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An illustrated miniature in the style of the medieval Baghdad school: robed figures gathered under arches, painted in flat jewel colours with gold outlining.
Editorial

One Thousand and One Nights as a Visual Network

The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.

Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.

Sunlight falls in scattered points through the perforated dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel's "rain of light," onto the pale stone of the museum's interior.
Editorial

The Universal Museum, Rebuilt on Arab Soil

How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world

A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.