Colour, Light and Wonder in Islamic Art

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Idries Trevathan is a curator and conservator with close to twenty years' experience working with Islamic art collections in the Muslim world and beyond. Trevathan works regularly on conservation projects and has conducted technical and aesthetic colour studies on a range of Islamic art, including the nineteenth-century Malay Qur'an manuscripts, eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Damascene reception rooms and sixteenth-century Ottoman porticoes in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Trevathan trained as an art conservator at the City & Guilds of London Art School and earned a PhD in colour in Islamic art from the Prince's Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London.

The experience of colour in Islamic visual culture has historically been overlooked. In this new approach, Idries Trevathan examines the language of colour in Islamic art and architecture in dialogue with its aesthetic contexts, offering insights into the pre-modern Muslim experience of interpreting colour. The seventeenth-century Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran, represents one of the finest examples of colour-use on a grand scale. Here, Trevathan examines the philosophical and mystical traditions that formed the mosque's backdrop. He shows how careful combinations of colour and design proportions in Islamic patterns express knowledge beyond that experienced in the corporeal world, offering another language with which to know and experience God. Colour thus becomes a spiritual language, calling for a re-consideration of how we read Islamic aesthetics.

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