Qur'an Manuscript Folio (1500s): Art, History and Details

Qur'an Manuscript Folio (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, was elevated above all other art forms in the Islamic world because Allah (God), revealed the divine word of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad (570–632) in the Arabic language. This beautiful double page forms the opening pages, or unwan, of a Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam. Read from right to left, the verses are written in Arabic in elegant naskhi script on a gold ground with florets identifying the ends of the verses. Calligraphers who specialized in beautiful writing often dedicated their lives to copying the Qur’an to grow closer to Allah and receive his blessings. The pages are enhanced with splendid illumination—ornamentation in colors and gold with scrolling vines, blossoms, lozenges, and cartouches within bordered rectangles. Because the book arts were held in high esteem in the Islamic world, decorative motifs created by illuminators were often adopted in other art forms such as metalwork, textiles, and carpets.

Object facts

• Title: Qur'an Manuscript Folio
• Date: 1500s
• Culture: Afghanistan, Herat, Safavid period (1501–1722)
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, gold, and colors on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 28 x 17.4 cm (11 x 6 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Islamic Art
• Department: Islamic Art
• Accession number: 1924.746

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sims, Lowery Stokes. The persistence of geometry: form, content, and culture in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.