Art from Islamic Lands, at the Hermitage Rooms; Durer and the Virgin, at the National Gallery

Date: 04-04-2004
Owning Institution: State Hermitage Museum.
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:   Renaissance  Middle Ages & Earlier    

“Heaven and Earth: Art from Islamic Lands”, at the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House, is a small but beautiful exhibition with a modest sense of missionary purpose. Its contents are drawn principally from the fine Islamic art collections of the State Hermitage Museum. The director of the Hermitage, N.B. Piotrovsky, writes well and poignantly, in his lucid introduction to the exhibition catalogue, about the mutual mistrust and misunderstanding that currently separates the cultures of Islam from those of the West. “An almost hysterical fear of the threat posed by Islam is one result of this non-communication… while, from the other side, comes the Muslim perception of the Western world as intensely and implacably hostile. This exhibition cannot change such entrenched world views but it can perhaps do a little to explain and inspire.” Global peace is unlikely to ensue but “Heaven and Earth” is at least a bright reminder of all those threads of connection – the quest for spiritual enlightenment, the thirst for beauty, the yearning for paradise – that join the Muslim and the Western worlds.

Islam is above all a religion of the word and its most influential work of art remains the Koran itself, the poetic text of Mohammad’s “recitation”, forced out of him (as he expressed it) following his mystical embrace with the angel Gabriel on Mount Hira. “He is the One God; God, the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of all being. He begets not, and neither is he begotten, and there is nothing that could be compared to him.” (Koran 112). Mohammad, like later generations of Orthodox Christians and European Protestants, placed a ban on religious imagery, and the first gallery of “Heaven and Earth” is principally devoted to the attempts of Islamic scribes to convey the transcendent mystery of God in the forms of calligraphy. The results are not writing instead of art but writing as art, expressed in forms of cursive script that run the gamut from intricacy and elegance to great power and monumentality. The earliest exhibited page is a fragment from the so-called Tashkent Koran, written in Kufic script, probably in North Africa, in the eighth century AD. The letter-forms have an austere, geometrical elegance. Penned in brown ink on sand-coloured vellum, evenly spaced, they almost seem to resemble a honeycomb of dwellings raised in a desert wilderness. A later page, from the early eleventh century, shows a script with much taller ascenders and exaggeratedly angular letter terminations, evoking the forms both of fire and of sudden slashing rain: the word of Allah rendered in such a way as to embody, perhaps, the energies with which he warms and animates the created universe. Another, from the tenth century, is penned in gold lettering on a field of azure, as if to suggest the nature of holy revelation as flame or fire shining from the celestial heights.These sheets of Islamic holy writ are moving and beautiful objects. Because they not only communicate specific texts, but also epitomise a type of expressive abstraction (even to the extent of anticipating many of the devices of much later Western abstract painting, which has its own metaphysical aspect) they survive translation to the foreign context of an art gallery surprisingly well.

“Heaven and Earth” fills only a few small rooms but still reflects the heterogeneity of the Hermitage’s Islamic collection, containing objects and works of art which collectively span a vast temporal and geographical sphere. There are thrilling eighth-century silver vessels of the Sassanian type, a particularly muscular example showing a bearded Assyrian prince slaying a lion (the Hermitage is unusually rich in ancient Islamic metalwork, largely because of excavation finds in the Urals and parts of Siberia). There are lustreware tiles from twelfth-century Iran, dense with fine foliate decoration. There are silk hangings created on the imperial looms of Ottoman Istanbul; carpets from Isfahan; and an array of golden, bejewelled objets de luxe – a table, an exquisite tray inlaid with floral patterns and a flask for rosewater encrusted with no fewer than 1,490 rubies, 509 emeralds and 40 diamonds – which were created for the Mughal court in the seventeenth century and given to Tsar Ivan VI by Nadir Afshar, the ruler of Persia, in 1741.

Most Islamic societies, like their Christian counterparts, have been characterised by polar extremes of spiritual unworldliness and a passion for luxury – a luxury justified, in the eyes of Muslim rulers, by the belief that they and their courts were to be seen as the “shadows” of God and His glory. But if one theme can be said to run through the assembled works of Islamic art in “Heaven and Earth”, sacred and secular alike, it is the leitmotif of the paradise garden filled with flowers, the pastoral refuge of bounty and beauty that awaits the righteous. It is figured in the floral decoration of Mughal goldsmithery, in the intricate frontispiece of a beautiful Iranian Koran, in silken hangings and prayer rugs – two-dimensional images, placed beneath kneeling worshippers, of the bliss that eventually awaits the devout – and most beautifully of all in the incomparably delicate manuscript illuminations of sixteenth-century Persia. The greatest masterpiece in the entire exhibition is perhaps a double-page miniature by Riza-i-Abbasi showing A Feast in a Spring Landscape, with a Swooning Youth, although it is also interesting that scholars remain uncertain whether it depicts a moment of sensual abandonment or spiritual revelation. Finely dressed sinuous figures sit, stand, squat and lie in a landscape of lush beauty, subtly abstract in its golden sky and stylised clouds, and contrastingly particularised in its trees, rocks and grasses. A beautiful youth, like some Persian prefiguration of Poussin’s languorous Narcissus, lies prostrate in a theatrically extravagant dead faint. It is possible that he is simply drunk, but the presence of a dervish among his entourage suggests that he may be experiencing divine ecstasy – rapt in a vision of paradise, perhaps.

About a century before Riza-I-Abbasi created his picture, the Northern Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer was painting his own rather different visions of a paradise garden. Several of these pictures, together with related studies, have been brought together in the Sunley Room of the National Gallery, in another small and extremely beautiful exhibition, on the theme of “The Virgin in the Garden”. The ostensible purpose of this show is to set the museum’s well known oil painting of that title – once believed to be by Durer himself, now generally regarded as a workshop production – in context. But the principal reason for a visit is the chance to see some of Durer’s most brilliant and rarely exhibited watercolour studies of flowers, plants and grasses, above all The Great Piece of Turf on loan from the Albertina in Vienna. It is a depiction, ostensibly, of nothing much, a square metre or so of muddy earth where luxuriant grasses grow, yet such is the patent intensity of Durer’s gaze, and so faithful is his draughtsmanship to the forms of the different grasses and weeds, that to look at it is to feel indeed as if seeing heaven in a wild flower.

The Great Piece of Turf was eventually relaid, so to speak – repainted in oils by members of Durer’s workshop – in the background of The Virgin in the Garden. But something was lost in the process, and the most memorable image of the madonna with child in a pastoral setting in this exhibition turns out to be another watercolour on loan from the Albertina, The Virgin with the Animals. Surrounded by faithfully observed creatures with symbolic overtones – a parrot for prophecy, a dog for fidelity, a fox for the evil she will have to overcome – Mary tranquilly dandles baby Jesus on her knee. Behind her spreads the panorama of an idealised German valley, with neat houses, safely corralled sheep and a group of shepherds, almost lost in the background, ecstatically greeting an annunciate angel. Spring flowers, irises, peonies, wild strawberries, carpet the ground.

There may not be many credible points of contact between the arts of Islam and the art of Durer but in this case there is a common source and a common notion of what it is to be blessed. The idea that the Virgin should occupy a garden, which is another Eden, reflects her role as an agent of human redemption. That is a Christian notion. But the idea of paradise is shared by Islam and Christianity alike. This is not surprising, since Mohammad was a man of the desert, like the prophets of the Old Testament and indeed like Solomon, whose poetic lines about “the rose of Sharon and the lily-of-the-valley” did much to shape the Christian conception of the Virgin in her garden. What could be more natural to such men than to think that heaven might be like a garden running with refreshing streams and sparkling with sunlit blooms? In that sense, the gardens of Islamic art and the verdant landscapes of Durer are flowers sprung from the same seed.