Le matériel épigraphique constitue une part non négligeable des calligraphies en caractères arabes. Beaucoup reste à explorer dans certaines régions où ces formes écrites ont souvent pris des significations spécifiques pouvant aller bien au-delà de leur message textuel. Cette rencontre est organisée en deux temps : une table-ronde réunira d’abord un chercheur, une calligraphe et un tailleur de pierre, dans un échange portant sur les modus operandi. Une journée d’études rassemblera ensuite archéologues, historiens de l’art et épigraphistes travaillant sur les inscriptions sur les rives de la mer Noire, la Péninsule Ibérique, et le monde indo-persan.
Between the 13th and the 17th of May 2024, CallFront hosted a week-long international workshop in Paris, focusing on calligraphic practices in the Iberian Peninsula, the Maghrib, and West Africa. This event brought together a panel of specialists in the field, who engaged with the scientific community of Paris and presented their work to a broader audience.
The workshop featured three major events, fostering the dialogue among scholars from diverse disciplines, such as History of Art, History, Paleography, and Anthropology. This interdisciplinary exchange enriched the CallFront corpus of scripts, and encouraged the advancement of research in these areas. Additionally, one of the goals of this workshop was to document some of the West African calligraphic traditions before they disappear, as they have in other regions.
West African manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
The first event was held on May 14th at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where the CallFront team was welcomed by Khalid Chakor Alami, in charge of the Persian and Arabic manuscript collections. This work session was led by Susana Molins Lliteras (University of Cape Town) and Mauro Nobili (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), who examined several West African manuscripts. The following manuscripts were given a particular attention: BnF Arabe 402[1], BnF Arabe 509[2], and BnF Arabe 6869[3].
Fig. 1 – Work session at the BnF – Photo: Chiara Tedesco
On November 7th, 2023 we had the pleasure of welcoming Umberto Bongianino, Departmental Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, for a session on praxis. These sessions are meant to be exploratory collaborations between researchers and calligraphers, in order to experiment and try out new hypotheses, following an established protocol developed by the CallFront Project. In this case, this was a preliminary session ahead of our work with the Moroccan master calligrapher Hamidi Bel’aid, who will be collaborating with us in the upcoming future.
We structured this session around a series of questions posed by Umberto Bongianino concerning the instruments used to write the Maghribī mabsūṭ (“monumental”) style, as well as the techniques used for Maghribī thuluth chrysography. The final part of the session broached questions regarding letter forms in epigraphic Maghribī thuluth, as well as the possible methods used for the transposition of models.
Fig. 1. Printed model from the Marrakesh Quran ca. 1220, the experiment sheet and different types of qalams.
For the experiments on Maghribī mabsūṭ, we used three specimens printed to scale: two Qurʾāns possibly from Marrakesh, dating from ca. 1220[1] and ca. 1230 (the “Pink Qurʾān”),[2] and a Qurʾān probably from Fes, dated 705 H./1306.[3] Our main objective was to recreate the calamus which would have been used for these calligraphic styles, a monumental variant of Maghribī round scripts used especially, but not exclusively, in Quranic manuscripts. In order to do this, we first selected thick 160 gr drawing paper, with no sizing but polished, resembling the weight and texture of the Pink Qurʾān. For the ink, although the corrosive effects on the pages of the original specimens indicate the employment of metallo-gallic inks (ḥibr), we used a black soot ink (midād), easier to procure and which behaved similarly to ḥibr in terms of consistency.
La prochaine séance du séminaire Calligraphie aux frontières du monde islamique (CallFront) aura lieu le 29 mars 2024, de 12h à 14h, à l’Institut d’Art et Archéologie (Paris), salle Doucet :
Epigraphic practices in Sultanate North India, 14th-15th centuries
Saarthak Singh (Gent University)
Organisation : Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Maxime Durocher
Mihrab de la mosquée Niujie, Pékin. Crédits : Nuria Garcia Masip
L’équipe CALLFRONT interviendra dans le cadre du séminaire Histoire et archéologie de l’Islam médiéval (Equipe Islam médiéval, UMR 8167), le mercredi 31 janvier 2024 de 17h à 19h à l’Institut de recherche sur Byzance, l’Islam et la Méditerranée au Moyen Âge (IRBIMMA) escalier B, dernier étage, 17, rue de la Sorbonne 75005 Paris.
L’équipe CALLFRONT interviendra dans le cadre du séminaire Les liens qui font les humanités numériques le mercredi 13 décembre 2023 de 10h à 12h30 à l’ENS-PSL, Salle Berthier, U207, 29 rue d’Ulm, Paris).
“Tafsir en langues arabe et tamasheq”, Mali, Tombouctou, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, ESS 04958 – CC BY-NC 4.0
La prochaine séance du séminaire Calligraphie aux frontières du monde islamique (CallFront) aura lieu le 6 décembre 2023, de 17h à 19h, à l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), salle Walter Benjamin :
West African Script Styles: Between Paleography and History
Mauro Nobili (University of Illinois)
Organisation : Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Maxime Durocher
“Ophiuchus et Serpent dans un manuscrit maghrébin du Kitab Suwar al-kawakib al-thabita.” BnF, ms. arabe 2488, f. 46a
La prochaine séance du séminaire Calligraphie aux frontières du monde islamique (CallFront) aura lieu le 8 novembre 2023, de 17h à 19h, à l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), salle Walter Benjamin :
De la calligraphie à l’uranographie : concevoir et dessiner le firmament au Maghreb médiéval
Umberto Bongianino (université d’Oxford)
Organisation : Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Maxime Durocher
