City image in illustrations of Arabic manuscripts of the XII–XIV centuries

Abstract

This article concerns the features and methods of artistic visualization of the image of a  city that described or mentioned only cursorily in texts of the illustrated medieval Arabic manuscripts. The visual images of a fabulous or real city, a priori existing in the historical and cultural space of the medieval Islamic world, inspired by the content of scientific treatises or literary works, and based on the real impressions or on folk tales either on author's fantasies usually are independent of the presence or absence of a verbal analogue in the text. It is often created by a portrayal associated in its purpose with a certain urban environment or causing associations with the lifestyle of a Muslim city. A city image is represented as a market with many people, or as a mosque with a minaret, either as a palace, a hotel, a library, or a school with students and their mentor, as a residential building, a city bath, a common garden or a  cemetery. Reproduction of a particular city is rarely the goal of an Arabic manuscript artist. Few recognizable pictures of a specific city are mainly limited by illustrations of geographical treatises and are dictated by the tasks of cartography. The most vivid and convincing lifestyles of the city in the vast historical and geographical space of the Arab Middle Ages art culture are performed in multitudinous and diverse illustrations for the thirteen extant manuscripts of  Maqamat (or “Assemblies’’) – the famous collection of entertaining and instructive crook novels by the Iraqi writer Al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122).