue for the exhibition*which has been seen by more than 1.5 million visitors worldwide, making the show the most visited in the museum’s 164-year history.


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Only Among Many by Pierre Pellegrini