What is the oldest surviving example of calligraphy?
14008439#1
The lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists, with the intent that two new copies (one in Persian, and one in Arabic) would be created each year and distributed to schools and cities around the Ilkhanate, in the Middle East, Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Indian subcontinent. Approximately 20 illustrated copies were made of the work during Rashid al-Din's lifetime, but only a few portions remain, and the complete text has not survived. The oldest known copy is an Arabic version, of which half has been lost, but one set of pages is currently in the Khalili Collection, comprising 59 folios from the second volume of the work. Another set of pages, with 151 folios from the same volume, is owned by the Edinburgh University Library. Two Persian copies from the first generation of manuscripts survive in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul. The early illustrated manuscripts together represent "one of the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid art in any medium", and are the largest surviving body of early examples of the Persian miniature.
Jami' al-tawarikh
55585671#10
Although no autograph copies of Yang Xi's famous calligraphy have survived, one well-documented stone rubbing version of the revealed "Huangting jing" (黃庭經, Yellow Court Scripture) has been given special attention. The Song dynasty connoisseur and critic Mi Fu (1051-1107) analyzed four manuscripts of the "Huangting jing", and said the best one was written on a silk scroll with a provenance that he traced back to the early 8th century. Mi disagreed with a former owner Tao Gu (陶穀, 903-970) who said that Wang Xizhi wrote the manuscript, and concluded it was a superb example of calligraphy from the Six Dynasties period. The Ming dynasty calligrapher and painter Dong Qichang (1555-1636) was so impressed by the Mi Fu manuscript that he made a copy, recommend it as the best model for studying "kaishu" script, and included it as the first example in his classic "Xihong tang fatie" (戲鴻堂法帖, Calligraphy Compendium of the Hall of the Playful Goose). Dong's colophon attributed the calligraphy to Yang Xi himself and described it as "the traces of a holy immortal" (Ledderose 1984: 262-263, who calls Dong's attribution to Yang "extremely optimistic").
Yang Xi
167020#6
Calligraphic design is omnipresent in Islamic art, where, as in Europe in the Middle Ages, religious exhortations, including Qur'anic verses, may be included in secular objects, especially coins, tiles and metalwork, and most painted miniatures include some script, as do many buildings. Use of Islamic calligraphy in architecture extended significantly outside of Islamic territories; one notable example is the use of Chinese calligraphy of Arabic verses from the Qur'an in the Great Mosque of Xi'an. Other inscriptions include verses of poetry, and inscriptions recording ownership or donation. Two of the main scripts involved are the symbolic "kufic" and "naskh" scripts, which can be found adorning and enhancing the visual appeal of the walls and domes of buildings, the sides of minbars, and metalwork. Islamic calligraphy in the form of painting or sculptures are sometimes referred to as "quranic art".
Islamic art
22619508#1
The word "emaki" stems from the word "emakimono" meaning "picture scrolls". The emakimono picture scrolls consisted of two designs: Pictures that were painted on a scroll with text added to the same scroll or a number of paintings that accompanied passages of text and were joined together in a scroll. The first known picture scroll was produced in Japan during the late ninth or tenth century. The "Genji Monogatari" picture scroll, however, was produced in the early twelfth century. Not only is the "Genji Monogatari Emaki" the oldest surviving monogatari scroll but it is also the oldest surviving non-Buddhist scroll in Japan. There is no exact date to the scroll, but it is estimated to being sometime between 1120 and 1140, in which case it was created just a little over a century after Murasaki Shikibu wrote "The Tale of Genji".
Genji Monogatari Emaki
10844079#1
Huang was a native of the cultural mecca Hangzhou. In 1598, he passed his Jinshi examination and held an official post in Jiangxi. His calligraphy style combined the manner of two Song Dynasty masters, Su Shi and Mi Fei. Huang’s best known calligraphy was, in his lifetime, reproduced in the Ming period painting-calligraphy album "Tangshi Huapu" (唐诗画谱, "Paintings of Tang Period Poems"), which itself was copied onto additional paintings. As was common in the Ming period, Huang perhaps did multiple versions of this Tang period poem by Liu Changqing (劉長卿) and others. His calligraphy was certainly sought after during his lifetime and in the period right after his death. Huang was also something of a poet. Examples of his verse can be found in various collections. A photo of a surviving example in Japan of his Liu Changqing poem is reproduced here. The poem reads:
Huang Ruheng
1119777#6
The Hōryū-ji Temple also holds bibliographic notes on the Lotus Sutra: the was written early in the 7th century and is considered the oldest Japanese text. It is written in Cursive script and illustrates that calligraphy in the Asuka period was already refined to a high degree.
Japanese calligraphy
2134398#1
Panel painting is very old; it was a very prestigious medium in Greece and Rome, but only very few examples of ancient panel paintings have survived. A series of 6th century BC painted tablets from Pitsa (Greece) represent the oldest surviving Greek panel paintings. Most classical Greek paintings that were famous in their day seem to have been of a size comparable to smaller modern works - perhaps up to a half-length portrait size. However, for a generation in the second quarter of the fifth-century BC there was a movement, called the "new painting" and led by Polygnotus, for very large painted friezes, apparently painted on wood, decorating the interiors of public buildings with very large and complicated subjects containing numerous figures at least half life-size, and including battle scenes. We can only attempt to imagine what these looked like from some detailed literary descriptions and vase-paintings that appear to echo their compositions. The first century BC to third century AD Fayum mummy portraits, preserved in the exceptionally dry conditions of Egypt, provide the bulk of surviving panel painting from the Imperial Roman period - about 900 face or bust portraits survive. The Severan Tondo, also from Egypt (about 200AD) is one of the handful of non-funerary Graeco-Roman specimens to survive. Wood has always been the normal support for the Icons of Byzantine art and the later Orthodox traditions, the earliest of which (all in Saint Catherine's Monastery) date from the 5th or 6th centuries, and are the oldest panel paintings which seem to be of the highest contemporary quality. Encaustic and tempera are the two techniques used in antiquity. Encaustic largely ceased to be used after the early Byzantine icons.
Panel painting
13804#28
Hiragana developed from "man'yōgana", Chinese characters used for their pronunciations, a practice that started in the 5th century. The oldest examples of Man'yōgana include the Inariyama Sword, an iron sword excavated at the Inariyama Kofun in 1968. This sword is thought to be made in year of (which is A.D. 471 in commonly accepted theory).
The forms of the hiragana originate from the cursive script style of Chinese calligraphy. The figure below shows the derivation of hiragana from manyōgana via cursive script. The upper part shows the character in the regular script form, the center character in red shows the cursive script form of the character, and the bottom shows the equivalent hiragana. Note also that the cursive script forms are not strictly confined to those in the illustration.
Hiragana
50731316#1
The earlier of the two sets is particularly notable for being the oldest surviving English translation of the Bible, albeit a very fragmentary one. It consists of 26 glosses, either interlinear or marginal, scattered throughout the manuscript. These so-called "red glosses" are written by a single scribe mostly in red ink in what is known as West Saxon minuscule, an Insular script found, for example, in charters of Æthelwulf, King of Wessex from 839 to 858. The glosses were first published in by E. Brock in 1876. A number of corrections were subsequently offered by Henry Sweet in 1885, Karl Wildhagen in 1913.
Blickling Psalter
55008600#0
The Birds' Head Haggadah (c. 1300) is the oldest surviving illuminated Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah. The manuscript, produced in the Upper Rhine region of Southern Germany in the early 14th century, contains the full Hebrew text of the Haggadah, a ritual text recounting the story of Passover – the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt – which is recited by participants at a Passover Seder. The text is executed in block calligraphy and accompanied by colorful illustrations of Jews performing the Seder practices and reenacting Jewish historical events. The Birds' Head Haggadah is so called because all Jewish men, women, and children depicted in the manuscript have human bodies with the faces and beaks of birds. Non-Jewish and non-human faces (such as those of angels, the sun, and the moon) are blank or blurred. Numerous theories have been advanced to explain the unusual iconography, usually tied to Jewish aniconism. The Haggadah is in the possession of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is on permanent exhibition.
Birds' Head Haggadah
53682#14
Sacred Western calligraphy has some special features, such as the illumination of the first letter of each book or chapter in medieval times. A decorative "carpet page" may precede the literature, filled with ornate, geometrical depictions of bold-hued animals. The Lindisfarne Gospels (715–720 AD) are an early example.
Calligraphy