The Diez Albums ─ Contexts and Contents

The five Diez albums in Berlin are an important source for the study of Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, and Timurid art. The 21 essays of this book contribute to deepening our understanding of the development of Persianate art and its perception in later times.

Julia Gonnella has studied Islamic Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and took her PhD at the University of Tubingen. For many years she has been excavating in Syria, particularly in Aleppo, and was teaching at the Free University in Berlin. Since 2009 she is curator at the Museum of Islamic Art and has organized numerous exhibitions, including Heroic Times. Thousand years of Shahnama (Berlin 2011 with Christoph Rauch), and How Islamic Art came to Berlin. The Museum Director and Collector Friedrich Sarre (Berlin 2015).Friederike Weis, PhD (2005), Freie Universitat Berlin. She worked as Assistant Curator at the Museum fur Indische Kunst in Berlin, held several fellowships and co-curated the exhibition Joseph and Zulaikha: Relations between India, Europe and Persia in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett in 2014. She is a DFG-researcher at the Staatsbibliothek, with the project: ?Autonomous pictures? Figural motifs in Persian drawings and paintings in the Diez albums”.Christoph Rauch studied Arabic and Islamic studies at Leipzig. Since 2004 he has worked at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where he was appointed head of the Oriental Department in 2010. He co-organized several conferences on manuscript collections and the history of Oriental studies, most recently the conference “Studies on Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905): Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies” in 2015. He is co-editor of The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (Brill 2015).