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 Tübingen. 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 Universität Berlin. She worked as Assistant Curator at the Museum für 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).

Contributors are: Serpil Bağcı, Barbara Brend, Massumeh Farhad, Julia Gonnella, Claus-Peter Haase, Oliver Hahn, Robert Hillenbrand, Yuka Kadoi, Charles Melville, Gülru Necipoğlu, Bernard O'Kane, Filiz Ҫakır Phillip, Yves Porter, Julian Raby, Christoph Rauch, Simon Rettig, David J. Roxburgh, Karin Rührdanz, Zeren Tanındı, Lâle Uluç, Ching-Ling Wang, and Friederike Weis.

The five Diez albums in Berlin, acquired by Heinrich Friedrich von Diez in Constantinople around 1789, contain more than 400 figurative paintings, drawings, fragments, and calligraphic works originating for the most part from Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, and Timurid workshops. Gonnella, Weis and Rauch unite in this volume 21 essays that analyse their relation to their “parent” albums at the Topkapı Palace or examine specific works by reflecting upon their role in the larger history of book art in Iran. Other essays cover aspects such as the European and Chinese influence on Persianate art, aspects related to material and social culture, and the Ottoman interest in Persianate albums. This book marks an important contribution to the understanding of the development of illustrative imagery in the Persianate world and its later perception.