The experience of colour in Islamic visual culture has
historically been overlooked. In this new approach, Idries Trevathan examines
the language of colour in Islamic art and architecture in dialogue with its
aesthetic contexts, offering insights into the pre-modern Muslim experience of
interpreting colour.

The seventeenth-century Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, represents
one of the finest examples of colour-use on a grand scale. Here, Trevathan
examines the philosophical and mystical traditions that formed the mosque's
backdrop. He shows how careful combinations of colour and design proportions in
Islamic patterns express knowledge beyond that experienced in the corporeal
world, offering another language with which to know and experience God. Colour
thus becomes a spiritual language, calling for a re-consideration of how we
read Islamic aesthetics.

Author: Idries Trevathan
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Saqi Books
Published: 09/10/2024
Pages: 256
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9780863560606

About the Author
Idries Trevathan is a curator and
conservator with close to twenty years' experience working with Islamic art
collections in the Muslim world and beyond. Trevathan works regularly on
conservation projects and has conducted technical and aesthetic colour studies
on a range of Islamic art, including the nineteenth-century Malay Qur'an
manuscripts, eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Damascene reception rooms and sixteenth-century
Ottoman porticoes in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Trevathan trained as an art
conservator at the City & Guilds of London Art School and earned a PhD in
colour in Islamic art from the Prince's Foundation School of Traditional Arts,
London.