Wall paintings of the Great Mosque of Isfahan

摘要

This compact, well-illustrated book sheds new light on the history of a canonical building of Islamic architecture: the Friday or Congregational Mosque of Isfahan in central Iran. Several campaigns of excavations conducted during the 1970s by an Italian team from IsMEO (Istituto per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente) directed by Umberto Scerrato and Eugenio Galdieri documented the fundamental change there from the hypostyle mosque, typical of the 'Abbasid period and sometimes dubbed the 'Arab-style' plan, to the four-wan or 'Iranian-style' plan that became standard in much of Iran and Central Asia. In addition to structural concerns, the excavators also uncovered fragments of painted stucco and plaster, mostly in the area around the tnihrab. This book analyzes these 104 fragments, which were stored in some two dozen wooden boxes following the abrupt suspension of excavations due to the Islamic Revolution in 1978.