Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt

Arts of the City Victorious is the first book-length study of the art and architecture of the Fatimids, the Ismaili Shi'i dynasty that ruled in North Africa and Egypt from 909 to 1171. The Fatimids are most famous for founding the city of al-Qahira (whence the name Cairo) in 969, and their art - particularly textiles and lustre ceramics, but also metalwork and carved rock crystal, ivory and woodwork - has been admired for nearly a millennium. Initially brought home to Europe by merchants and Crusaders and then preserved as relics and reliquaries in church treasuries.
Fatimid art and architecture has always been somewhat anomalous in the history of islamic art because of the direction it grew (west to east), subject matter (figural at a time when geometry and the arabesque were developing elsewhere), and unusually rich and precise documentation in royal and popular accounts. Whereas earlier studies treated the two and a half centuries of Fatimid art and architecture as a single category, this book is the first to show how they grew and evolved over time.

Jonathan M. Bloom shares both the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University with his wife and colleague, Sheila S. Blair.