customised search in book art

Book art

The book art module contains miniatures, illustrations and illuminations of all Oriental manuscripts held by Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. As part of a digitisation and cataloguing project (2012-2013), all book art elements of the Islamic manuscripts were collected. The database comprises ca. 8200 entries on book art objects from 310 Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Javanese manuscripts. These entries contain detailed descriptions, in addition to general information such as classmark, catalogue number and short title as well as formal information such as size, date and place of origin.

Among the artistically outstanding objects of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin included in the module are (Diez A fol. 70-74) and the Berlin Jahangir album (Libri pict. A 117). We will gradually complement the current dataset with Indian, Armenian, Hebrew and African book art elements.

In addition to a full text search, diverse search patterns can be applied, such as type or motif. The book art entries are linked to the main entry of the respective manuscript enabling further contextualisation. The following definitions apply to types of book art objects:

Illustration:

The term refers to miniatures and drawings that clearly belong or used to belonged to a particular manuscript.

Illustration → miniature:

The term refers to polychrome images with entire surface colour.

Illustration → drawing:

A drawing has a linear quality. It can also be multi-coloured.

non-illustrative image:

This category comprises images that do not explicitly refer to a text and mostly depict decorative motifs. Non-illustrative images may contain narrative elements.

Illumination:

Illuminations are pictorial book decorations to complement texts, calligraphy and paintings, usually with gilding.