Ernst Grube's research spans Islamic painting from 10th-century Egypt to 19th-century Persia. This collection of studies presents his extensive scholarship, offering new materials, defining painting schools, and proposing fresh interpretations. Essential reading for art enthusiasts in Islamic and related art forms.

Ernst Grube's research on Islamic painting over more than three decades has dealt with materials, issues and problems ranging from 10th-century Egypt through Ottoman Turkey to 19th-century Persia. The studies collected in this volume represent the breadth of his scholarship: they collect and lay new materials before the reader, isolate and define schools of painting as thinking about them coalesces, and propose new interpretations of materials already well-known to scholars and students. Most of these studies are reprinted without major alterations, but additional notes at the end make some essential readjustments. Article 5, a study of a drawing on a so-called 'Fustat-Fragment', possibly of 9th-century date, has 50 pages of illustrations of such fragments, not included in the original article and most of them not published before. Professor Grube brings the methodological approach of a Western Medievalist to the study of a primary form of Islamic art. These articles are all essential reading for anyone interested in painting as a major form of art not only in the lands where Islam held sway but also in Late Classical Antiquity, Medieval Europe and Byzantium.