The Character of Umayyad Art: the Mediterranean Tradition

This chapter is an attempt to explain what happened when Umayyad art came to grips with the pictorial heritage of Byzantium and, further back, of the Graeco-Roman classical world. The period when this encounter took place is short - 661-750 – but the pace of change was extraordinarily rapid and intense. The bulk of this article is an attempt to identify the underlying processes which shaped Umayyad art. Three stages emerge with some clarity: imitation; adaptation; and transformation. Each stage will be explored in some detail and illustrated with examples taken from a remarkable variety of media: architecture, of course, with its sister arts of painting, sculpture and mosaic, but also textiles, coins, manuscripts and metalwork. Iconography also plays a major role. The art of this century takes the Graeco-Roman, early Christian and Byzantine heritage down many unexpected paths, with its time-honoured conventions variously copied, adapted and thoroughly reworked in accordance with a constantly evolving aesthetic. That aesthetic used not only Graeco-Roman art but also the various subsets of Byzantine art – Italian, Balkan, Syrian and Egyptian among them – in unprecedented ways, creating a foundation on which all later Islamic art rests.