Hawzah News Agency - (Houston - Texas) - For one of its online exhibitions, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has curated a selection of historical works from its stunningly diverse trove of Islamic art, including many works of Turkish origin.    

 With an astute eye for collections, after roaming tirelessly through biennial galas for the past 13 years and running, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has added some invaluable art history treasures to one of its more unique departments, that of the "Art of the Islamic Worlds."

For its 10th anniversary in 2017, the department’s curators assembled their highlights, currently on view via online exhibition, encompassing the epochal breadth of multicultural invention that has been refined and cultivated since the seventh century with religious zeal.

The very first specimen, glorified by interactive photography and detailed texts, is a ceramic bowl labeled, “A Galleon at Sea,” attributed to a Turkish ceramicist and dated to the first half of the 17th century. There are oversized, perhaps mythological spirit fishes that float beneath the hull of the centered image of the craft, their red eyes and green gills flashing in the gleaming, aquamarine paint that matches the sails of the elegant three-masted ship. The venturous exhilaration of embarking over the wild deep is conveyed visually with lively, animate grace.

The digital curation by MFA Houston quotes from “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad,” torn as from the pages of the Arabian Nights, wherefrom the tale derives. It speaks of a parallel theme to that of the art collection itself, only couched in the swashbuckling milieu of old, where a proud and trailblazing merchant sets off from Baghdad, their watercraft bulging with precious fortunes of creative industry from one of Islam’s easternmost bastions of cultural fruition. But a storm knocks them off their path and changes their fate, one might say, to Houston, Texas.

The symbolism of the ship has spiritual potency but in a more practical sense, illustrates the means by which peoples traded their fine arts and aesthetic ideas, toward a pedagogy of traditional handwork and its relation to such undying worldly themes as beauty, devotion and power. Like the airplane today, the seafaring vessel indicated to the eyes of yore the international logistics of premodern interconnectivity, from port to port, where people and objects, goods and thoughts intermingled liberally and appreciated by their movement.

An anonymous artist or group of artists manufactured “A Galleon at Sea” in Turkey’s Iznik district in the western province of Bursa, famously one of the fastest beating hearts of material creativity . The designs are a fusion of styles, which Turks inherited from the Chinese, particularly apparent in the swirling patterns of waves, which look like scrolls, a direct quote from Ming porcelain. Also, the boat itself reveals, to expert analysts, elements of Ottoman and European shipbuilding, exemplifying the busy waters that washed up against all lands once under Istanbul’s sway.