Baghdad School
This stylistic movement used strong, bright colors, and employed a balanced sense of design and a decorative quality, with illustrations often lacking traditional frames and appearing between lines of text on manuscript pages.
The school consisted of calligraphers, illustrators, transcribers and translators, who collaborated to produce illuminated manuscripts derived from non-Arabic sources.
The characteristic Baghdad School artistic style, which features sprightly characters bearing highly expressive faces and hand gestures (rather than stereotypical people), reached its peak in the first half of the 13th-century, although some examples can be identified at earlier periods.
[13] The Greek materia medica, in particular herbals and bestiaries, which described the characteristics and medicinal uses of various plants and animals found in the Mediterranean world, were among the books transcribed.
[2] Dioscorides was a renowned Greek physician, herbalist, and pharmacist serving the Roman Empire and its armies during the first century CE, whose work gained influence throughout the medieval Islamic world.
[2] Dioscorides was a renowned Greek physician, herbalist, and pharmacist serving the Roman Empire and its armies during the first century CE, whose work gained influence throughout the medieval Islamic world.
The scene itself has a realistic and personalized quality to it, depicting a physician in a natural setting as he prepares a medicinal mixture containing honey for his patients, and yet also has ornamental characteristics with its design and choice of colors—another distinctive feature of the Baghdad School.
[2] Illustrations and text from the 13th-century Arabic translation of De Materia Medica The 1237 edition of the Maqamat al-Hariri is an illuminated manuscript created by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti in 1237.
[18] It may have been created in Baghdad, based on some stylistic parallels with the Kitab al-baytarah which securely emanated from this city, but this attribution remains quite conjectural.
[21][22] The manuscript details a series of tales regarding the adventures of the fictional character Abu Zayd of Saruj who travels and deceives those around him with his skill in the Arabic language to earn rewards.
[3] Other illustrations by Yahya Al-Wasiti from al-Hariri's Maqamat Yet other examples of work in the style of the Baghdad School include the illustrations in Kalīla wa-Dimna (Fables of Bidpai), (1222); a collection of fables by the Hindu, Bidpai translated into Arabic,[26] and Rasa'il al-Ikhwan al-Safa (The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren) (1287); an example of an illuminated manuscript produced after the Mongol invasion.
