The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2019 Annual Book Prize:

WINNER

Margaret S. Graves
Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam
Oxford University Press, 2018.

In the words of the Annual Book Prize committee:

This book is impeccably researched and carefully composed, persuasively arguing the central thesis of the book—that small decorative arts reflect the symbolic, phenomenological and ideological contingencies of large-scale architectural manipulation of space. The copious color or black-and-white illustrations present a panorama of high and low Islamic culture that brings the vicissitudes of a poetics of composition and space popularized by literary theorists and poets such as al-Jahiz into the intimate domestic interiors of medieval patrons. Historically rich in its deployment of biography, epigraphy, and style, this is a model volume articulating a novel interpretation of Islamic decorative arts while grounding its innovative methodological approach to materiality in careful looking, insightful exegesis, and the so-called “allusive object” as the fundamental form of evidentiary support.

Oxford University site: click here

The committee also recognizes this volume as Finalist:

Christopher R. Lakey
Sculptural Seeing: Relief, Optics, and the Rise of Perspective in Medieval Italy
Yale University Press, 2018.

Yale University Press site: click here