Native Sacred
-A place of beauty in the making, as opposed to the beauty made.
-Elite residents worked with the Life-Giver to negotiate everlasting but mortal deliverance from earthy suffering.
-Mortals could and should not enter the sacred.
-Sacred enters individual.

Motifs - narratives - "song of wind" - fauna, wildlife - the architecture anticipates the arrival of the sacred.

Flowers rain down - images/motifs of flowers spread over walls and ceilings.
Flowers spread fragrance.

importance of flowers - song, painted, crafted, carved - summon divine to ritual arena.
Images painted and carved - depict humans with flowers flowing from mouth or musical instrument.

Floral friezes often frame thematic murals - recall tapestries and carpets and decor that characterize outdoor processional and dance areas.
Also included garland, crowns, posies and song/music flower songs

Other iconographic elements included with flower friezes - medallions, classical urns, cherubs and put, birds and animal and mythical monsters.
Friezes highly rhythmic in form visually - perceived as drumbeats.
Repetition plays into this.
The formal order of friezes reflect the formal elements of dance.
Images echo costumes used in dance.
Example of dance - costumes (eagles, lions, tigers, monkeys, birds, dogs, bat).
Trees laden with sweet-smelling flowers.
Boys dresses as birds descended from trees while elders danced. Boys wore gold bells on ankles and wrists. Sucked dew from flowers in trees.

Color
Blue and Red - two vital fluids of the cosmos - Water and Blood
Black and Red - chromatic metaphor for sacred metaphor.
Despite the availability of extensive range of pigments these colors dominate.

Mapping - churches consistently represented as blue and red places.
Blue - turquoise-blue
Red- red-brown

"Like sentinels, they speak as glyphic morphemes of the nature of the place we are about to access: "This is the place of the blue and the red flowers; this is the place of the source of life."

16th century Indian Mexico
Image of Christianity was not copied - rather read and rewritten.
Churches perceived  as the living replicas of the landscapes/ out sacred  features.

Ayaucalli - "mist house", a temple or group of temples dedicated the rain deities.
Oyoalli - hollow, pear or almond shaped create ornament, associated with pulque gods, possibly used as a rattle instrument
Tzoalli - mixture of amaranth seed with honey or maize flower used to make effigies of deities and other sacred things.
Xonecuilli - "twisted foot", name give to ritual "breads", often in shape of "S" to represent lightning or in the shape of a butterfly, name of a star of constellation. 

Sassanian silk industry, established in Iran.
Great importance to Islamic rulers.
Practice of distributing silk robes to courtiers and official as a mark of royal appointment or favor.

Textiles also important as a means to implement Sassanian motifs into other cultures.

Religious constraints stimulated new forms of art
Forbidden to drink from gold and silver vessels, okay to eat off gold/silver.
Wood, glass, ceramic had to be made for the more pious.


Article on Discovery.
http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/journeys-into-the-unknown-91212/

Notes on Embroidery

-signified high social status in Muslim societies
-craftsman embroidered items with gold and silver thread

Gold

A Glimpse of Paradise: Gold in Islamic Art

October 9, 2010 - April 2011

"According to the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and Hadith, the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, paradise is a lush garden filled with musk-scented streams, channels of milk and honey, and palaces built from gold and silver bricks. The righteous, bedecked with beautiful gold bracelets and silk garments, enjoy delicious foods served by angels from gem-encrusted gold vessels. While gold ornaments and implements are abundant in the afterlife, the wearing and hoarding of gold during one’s lifetime is generally cautioned against because it may inspire an impious attachment to extravagances. Royalty of the past nevertheless adorned themselves with luxurious gold-woven textiles and gilded jewelry, perhaps to remind themselves of the rewards waiting in paradise, although these shimmering embellishments also served to show off their wealth and power, a less virtuous benefit.
A Glimpse of Paradise explores the unique status of gold in Islam through a small group of objects drawn from the Museum’s collection. The diverse selection includes a fourteenth-century Qur’an folio from Central Asia or Turkey with gold decoration added in India, and a resplendent eagle-shaped pendant made in Iran during the nineteenth century. As these works show, gold has been put to multiple uses in the arts of Islam, serving both as a sign of the divine and as an ornament for earthly pleasure."

Sultan 'Ali 'Adil Shah II, c. 1670
Indian
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Image: 10 × 5 9/16 inches (25.4 × 14.1 cm) Sheet: 10 3/8 × 6 1/8 inches (26.4 × 15.6 cm)
125th Anniversary Acquisition. Alvin O. Bellak Collection, 2004
2004-149-38

Label:
During the reign of Sultan 'Ali 'Adil Shah II of Bijapur (reigned 1656-72), ruler of one of the five Islamic kingdoms of the Deccan, the threat of Mughal military domination increased. In painting, however, the Deccani preference for fanciful, decorative compositions reasserted itself over the Mughal naturalism that had filtered into Bijapuri painting during the previous three decades. The sultan stands in a strange landscape; a small hill gives way to a mysterious field of gray that ends abruptly at a group of pink and blue rocks where birds perform aerial tricks. 'Ali 'Adil Shah is oddly drawn, his fingers distorted to follow the shape of his shield, rather than the form of human anatomy.

source Philadelphia Museum of Art

A World History of Art