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. This calligraphic panel was composed by the well-known Ottoman calligrapher, Hâfız Yûsuf (d. 1786), and contains a heading written in the thuluth style of script and five lines written in the naskh style. An illuminator added verse markers and the folio was mounted with two different marbled papers. The thin inner border, lined with gold margins, uses multiple colored pigments to create diagonal, zigzagging lines, while the more subtle outer border is an ochreous stone pattern.