The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide [arabic Edition] Reviews

Arts of the City Victorious is the first book-length study of the art and architecture of the Fatimids, the Shi‘ite dynasty that ruled in North Africa and Egypt from 909 to 1171. The Fatimids are most famous for founding the walled city of Cairo in 969, and their art—particularly textiles and luster ceramics, but also metalwork and carved rock-crystal, ivory, and woodwork—has been admired for nearly a millennium. Fatimid art is known for its strongly figural imagery, and its elegant and inventive use of Arabic calligraphy, particularly the angular Kufic script. Highlighting surviving examples of Fatimid art and architecture, this volume also draws on an unusual wealth of medieval sources that provide written evidence for the rich visual culture shared among the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Fatimid realm. Whereas earlier studies treated the two and a half centuries of Fatimid art and architecture as a single category, this book is the first to show how they grew and evolved over time. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book focuses on key works of art, copiously illustrated with photographs, many in color. With this volume, art historian Jonathan Bloom synthesizes the findings of many scholars in many languages, to offer a rich portrait of a vibrant artistic period in Islamic civilization.

The genius and sensitivity of the justly celebrated nineteenth-century Scottish artist David Roberts are fully revealed in this outstanding special three-volume collector’s edition that reproduces in unprecedented print quality all 247 of Roberts’ published drawings of Egypt and the Holy Land. In 1838 and 1839, Roberts spent eleven months traveling and sketching throughout Egypt from Alexandria to Abu Simbel and through Sinai to Petra, Jerusalem, Palestine, and Lebanon. The 247 lithographs that Belgian engraver Louis Haghe then produced at the rate of one a month from the drawings executed during Roberts’ extraordinary trip were published in six volumes by Francis Graham Moon, as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–46) and Egypt and Nubia (1846–49). This monumental work assured the artist of a fame that has lasted until the modern day. Once again in this limited collector’s edition, the wonders that Roberts saw on his trip and the style of life in the Middle East in the middle of the nineteenth century are brought vividly to life by the pictures and the original accompanying texts by the Reverend George Croly and William Brockedon. All admirers of David Roberts will want to own this unique and exquisitely produced edition.