Salmiya

Quasi-periodicity in 15 th century Islamic Art and whether it actually has been developed as a concept is still a matter of a somewhat controversial debate. There are three sites in the city of Esfahan which have been studied in this regard in considerable detail, two rather small patterns on a spandrel and a portal on the Darb-i Imam shrine in the Dardasht quarter of the old city (1453) and a huge pattern on the western iwan of the Great Mosque. Several authors have, in the meantime, tried to overlie Penrose patterns of kites and darts or thick and thin rhombuses in order to prove that medieval artisans were able to apply what had been described by Roger Penrose only five centuries later. See, for example, Lu and Steinhardt (2007), their response to some additional work by Makovicky (2007), or Cromwell (2008) here , here , and here . However, while a certain desire for subdivision and self-similarity can easily be traced on the respective buildings, it is not perfect, in particular...

Kuwait’s Arab Times had attracted my attention to Esfahan’s gorgeous Great Mosque in an article in 2003. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find so far a webpage of the article which praised the wonders of Iran’s largest mosque and one of the most significant and finest buildings of the Islamic world. I visited the site the first time at my second trip to Esfahan in late spring of 2004. I took some pictures in the vast courtyard, soaked the peaceful atmosphere there, and watched the few visitors from Iran and elsewhere. I had forgotten about the many details of the article and faintly had read some of the notes in my travel guide. My second visit in late 2007 was driven by scientific interest. I had recently posted (at Freelance ) my rather amateurish studies and thoughts about a suggested ‘conceptual breakthrough’ in Islamic architecture and art in the late 15th century, i.e., quasi-crystalline tessellations, which had led to world-wide attention due to its publication in the Science magazine...

The old Dardasht quarter near Esfahan’s Friday mosque hides another gem caught in time. The stunning Islamic art with an incredible degree of complexity has fascinated the West for a long time. Beautiful mosaics cover the dome, the minarets and the pillars of mosques. It was hold that the strict geometric star-and-polygon ornaments in, what is called in the West medieval, Islamic architecture was conceived as a network of zigzagging lines where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. Henri Stierlin writes in his monumental work about Islamic Art and Architecture (2002) about decorations of the Timurid era: "The determination of this splendour-loving dynasty to give religious buildings a special grandeur and lustre led to rivalry between architects as to who would produce the most perfect work, the design that was most unified while fully exploiting a variety of motifs, and a multiplicity of techniques including brick, glazed surfaces, mosaics, pierced s...