Muqarnas

This structure gives the ability to distinguish between the main parts of a building and serves as a transition from the walls of a square or rectangular room to a round dome or vault above it.

[6] From below, these compositions can create an elaborate visual effect based on the interplay of light and shadow across the surfaces sculpted into three-dimensional patterns.

[8][1] Although following strict rules and using only a limited set of individual forms, the technique allows for the creation of highly complex and diverse compositions.

[1] Western writers have often compared the resulting compositions to "stalactites" or "honeycombs" and these terms are often used in European languages to describe the technique.

One of its main uses is to bridge the transition between the base of a circular dome and a square chamber below it, effectively serving as an evolution of the more traditional squinch.

[8] Some plaster muqarnas compositions are attached to a hidden supporting framework or upper vault above, either glued or suspended by ropes.

[13] The earliest monuments to make use of this feature date from the 11th century and are found in Iraq, North Africa, Iran, Central Asia, and Upper Egypt.

[1] This apparently near-simultaneous appearance in distant regions of the Islamic world has led to different scholarly theories about their origin and diffusion.

[1][7] Some early scholars of Islamic art, such as K. A. C. Creswell and Georges Marçais, believed that the evidence points to a simultaneous parallel development in these different regions.

[1] The earliest evidence of muqarnas-like elements, although only conjectural, comes from fragments of stucco found in Nishapur, Iran, dated to the 9th or 10th century.

[7][3][1][18] Yasser Tabbaa has argued that muqarnas domes in particular must have originated in Baghdad and that the far-reaching influence of the Abbasid capital enabled its rapid spread to other regions afterwards.

Jonathan Bloom speculates that the outside influence could originate from Syria, but notes that there are few Syrian monuments still standing that can support this claim.

[5] At Qal'at Bani Hammad in central Algeria, a royal city founded in the early 11th century by the Hammadid dynasty, archeologists discovered fragments of plaster which have been identified by some as the earliest appearance of muqarnas in the western Islamic world,[20][21]: 133  but their dating and their identification as true muqarnas have been rejected or disputed by some scholars, including Yasser Tabbaa[7] and Jonathan Bloom.

[24] This type of dome was also popular in Zengid Syria around the same time, as in the example of the Bimaristan of Nur al-Din in Damascus (1154), which also features a shallow muqarnas vault hood over its entrance portal.

[1] In northern Mesopotamia, muqarnas domes were often made of stucco inside a conical or pyramidal brick roof, as seen in Mausoleum of Imam Awn al-Din in Mosul (built in 1245, destroyed by ISIS in 2014[25]).

[1] A closely related type is also seen in the Shrine of Shaykh 'Abd al-Samad in Natanz, Iran, which is dated to 1307 and demonstrates the sophistication muqarnas had reached in the Ilkhanid period.

[1]In Safavid Iran of the 16th to early 18th centuries, muqarnas was no longer used to cover the interiors of religious buildings but was still used to fill the vaults of iwans.

[1] In the 18th century, Iranian muqarnas began to be covered with mirror glass mosaics, with one of the earliest examples found at Chehel Sotoun in Isfahan, dating to its restoration in 1706–7.

[29] Muqarnas with small lozenge-shaped cells were combined with a related type of geometrically-patterned (squinch net) vaulting, usually based on a star motif.

[31]: 89 In Anatolia, the monuments of the Anatolian Seljuks and other local dynasties made use of muqarnas inside mihrabs (sometimes covered in tilework), on the capitals of columns, in the transitional zones of minaret balconies, and over masonry entrance portals.

[1] In the western Islamic world, muqarnas decoration was definitively introduced during the reign of the Almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf.

[22]: 98–100  It's possible that an even older instance of muqarnas existed in a palace inside the Alcazaba of Almería, dating to the reign of the Taifa ruler al-Mu'tasim (r. 1051–1091).

[11] The Asunción chapel in the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (near Burgos in northern Spain) features muqarnas and other Islamic-style decoration compatible with Almohad craftsmanship.

The most impressive example is in the Cappella Palatina (c. 1140) in Palermo, which has a central nave covered by the largest rectangular muqarnas vault in the world, made of painted wood.

[44]: 164, 170–171  In many of these examples, muqarnas vaults are recurring features in the gavits (narthexes) of the churches, which were the locus of much innovation and experimentation in medieval Armenian architecture.

[45] Antony Eastmond, in analyzing this detail of the church and comparing it with other non-Muslim monuments of the period (including Armenian constructions), suggests that muqarnas could have been adopted into a wider repertoire of architectural motifs and ideas that was shared across Anatolia and the surrounding region at this time.

[3] Oleg Grabar, in his work on the Alhambra in Granada, suggested that the large muqarnas domes in the Palace of the Lions were representations of the rotating heavens.

The celestial connotation of the muqarnas structure represents a passage from "the functions of living, or of awaiting eternal life that is expressed by geometric forms.