Precious Materials

Annabelle Collinet is curator for the medieval Iranian world in the Department of Islamic Arts, Muse e du Louvre, and associate member of CeSor, Centre d'etudes en sciences sociales du religieux d'e tudes en sciences sociales du religieux, UMR 8216 (EHESS/CNRS). She has a PhD from the University of Paris-I Pantheon-Sorbonne, and her interests focus on the 'arts of fire' in the Iranian and Indian world. The subject of her thesis (archeology and history of Islamic art) focused on the ceramic cultures of Sind (Pakistan) from the 8th to the 18th century. She is the co-author of the publication of the results of the Franco-Iranian archaeological research (CNRS, Louvre, ICHTO) carried out in eastern Iran between 2006 and 2009: Nishapur Revisited, Stratigraphy and Ceramics of the Qohandez (Oxbow Books, 2013). Annabelle Collinet regularly teaches at the E cole du Louvre where, since the early 2000s, she has lectured on the arts of the Islamic world, in particular the metalwork of the Middle East and Iran.David Bourgarit, is an archeometallurgist and researcher at C2RMF (Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Restoration des Muse es de France) and member of UMR 7055 (Prehistory and Technology, University of Nanterre). With a specialisation in metallurgy, he was awarded a diploma from the E cole nationale superieure de physique de Grenoble (1992) and a doctorate in metallurgy and materials from the Universite de Paris-XI (1996), where he also obtained his habilitation for directing chemistry research (2009). His research focuses on ancient metallurgical techniques dating from European proto- history to the French Renaissance. David Bourgarit is currently leading the international CAST:ING international project (2015-2021) on copper alloy sculpture, and he co-directs the VISHNU project (2018- 2023) on monumental sculpture at the National Museum of Cambodia.

Precious Materials is a dazzling and erudite work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Drawing together careful historical research, provenance sleuthing, and comprehensive archaeometallurgical analysis of materials and techniques, the text sets a new bar for the study of metalworking in the medieval Islamic world. The authors present a sequence of clear interpretive frames that build upon each other, culminating in a catalogue where each virtuosic object is explored in unprecedented detail. Working in concert with this is a wealth of carefully deployed technical imagery, suffusing the whole book with the uncanny beauty of the X-radiograph and the microphotographic detail. We are shown things no human eye has ever seen before. The metalworkers of pre-Mongol Iran and Afghanistan have long been recognized as supreme masters of their craft, but never before has it been possible to see and to know the true extent of their skills in such forensic detail.Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Brown University