Ernst Grube's research on Islamic painting over more than three decades has dealt with materials, issues and problems ranging from 10th-century Egypt through Ottoman Turkey to 19th-century Persia. The studies collected in this volume represent the breadth of his scholarship: they collect and lay new materials before the reader, isolate and define schools of painting as thinking about them coalesces, and propose new interpretations of materials already well-known to scholars and students. Most of these studies are reprinted without major alterations, but additional notes at the end make some essential readjustments. Article 5, a study of a drawing on a so-called 'Fustat-Fragment', possibly of 9th-century date, has 50 pages of illustrations of such fragments, not included in the original article and most of them not published before.

Professor Grube brings the methodological approach of a Western Medievalist to the study of a primary form of Islamic art. These articles are all essential reading for anyone interested in painting as a major form of art not only in the lands where Islam held sway but also in Late Classical Antiquity, Medieval Europe and Byzantium.