Tag Archives: Islamic Art History

Lecture | Dr Stefano Carboni | University of Melbourne

Macgeorge Fellowship Lecture Dr Stefano Carboni Director and CEO, Art Gallery of Western Australia This lecture explores one of the most intriguing books of the medieval Islamic world. The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things is an encyclopedia of the natural world written by the legal scholar Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazvini (1202-83), who worked under the late Abbasids and the early Mongol Ilkhanids in Iraq. The book was extremely popular and is known in many surviving manuscripts, virtually all of them heavily illustrated. The text describes such things as survival from shipwrecks, encounters with giant whales, people […]

Read More