Illumination around the world.

This leaf from the Blue Quran, created probably in the 9th century in Tunisia, is kept in the David Collection in Copenhagen. The Blue Quran is one of the most luxurious Quranic manuscripts and the only known chrysography copy written on blue parchment.

Fine Art Facsimile Leaves from Marvellous Islamic manuscripts



For more than 1000 years, phantastic manuscripts have been created throughout the islamic world. For the first time ever, some of them are being partly reproduced as Fine Art Facsimile Leaves. They form a worldwide unique collection presenting the achievements of calligraphers and miniaturists from more than 10 centuries and different cultures from the Islamic world.

Each leaf is reproduced faithfully to look exactly as the precious original: every aspect, colours, and the shining gold – wherever existent – are being reproduced down to the smallest detail. Even the cutting is irregular, completely like the original.

Every single leaf is presented on a luxury paper passepartout. Describing texts in Arabic and English accompany each leaf, which is protected by a Luxury Presentation Map printed with foil gold.

Layla vu Mecnun is a poem on the tragic love story of Layla and Majnum by Alisher Navai, the great Uzbek poet. The poem contains about 3600 distichs and is written in Chagatay Turkish. The original is kept in the John Rylands Library / The University of Manchester with the shelfmark MS Turkish 3. The miniature on fol. 34a depicts a colloquy between Majnum and his father in the desert.
Al-Ḥarīrī, Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim, al-Maqāmāt (Assemblies), fol. 68, Abū Zayd and al-Harith Sailing on the Euphrates. Created in Syria around 1222. A masterpiece of Arabic literature, the book of Maqāmāt, together with Kalīla wa Dimna, represents one of the few literary works to have been illustrated in the Arab world. Created in the mid-11th century by al-Ḥarīrī, its fifty assemblies (maqāmāt) describe the adventures of the narrator al-Ḥārith and the hero, Abū Zayd, a sort of bohemian vagabond and rascal, ready to try his hand at all trades and deploying all the resources of his cunning and eloquence in all types of situations. His wanderings lead him to cross the entire Abbasid Orient where he meets the different representatives of society of his day.