Posts tagged calligraphy
image from Tughra, Wikipedia.
When a new Ottoman emperor ascended to the throne, his court calligrapher would create an elaborate signature (called a tughra) for him, to be affixed henceforth to royal documents, coins, etc. Once or twice I've come across Süleyman the Magnificent's tughra and was always stopped short: what a fitting, dashing, swaggering mark for the man who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and marched his armies all the way to the gates of Vienna. What I didn't realize is how stylized and similar all the Ottoman emperors' tughras are—unless you're skilled at parsing Arabic calligraphy, they mostly look the same. What I'd assumed were the most distinct elements of Süleyman's mark—those three bold upstrokes with pennants flying—are common to all.
Nate: 
"Poetry by Meer Taqi Meer, a renown poet of India," paper, self-made ink and bamboo pen (2009), by Shanawaz Alam Ahmed, International Exhibition of Calligraphy :: via ephemera assemblyman
This beautiful gazelle contains lines from the great eighteenth-century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, one of the great masters of the ghazal poetic form. (The gazelle-ghazal Arabic pun does not pass unnoticed. Wish I could figure out what the text itself is about—beyond the ghazal-standard "poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain").
Nate: