Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt.

• Author: Walker, Paul E.
• Position: Book review

Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt. By JONATHAN M. BLOOM. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS in association with THE INSTITUTE OF ISMAILI STUDIES, 2007. Pp. xviii + 236. illus. $75.

This handsome new book by the well-regarded art historian Jonathan Bloom presents the entire scope of Fatimid art, from its earliest phases in the Maghrib commencing in 909 to the close of the dynasty in Egypt in 1171. For reasons that have not always been clear to those of us who are not historians of Islamic visual arts, the Fatimids have commanded unusual notice among students of this subject. The literature on specific features and individual objects from the period is relatively plentiful, so much so that for an outsider to master more than a limited selection offers a daunting task. And until now one might read many smaller studies and yet fail to grasp the whole picture and discern the true importance of Fatimid art. Exhibition catalogues and the occasional conference volume with its published proceedings have not reached that goal, in part because they have not necessarily raised all the issues, as, for example, those connected with broader questions of influence. An exhibit also deals with architecture less well than the portable arts. Arts of the City Victorious (a name that points to Cairo, al-Qahira, "the victorious," a city created by the Fatimids) at last changes all that. In one volume we are here treated to the full range of Fatimid art. with copious illustrations, accompanied by a learned, suitably cautious analysis of its achievement, its numerous strengths, and some of its weaknesses.

The subject matter of Fatimid art, in addition to architectural monuments many of which survive although frequently altered by restorations over the centuries, includes various categories of the decorative arts: textiles, ceramics, metalwares, rock crystal and glass, woodwork, ivories, books and illustrations, coins, and more. Deciding what of the latter is actually Fatimid is difficult. Even when an object can be safely assumed to belong to the right time and place, what is it that makes it specifically Fatimid. that is, having a characteristic peculiar to this Islamic dynasty as opposed to another of the same period? For an item now found far away from its supposed origin, questions of the kind are often insoluble, although that has not necessarily hindered speculation. The search for a connection between...