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465 results for mongols

Essay

Folios from the Great Mongol Shahnama (Book of Kings)

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

The Shahnama, with its rich detailing of the largely lost material culture of the Mongol court, presents a view of the contemporary Ilkhanid world, transforming a popular text into a splendid visual document of the period.

Essay

The Art of the Book in the Ilkhanid Period

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

The Mongols clearly brought with them an excitement about the art of painting.

Essay

The Legacy of Genghis Khan

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

The Mongols were remarkably quick in transforming themselves from a purely nomadic tribal people into rulers of cities and states and in learning how to administer their vast empire.

Essay

The Religious Arts under the Ilkhanids

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

The Mongols of the steppes believed in shamans—spiritual guides who could intercede between humans and the powerful spirits of good and evil.

Essay

Folios from the Jami‘ al-tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles)

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

The paintings draw upon a wide range of sources, including pre-Mongol Persian and Arabic texts, Chinese handscrolls and woodblock illustrations, and Byzantine religious and historical manuscripts.

Essay

The Mongolian Tent in the Ilkhanid Period

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

A Mongol royal tent was the epitome of luxury and allowed the ruler to reconcile semi-nomadic and sedentary lifestyles.

Press Release

RIDING ACROSS CENTRAL ASIA: IMAGES OF THE MONGOLIAN HORSE IN ISLAMIC ART

Essay

A New Visual Language Transmitted Across Asia

October 1, 2003

By Qamar Adamjee and Stefano Carboni

A number of motifs that were part of the existing artistic repertoire were adopted as imperial symbols of power and dominance.

Essay

Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368)

October 1, 2001

By Department of Asian Art

In the hands of highly educated scholar-artists, brushwork became calligraphic and assumed an autonomy that transcended its function as a means of creating representational forms.

Essay

The Art of the Ayyubid Period (ca. 1171–1260)

October 1, 2001

By Linda Komaroff and Suzan Yalman

Signatures of artists on refined and prized brass works inlaid with silver seem to indicate that the craftsmen were from Mosul (in present-day Iraq) and had fled from the approaching Mongol armies.

Art

Saddle and Bridle

Date: probably 19th century
Accession Number: 36.25.577a–c

Art

Helmet

Date: possibly 16th–17th century
Accession Number: 2001.91

Art

Defeat of the Mongols in the Western Sea

Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide (Japanese, 1807–1873)

Date: 1863
Accession Number: 2007.49.295a–c

Press

Genghis Khan's Cultural Legacy Highlighted in Landmark Metropolitan Museum Exhibition

In a lifetime characterized by war and conquest, Genghis Khan (1167?–1227) forged the largest contiguous land empire in human history. His legacy was a unified Mongol confederacy that his sons and grandsons ruled for more than a century. During this peaceful era, people, objects, and ideas moved with unprecedented freedom over a vast territory that reached from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea. The confluence of previously distant cultures yielded a bold new visual aesthetic that would resonate in Islamic art for centuries to come.

Art

Temple Pendant with Two Sirens Flanking a Tree of Life (front) and Confronted Birds (back)

Date: 11th–12th century
Accession Number: 17.190.680

Art

Adoration of the Magi from Seven Scenes from the Life of Christ

Date: ca. 1390
Accession Number: 1986.285.1

Exhibitions

The Legacy of Genghis Khan

Exquisite illustrated manuscripts, decorative arts, and architectural decoration created during the period of the Ilkhanid rule in the Iranian region.

Press

The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change

The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change, a complement to the exhibition The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty</b>, traces the momentous stylistic transformation in painting and calligraphy that began under Mongol rule and culminated in the literati traditions of the early Ming. Featuring more than 70 works in all pictorial formats—hanging scrolls, handscrolls, album leaves, and fans—the installation focuses on the rise of a new scholarly aesthetic in the graphic arts that occurred in response to the wrenching social and political changes brought about by the Mongol conquest. Drawn primarily from the Metropolitan's own holdings, the installation also includes 17 important loans from local private and university collections.

Press

RIDING ACROSS CENTRAL ASIA: IMAGES OF THE MONGOLIAN HORSE IN ISLAMIC ART

The Mongolian horse — a small, tireless, and agile animal that was instrumental to the movement of the Mongol armies across Central Asia — has also come to symbolize the introduction of new cultures and traditions to the eastern Islamic world. The depiction of horses in Islamic art — both realistic and symbolic — will be examined in the exhibition Riding across Central Asia: Images of the Mongolian Horse in Islamic Art, which will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 26.

Press

THE EMBODIED IMAGE: CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY FROM THE JOHN B. ELLIOTT COLLECTION

The most important and comprehensive exhibition of its kind ever assembled in the West, The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection</I> — opening September 15 — will bring together some 120 works of art from the two principal collections of Chinese calligraphy that were formed in the United States. More than 55 masterworks from the John B. Elliott Collection of The Art Museum, Princeton University — perhaps the finest such collection outside Asia — will be integrated with a similar number of masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, most notably from the John M. Crawford Jr. Collection, and loans from six private collections. Spanning the period from the fourth century to the modern era, the exhibition will explore the stylistic range and individuality of many of the leading artists of the last 1,000 years.