The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture by Gülru Necipoğlu
Excerpt from the publisher's site with free access to the book:
"Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture.
The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault."
Table of Contents
Preface
Notes to the Reader
Part 1: The Scroll Tradition
Chapter 1. Architectural Drawings and Scrolls in the Islamic World
Chapter 2. The Topkapi Scroll, Its Date and Provenance
Chapter 3. The Topkapi Scroll as a Mirror of Late Timurid-Turkmen Architectural Practice
Notes to Part 1
Part 2: The Discourse on the Geometric “Arabesque”
Chapter 4. Ornamentalism and Orientalism: The Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Literature
Chapter 5. Recent Studies on Geometric Ornament
Notes to Part 2
Part 3: The Geographical, Chronological, and Semantic Horizons of the Geometric Mode
Chapter 6. Geometric Patterning Before the Mongols
Chapter 7. The Post-Mongol Synthesis
Notes to Part 3
Part 4: Geometry and the Contribution of Mathematical Sciences
Chapter 8. Theory and Praxis: Uses of Practical Geometry
Chapter 9. Manuals of Practical Geometry and the Scroll Tradition
Notes to Part 4
Part 5: Geometry and Aesthetic Theory
Chapter 10. The Aesthetics of Proportion and Light
Chapter 11. Geometric Abstraction and the Psychology of Visual Perception
Chapter 12. The Semiotics of Ornament
Notes to Part 5
Catalog: Pattern Types and Drawings in the Topkapi Scroll
List of Pattern Types
List of Drawings
The Topkapi Scroll: A Color Reproduction
The Muqarnas: A Geometric Analysis by Mohammad al-Asad
Map of the Islamic World
Bibliography of Printed Primary and Secondary Sources
Index