Art and Architecture of Islam added to ARTstor

Professors Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (Boston College), Professor Walter B. Denny (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and ARTstor announced today that they had reached an agreement to collaborate on the distribution through ARTstor of up to 25,000 high quality digital images of the art and architecture of Islam from the personal archives of this team of leading scholar photographers.

Jonathan Bloom’s primary areas of research include Islamic art and architecture, the history of paper, and art in the medieval Mediterranean world. Sheila Blair’s major areas of research are Islamic art, especially the arts of Iran and Central Asia, the art and architecture produced under the Mongols, calligraphy and books. Walter B. Denny’s primary field of teaching and research is the art and architecture of the Islamic world, in particular the artistic traditions of the Ottoman Turks, Islamic carpets and textiles, and issues of economics and patronage in Islamic art. In reaching this agreement, Walter B. Denny said, “I anticipate that the availability of these resources through ARTStor will make it significantly easier for courses on Islamic art to be offered in institutions throughout the world.”