Page with illuminated calligraphy

Ottoman calligraphers often demonstrated their skills by writing different styles and sizes of Arabic script on rectangular sheets of paper, which were then illuminated, mounted on pasteboard with colored and marbled papers, and assembled into accordion fold albums, known as muraqqaʿ. The calligrapher used the thuluth style of script to compose the heading and the naskh style for the four small lines. An illuminator added verse markers and vegetal motifs to the two narrow decorative panels. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, collectors and dealers from Europe and the United States tended to value individual folios of Arabic-language calligraphy more highly than they did entire albums. Because they appeared closer to the more familiar format of European painting, single folios were regarded as individual works of art and their sale was substantially more profitable than the sale of albums. The demand among European and American collectors for single folios of calligraphy led to the disassembly of many albums originally assembled in the Ottoman Empire. This calligraphic panel is mounted on modern papers and was likely excised from the same album as another MFA folio of Ottoman calligraphy, 29.109