The Shrine of the Twelve Imams, for example, has a frieze of Kufic On the 20th of March 1934, Robert Byron visited, together with the Friday Mosque of Yazd and the Vaqt-i Sa’at, the Shrine of the Twelve Imams, located in the same city. Byron’s mention of the monument is very brief: “The Shrine of the…
Tag: Yazd
The hidden decoration of the Vaqt-i Sa’at
The most elaborate of them Robert Byron is impressed by the beauty of the monuments of Yazd. In the entry dated 20th March 1934 of his travelogue, he writes down how unexpected it was for him to encounter such beauty. An extraordinary series of simple, egg-domed mausoleums now lured us across the town—extraordinary in that, being…
The Friday Mosque of Yazd and its decoration
clue after clue yielded treasure It is the 20th of March 1934 when Byron arrives at Yazd. As he recounts in his travelogue, the very same day he reaches the city, he sets off to look for monuments. And the monument that intrigued him the most in the city is the Friday Mosque. In his…
Reinterpreting an Iranian slab from XII century
After my previous blog, in which I gave my reading and some thoughts about an Iranian tombstone dated 1101 and kept in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I want to go on down this path and consider another tombstone, kept in the same museum (accession number M.73.7.1).
Signatures on gravestones: two XII century Iranian tombstones
Tombstones are full of surprises, and information: not only on the poor passed away, but also on the iconography, the use of Qur’anic citation, place and time, people, craftsmanship, patronage, religion, public and private sphere…in short: from a tombstone, if you are careful, you can get a whole context. Let’s take this one for instance
SquareKufic 